How to take care of a Windows computer-- haha!

[Mechcozmo]

Linkety (http://money.cnn.com/2004/12/13/technology/komando/clean_pc/index.htm)

Haha! This is what you have to do to a Windows computer everyday to make it run faster. They forget to mention do a virus scan and a malware scan, though. This makes be love my Mac more, especially after I spent 4 hours two nights ago fixing a b0rked Windows registry...


(I put this here because it isn't really a current event... Win95 users can benefit from this stuff, and that isn't current.)

[Blue Velvet]

Linkety (http://money.cnn.com/2004/12/13/technology/komando/clean_pc/index.htm)
...This makes be love my Mac more, especially after I spent 4 hours two nights ago fixing a b0rked Windows registry...


Sigh... the dreaded registry.

I will never forget the hours (I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing) I spent fixing a friends Win98 thing because some idiot who used her machine had clicked on something that messed with IE so that the homepage couldn't be altered. And yes, it was stuck on a porn site...

She now has a Mac.

[thecow]

Sigh... the dreaded registry.

I will never forget the hours (I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing) I spent fixing a friends Win98 thing because some idiot who used her machine had clicked on something that messed with IE so that the homepage couldn't be altered. And yes, it was stuck on a porn site...

She now has a Mac.Sounds like some spyware thing. Did you run ad-aware?

[Blue Velvet]

Sounds like some spyware thing. Did you run ad-aware?

No.

Eventually fixed it and when the machine died a few months later she bought a Mac.

The majority of users shouldn't even have to worry about things like that... that is, until they start bothering their friends for help. :)

[Applespider]

I thought I'd escaped having to clean Win98 registries up since my mother and sister now have Macs. But no, ended up visiting my aunt and uncle over Christmas and they had a borked Win98 machine thanks to both my uncle and their 13 year old son enjoying p0rn sites. The PS2 game cheat sites weren't helping either.

26 Trojan horses, 8 viruses and several hours later, and my earlier suggestion to get their daughter an iBook for school rather than a Dell was being considered much more seriously...

[edesignuk]

I have a love, hate, relationship with the registry. I love the way you can change so many things (tweaks etc), and control Windows with it (hell, Group Policy is really nothing other than reg entries, and that's hugely powerful/manageable with Active Directory), but I hate how messed up it can become...oh well...

[Mechcozmo]

Malware might have done it over here. But it was so messed up, I ran a few programs on it and the error message stopped coming up. Some minor data loss, nothing important. But a PITA, and if these family members didn't have me, they would be reinstalling Windoze XP...

[Chip NoVaMac]

Make a Mac it's replacement maybe? :)

[Rincewind42]

1) Baseball Bat
2) Dyamite
3) Take it skydiving
4) Chuck it out of your car at 140MPH (225 Km/H for you metric folks)
5) Make it a pair of cement hard drives (if youse catch ma drift)
6) A 24 pack of beer, an orange vest and a 12-gauge shotgun.
7) 1.21 Gigawatts

I'm sure there are lots more ways to take care of a Windows PC. But I can't say I've ever found a way to make one nearly as productive as my Mac :D

[bubbamac]

To be fair, I do most of those things on my Mac, just in different ways, called by different names.

[Mechcozmo]

1) Baseball Bat
2) Dyamite
3) Take it skydiving
4) Chuck it out of your car at 140MPH (225 Km/H for you metric folks)
5) Make it a pair of cement hard drives (if youse catch ma drift)
6) A 24 pack of beer, an orange vest and a 12-gauge shotgun.
7) 1.21 Gigawatts


I like numbers 6 and 7 the best. And my disk cleanup stuff? Its all so organized that I don't need to bother with it. Just some routine deletion, nothing too major like cleaning caches and stuff. Nothing to the scale the Disk Cleanup thingy in Windows does... (its called a cron script and you use "sudo periodic daily/monthly/weekly" to make em work)

[5300cs]

How to take care of a Windows computer

Boot off a Linux CD and make sure to format the whole drive.

[Mechcozmo]

How to take care of a Windows computer

Boot off a Linux CD and make sure to format the whole drive.

I prefer just to wipe a magnet along the drive... pure random scatter!

[Mav451]

In her list, only #1 makes sense. Once you have < 13% of disk space left, fragmentation exponentially increases.

Its unbelievable that people still have too many things starting up. I keep shaking my head when I see people loading 10-15 things in their taskbar, when only 4 are needed. And then they wonder how I can reboot and get into windows in under 20 seconds.

[Mechcozmo]

Its unbelievable that people still have too many things starting up. I keep shaking my head when I see people loading 10-15 things in their taskbar, when only 4 are needed. And then they wonder how I can reboot and get into windows in under 20 seconds.

Well, the "Dell support alert" pops up, anti-virus stuff comes up, a popup blocker comes up... they all suck CPU time, and they all suck. Thats a main reason to have slowdown.