Luto, re virus protection... Would you care to comment on router/hardware protection instead of software, ie. NIS? Thanks.
i'll field this Q Luto.. hardware offers no protection whatsoever from the dreaded virus and its related trojan horse and worm, you need anti-viral software.. may i recommend.. http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php HIGHLY RATED!
"are you too lazy to figure out what all of these tools do? Then forget all of the tools. Novice Mode safely cleans the Registry with one click of the button." -regvac just what I need
But here's what I do.... 1. I have a "base" HD (with current updates), drivers, and software I'll always have onboard... MetaStock, Office, etc. It sits in the closet for emergency recovery or just a refreshened load to get rid of the "bit rot", as you say. 2. I have 2 other HD's which are swapped about every 3-4 weeks and are of course current with anything I've added. This is my backup in case of a virus, HD crash, or whatever. HD copies are made with Maxtor's MaxBlast 3 software. Works great. 3. I also make an additional data backup current to the day on a CD-RW or flash drive. Who knows... I may never again have to do a fresh install from scratch!
RegScrupXP does a good (so I'm told) job of that too, and it's free! It's archived at MajorGeeks.com/Registry/RegScrupXP
Gnome has an excellent solution. In fact the prefered solution Create a clean setup and then image it with whatever software you want. DriveImage is what I use on my Fujitsu. Norton Ghost is another, Maxblast another. This is a great way to go. When we tested software, we started from a clean install about every week. And certainly before a major test pass. With hard disk imaging software if something goes wrong you can often be back up and running in minutes. To imporve boot time, probably for the average person, using MSCONFIG (From the run command) and disabling the startup items that are not needed and under the Boot.ini checking NoGUIBoot will help a lot. NoGUIBoot just skips the Windows startup. To determine what is "not needed" in the startup, I would suggest diabling all and seeing what happens. Most of them are to help apps boot faster, like MSOffice. Or they could be something a bit more obnoxious like spyware. Cheers
On the registry, I have never been to concerned with it being bogus relative to performance or jsut a bit on stability.. It can cause programs to run wacky or not at all, but reinstall usually fixes it. I think it is more the uninstall of programs. Think of it this way, the 3rd and 4th tier players in the developement group get stuck with cool feature "install". lol. Uninstall is even LOWER on their list. It seems Windows XP Home with all updates and Office is about 2.5 Gb or less. So if your hard disk has say 10 Gb or more used then what is up? Where is that other 7.5g GB. Now most programs are small unless they are games, reference. Trading software is small also. data for charts is probably under 100 Mb for most. Point is it should add up. If it doesn't you can tinker and dink around by uninstalling but it will never be as good as a clean install. People are concerned about performance in hardware. This is how you get software performance. A clean install with Updates is the way to go. It is performance tuned on every build by the windows performance group. Bet they got a cool automation lab! Windows Update team has to make the patches and fixes, but those are also tested. Actually probably very well tested, because those are the most public bugs, esp malicious ones with Billg refernences.
One more thing Gnome has going for him. Multiple HDs All machine should have 2 HD. Two physical disks. On the second disk you can partiion and put a drive image of the C drive on it. Hard Disks are cheap. If you like high performance get a seperate controller card with a the new Serial ATA interface. Some come with a card. Shop around. SOP Redundant disks.
Have not used the current version. It is a pretty simple task to perform. I would go for less $$. There were custom ones written by interns around. I bet there is a shareware version. I know Drive Image SE works. Even allows one to adjust the partion size while backing up if there is not enough room. Smart. I am sure there is some computer science behind the compression, but as long as it is lossless and resonably fast and compact, it is good enough. I would bid $30 max Back from reading reviews. People complain it boots to DOS, thereby not allowing external devices at backup (cuz they would need the DOS driver right). Well that is why I would not pay more than $30. Some guy complained on a multiboot system, and Win 98 blah blah. Well then don't do that.... Keep it simple and cheap. dual drives with partions and a simple imaging tool. There is Norton Ghost too. I'v used that and it works. Whichever is cheaper and work with your OS. Kinda like a screw driver.