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Anger Management: living with Windows XP + lot of software

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Lashiec:
Use Total Uninstall to monitor installations and removing the crap afterwards. You have to learn how things work in Windows before being able to use it correctly, but it's worth the effort. Since I began to use almost three years ago, computers ran as fast as they should. BTW, if you give it a try, monitor only trivial software, like games and apps, forget about drivers and Windows updates, as it could do more harm than benefit.

Armando:
Buy a big additional /external harddisk + Acronis Trueimage and make weekly images.
Problem with this is that when I find out that there's problems it will be a pain to revert to  an identical installation without problems.
--- End quote ---

Justice, that's what I've been doing for years and I think it's the best strategy.

It's not that much of a pain if you have a Windows partition separated from your documents. You'll lose maybe... what...  30min. max? And you'll be pretty much sure that your system will be exactly how it was before... And you can do something else while the image is restored... Go for a walk, listen to the birds. Play on you 2nd computer :)

You could combine that with Altiris if you want (I don't -- too much management!). That way, you're sure you won't break anything that's not recoverable!

Although I generally don't image my system every week (because I don't install enough stuff to justify it) -- every 2-3 weeks -- I will image my system every time I feel like testing a bunch of new apps, especially if I've heard that they can potentially be dangerous.


PS. Make sure your images work! I've never had problems with Acronis, but who knows... One potentially useful habit, IMO : never use my 500 Gb backup and Image hard drive for anything else than... backuping and imaging.

Armando:
Use Total Uninstall to monitor installations and removing the crap afterwards. You have to learn how things work in Windows before being able to use it correctly, but it's worth the effort. Since I began to use almost three years ago, computers ran as fast as they should. BTW, if you give it a try, monitor only trivial software, like games and apps, forget about drivers and Windows updates, as it could do more harm than benefit.
-Lashiec (August 29, 2007, 10:12 AM)
--- End quote ---

I've heard good things about Total Uninstall and I think I tried it a couple years ago. Would certainly be pretty handy too...

urlwolf:
Another option;
run weekly backups with FirstDefense-ISR on your OS partition.
Faster, easier than acronis.
Run an incremental backup (superflexible is my fave) on your data partition.

That's what I do. I think it's pretty secure. I have a clean install of XP as a base image in FD-ISR. If things go really bad, I boot to that one. There's a long thread about how to use FD-ISR in security forums.

My strategy:
A base snapshot (windows, + drivers + barebones utils)
A working snapshot (the one I boot to everyday). You can afford to screw things up here)
An archive of the working snapshot (that's a 'last known good config'). It'll have all the programs you installed in recent history.

If you install something that craps your computer, I boot to the base snapshot, recover the last archive to the working snapshot, and then boot back to working snapshot. I hope it makes sense.

All in all, I feel pretty protected. I disconnected windows' own history, as this is a lot safer.

You could have as much as 10 archives if you wanted to, but I'm ok with one.

HTH

Darwin:
Some time ago i noticed that the more "cleaning/repairing" programs i ran, the less stable my windows OS became.
So now i never run any registry cleaners, disk check repairers, etc.

I think the reason is this:
Inside every computer that has Windows OS installed, is a tiny little miniature bill gates.  And when you run these types of programs you make it very angry and it throws a fit and starts trashing things.  That's just my theory,
-mouser (August 29, 2007, 05:25 AM)
--- End quote ---

Can't comment on your hypothesis about the homonculus in every machine, but I can verify 100% your experiences with any form of system cleaner - be it a registry cleaner, temp files cleaner or what have you. Using one without extreme caution is guaranteed to break one or more programs on my system, usually requiring reinstallation and/or reactivation to get functioning again.

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