Note: Most of this is PC related. If you’re driving a Mac, I’m sorry, but you may want to skip this :).
We did a lot of computer maintenance over the weekend. Both the laptops had accumulated lot of useless crud and the desktop had developed a couple of problems that needed seeing too - no image on the monitor (just a blank, pastel colored screen) when Windows kicked in during the boot sequence and a tendency to simply reboot itself - for no apparent reason - at random times.
The problem with computer maintenance is that it’s a pain in the butt. Even when there’s nothing really wrong. It ties you up and ties the computer up and so you just keep putting it off and putting it off until one day you want to install a new program and your previously mild-mannered laptop asks you if you’d like it to stick the program in your ear because it doesn’t have any more room. Ack!
We keep a lot of anti-virus, anti-spyware, crud cleaner and watch-dog types of software on all the systems. It is one of Myria’s biggest (though well-justified) complaints that you pay big money for a fast, sophisticated system with tons of horsepower and you wind up tying up 20% of that same sophistication and horsepower in programs to keep spammers, infections, advertising and assholes from getting in and messing things up. It really is extremely annoying, but if you spend any time roaming around the internet (and that includes sending and receiving e-mail), your computer has got to have that protection or some morning you’re going to try to boot up and instead of the normal sequence, you’ll see a message on your monitor that says:
And then the CPU blows up.
So first, you go through your list of programs:
Ccleaner
Microsoft AntiSpyware
Spybot Search and Destroy
Avast Antivirus
...and check for updates, upgrades and new versions. You want to have the most current version of the software running because that will find and help you solve the most problems. The only exception is the Avast antivirus which runs all the time in the background and takes care of its own updates when you’re on line.
And then you run them and do what they suggest. I was able to reclaim almost 4 gigs of space on my C: drive. Then you should probably run a Scandisk to see if you have any bad sectors on your hard drive and a Defrag to consolidate that lovely new reclaimed space so that your programs run a little faster and easier and your future installs go a little more smoothly.
Myria did get the desktop system running normally again, thank goodness. We use it as storage and as a sort-of server and it’s certainly nice to have it available again!
While it was somewhat annoying to go through all this, it is very pleasant to have a nice, clean machine to play with again :). Myria is much better at doing maintenance on a regular basis than I am. I tend to let things go until there’s an obvious problem and by then there’s a ton of crap that needs to be taken care of. So that’s what I did this weekend. I didn’t even pick up my needles until about 10:00 PM last night to work another repeat on the lace scarf - just so the weekend wouldn’t be a total knitting loss :)
Goldie and I hope that you managed more knitting over the weekend than we did, but that if you didn’t, that whatever you did do was satisfying :)
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Your recount of the last few days gives me chills.
My laptop hard drive died in January. Poof! Everything gone and idiot me with no back-up.
After some recovery the re-installation began. Now I’m “glitching” again. At least I back-up once a week.
DH has wiped and re-done his laptop twice in the past few months.
It makes my head hurt to think about having to do all of the maintenance but it’s SO important.
KUDOS to you for taking the time. 
My arsenal of tools include:
free firewall ZoneAlarm
free spyware scanner AdAware
another free spyware scanner Spybot
free virus scanner AVG
shareware RegMechanic
SpyBot has some really good tools that come with it including a really good shredder and uninstaller among other things.
IMHO the best thing about XP is System Restore, that makes it worth the price of admission.
Laurie - Well, hard drives do die of old age too but a lot perish of malicious tinkering which can be prevented. One of the back-up tricks I use is to keep all data files in a single directory divided into appropriate subdirectories. For example, word-processor documents go into the Data\Document subdirectory, spreadsheets into Data\Spreadsheets and so forth. Then I back up just that Data directory on a regular basis. This takes up much less time (and space) than a full back-up and targets the important things - the things we couldn’t reproduce if the drive died. A full back up is a good idea from time to time. But in the interim, if a program gets glitchy, it can be uninstalled and re-installed. If the data gets lost, it’s lost forever.
Pam - That looks like a good list of tools. I’d suggest checking out Ccleaner too as it finds some things the others might miss (see post for the link).
Yes - backing things up is well worth the time. Just takes one hard drive implosion to teach that lesson :-P
I tried CCleaner and I like it. It did all of the stuff I normally do my hand, plus found some other stuff. Thanks for the link.
Pam - Way cool :) Glad you found it useful. A clean system is a happy system, heheh…
Kathy - Boy, you’re not kidding! I read somewhere recently that experience is a tough teacher because you get the test first and then the lesson :)
