2 May
2008
2 May
'08
12:29 p.m.
On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 6:39 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com> wrote:
Greetings,
If any of you have experience in this direction, perhaps you could
suggest what I should recommend to my better half (Ivy). Her Inspiron is
showing the all-too-familiar signs of infestation, slowing down to a
crawl and sometimes even stopping completely. She's not ready for Linux
yet, so she has to resolve this problem with XP. She's looking at some
free and some commercial programs that claim to clean and repair the
registry, but neither of us know if there are any especially recommended
programs or utilities for such a job.
Any advice from the dual-booters out there in LAU land ?
Best,
dp
Only to be VERY careful about any choice you make. It's easy to get
anxious wanting the machine to work. It's easier for one of these
tools to mess things up and make things worse than they already were.
I've not had very good luck with any of them myself. I've tried a few
downloadable demos from CNet's download.com site. They all find things
but none of them ever made my PC seem fast when they were done. This
sort of tool has a way of preying on you when you are vulnerable and
if it doesn't work they just say it's M$'s fault and things were too
messed up. Sad that there is an aftermarket of people cleaning up the
gorilla's mess.
While I write this I'm baby sitting my 9 month old laptop. It came
with Vista which I was never very happy with. Typical of the M$ Update
service it got slower and slower over time until finally yesterday it
started to outright crash. Even Alt-Ctrl-Del wouldn't do anything.
Turn it on for 3 minutes, run some software, the graphics driver goes
haywire and the screen dies. Seemed like it might be either a driver
problem or an over heating problem...
Gentoo to the rescue. I booted from a Gentoo install disk which
happens to read NTFS file systems. No problem copying off the few
things I didn't have backups for. (Thankfully that wasn't very much.)
I ran memtest86 overnight. 9 hours - no problem. I have always been
unhappy with the hard drive performance under Vista. I run hdparm -tT
under Linux and get 40MB/S from the drive. That's OK I'm thinking.
You might want to consider doing really good backups of your wife's
data and then just reinstalling Windows. It's simple, allows you to
get the machine up to date as per M$'s vision, and in my experience
nothing works as well. With that path I personally have more
confidence about the next 6 months until I get to do it again. Like
the bottle say "Rinse & repeat..."
Cheers,
Mark