On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 6:39 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips@xxxxxxxxxx> 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 _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
