OS Re-install?
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charlieg wrote:
We just don't have time to "scrub the hard drive" on a whim.
I usually repave my machines once a year just as a matter of course. That's about how long Windows lasts for me before it starts to noticeably degrade to the point where it's worth the pain of rebuilding the machine (and it's not like I go nuts installing and uninstalling lots of different apps, either :rolleyes:). The first thing I do when I get a new machine is reformat it, re-install a clean copy of Windows plus a core set of tools (e.g. firewall, disk defragmenter, enhanced command-line processor, etc.) and then take an image of it. I then reinstall my dev tools and take another image. This saves a huge amount of time when it comes to repaving. This was particularly the case with my Dell laptop - I had a lot of headaches setting it up initially because of Dell supplying the wrong drivers but once I got everything right, I imaged it and never have to worry about it again. I've just finished rebuilding two PC's and half-a-dozen virtual machines and imaging made it so much easier. With the VM's especially, being able to quickly switch between snapshots was a major bonus :cool:
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall. Awasu 2.2.4 [^]: A free RSS/Atom feed reader with support for Code Project.
Excellent ideas - but do you really experience significant XP degradation? I don't install programs that often, but I imagine its more than 20 over 3 years (not counting the base application installs).
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
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I've had my Dell laptop now for almost 3 years (about 100 days left in warranty), and I have this 'issue' with a graphics flicker. We've updated drivers, swapped graphics boards, still have the flicker. I know what is coming next - either a motherboard swap (shudder) or an OS re-install (shudder - shudder). These solutions seem to be pretty big hammers. So, you developers out there that maintain your own systems, you know who you are, especially the independents. We just don't have time to "scrub the hard drive" on a whim. Further, we usually have to have a really good reason to scrub the drive and reinstall the dozens of programs that we have installed. How many of you have had issues with your system (beta s/w excluded) such that an os re-install corrected the problem? Curious. Thanks.
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
During my student days, I used to do it often, mostly because something would screw up my machine. In the 2.5 years that I've been with a corporate, I've had to format my machine zero times. However... it's become very sluggish now (I've had it for 2+ years). I still don't want to format it because reinstalling (and more importantly, customizing) everything would easily take 3-5 days. :sigh:
Cheers, Vikram.
"...we are disempowered to cultivate in their communities an inclination to assimilate to our culture." - Stan Shannon.
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I've had my Dell laptop now for almost 3 years (about 100 days left in warranty), and I have this 'issue' with a graphics flicker. We've updated drivers, swapped graphics boards, still have the flicker. I know what is coming next - either a motherboard swap (shudder) or an OS re-install (shudder - shudder). These solutions seem to be pretty big hammers. So, you developers out there that maintain your own systems, you know who you are, especially the independents. We just don't have time to "scrub the hard drive" on a whim. Further, we usually have to have a really good reason to scrub the drive and reinstall the dozens of programs that we have installed. How many of you have had issues with your system (beta s/w excluded) such that an os re-install corrected the problem? Curious. Thanks.
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
I once had to do a re-install due to an 'infection' of some kind. None of the AV tools I had could find it, but I kept getting a process showing up in the 'run' key with a random name. The side effect was, my printer worked better after the re-install. I believe there was some registry / driver cruft in the original installation that the re-install cleaned up.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
During my student days, I used to do it often, mostly because something would screw up my machine. In the 2.5 years that I've been with a corporate, I've had to format my machine zero times. However... it's become very sluggish now (I've had it for 2+ years). I still don't want to format it because reinstalling (and more importantly, customizing) everything would easily take 3-5 days. :sigh:
Cheers, Vikram.
"...we are disempowered to cultivate in their communities an inclination to assimilate to our culture." - Stan Shannon.
Vikram A Punathambekar wrote:
However... it's become very sluggish now (I've had it for 2+ years). I still don't want to format it because reinstalling (and more importantly, customizing) everything would easily take 3-5 days.
Yeah but the time you loose over the course of a month is worth the one or two days spent reinstalling (3-5 days is far too long mate.)
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote:
I don't see it happening, at least not until it becomes pointless.
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Excellent ideas - but do you really experience significant XP degradation? I don't install programs that often, but I imagine its more than 20 over 3 years (not counting the base application installs).
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
charlieg wrote:
but do you really experience significant XP degradation?
Definitely. I can't quite put my finger on what it is exactly but the machine does definitely degrade. I recently held off repaving my Dell laptop for a few months (because I had a new machine coming and didn't want to waste time rebuilding it since I was going to just blow it away once I had transferred everything over) and it was utterly painful to use. I think the disk just fragments over time in such a way it can't be defragged well, the Registry obviously fills up with crap, and so on. A brand-new installation of Windows is always noticeable snappier. I do a lot of development on my PC but it's all VC6 and my toolset is pretty stable. I can't for a second imagine how people manage, constantly installing Microsoft betas, CTP's and other assorted crap :-|
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall. Awasu 2.2.4 [^]: A free RSS/Atom feed reader with support for Code Project.
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Vikram A Punathambekar wrote:
However... it's become very sluggish now (I've had it for 2+ years). I still don't want to format it because reinstalling (and more importantly, customizing) everything would easily take 3-5 days.
Yeah but the time you loose over the course of a month is worth the one or two days spent reinstalling (3-5 days is far too long mate.)
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote:
I don't see it happening, at least not until it becomes pointless.
Paul Watson wrote:
but the time you loose over the course of a month is worth the one or two days spent reinstalling
Sod the time, the sheer frustration of working on a machine that's running like crap drives me nuts :-) I work really quickly and having to constantly wait for the PC to catch up is maddening :laugh:
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall. Awasu 2.2.4 [^]: A free RSS/Atom feed reader with support for Code Project.
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During my student days, I used to do it often, mostly because something would screw up my machine. In the 2.5 years that I've been with a corporate, I've had to format my machine zero times. However... it's become very sluggish now (I've had it for 2+ years). I still don't want to format it because reinstalling (and more importantly, customizing) everything would easily take 3-5 days. :sigh:
Cheers, Vikram.
"...we are disempowered to cultivate in their communities an inclination to assimilate to our culture." - Stan Shannon.
Vikram A Punathambekar wrote:
my machine.
What's the configuration? CPU/RAM/HDD. I've been using an old system(P4 2.6 Ghz/1GB/40GB) The HDD is full now but if I go and ask for an upgrade, I doubt they would question the type of files that have taken up the 40 GB space.Most of them are Songs/pictures/videos/setup.exes/ and many more that are in no way related to my work.:rolleyes: So I've strated dumping the files on the development servers(around 300 GB usually) that are just controlled by me. And about reinstalling the OS, even I never had to reinstall it at work. It's just because of the protection level they have there. Very good firewalls though I flame it here very often :-D
Code-Frog:So if this is Pumpkinhead. Time for him to run and hide. It's an interesting thought really.
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charlieg wrote:
We just don't have time to "scrub the hard drive" on a whim.
I usually repave my machines once a year just as a matter of course. That's about how long Windows lasts for me before it starts to noticeably degrade to the point where it's worth the pain of rebuilding the machine (and it's not like I go nuts installing and uninstalling lots of different apps, either :rolleyes:). The first thing I do when I get a new machine is reformat it, re-install a clean copy of Windows plus a core set of tools (e.g. firewall, disk defragmenter, enhanced command-line processor, etc.) and then take an image of it. I then reinstall my dev tools and take another image. This saves a huge amount of time when it comes to repaving. This was particularly the case with my Dell laptop - I had a lot of headaches setting it up initially because of Dell supplying the wrong drivers but once I got everything right, I imaged it and never have to worry about it again. I've just finished rebuilding two PC's and half-a-dozen virtual machines and imaging made it so much easier. With the VM's especially, being able to quickly switch between snapshots was a major bonus :cool:
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall. Awasu 2.2.4 [^]: A free RSS/Atom feed reader with support for Code Project.
Hello Taka, What imaging software do you recommend?
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
Think inside the box! ProActive Secure Systems
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes -
Vikram A Punathambekar wrote:
my machine.
What's the configuration? CPU/RAM/HDD. I've been using an old system(P4 2.6 Ghz/1GB/40GB) The HDD is full now but if I go and ask for an upgrade, I doubt they would question the type of files that have taken up the 40 GB space.Most of them are Songs/pictures/videos/setup.exes/ and many more that are in no way related to my work.:rolleyes: So I've strated dumping the files on the development servers(around 300 GB usually) that are just controlled by me. And about reinstalling the OS, even I never had to reinstall it at work. It's just because of the protection level they have there. Very good firewalls though I flame it here very often :-D
Code-Frog:So if this is Pumpkinhead. Time for him to run and hide. It's an interesting thought really.
VuNic wrote:
What's the configuration? CPU/RAM/HDD.
Same as yours, though I'm not sure about the processor speed (probably lower, definitely not higher). About the rest of your post, mate... it's eerie :~ how it could be me you're talking about. I don't have as many pictures or videos, though, and I don't have control over dev servers to dump stuff there. :(( I'm slowly transferring my stuff to CDs, though.
Cheers, Vikram.
"...we are disempowered to cultivate in their communities an inclination to assimilate to our culture." - Stan Shannon.
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I've had my Dell laptop now for almost 3 years (about 100 days left in warranty), and I have this 'issue' with a graphics flicker. We've updated drivers, swapped graphics boards, still have the flicker. I know what is coming next - either a motherboard swap (shudder) or an OS re-install (shudder - shudder). These solutions seem to be pretty big hammers. So, you developers out there that maintain your own systems, you know who you are, especially the independents. We just don't have time to "scrub the hard drive" on a whim. Further, we usually have to have a really good reason to scrub the drive and reinstall the dozens of programs that we have installed. How many of you have had issues with your system (beta s/w excluded) such that an os re-install corrected the problem? Curious. Thanks.
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
I always end up reinstalling Windows every few months however that is going to change because I'm getting tired of doing it. I have installed Windows 3.11 to NT 3.1 to WIndows 95 to Me to NT 4.0/5.0/5.1 ... Vista so many times that it is burned into my memory, its like I am a install Windows fiend or something. I have gotten so good at it that I can set up a complete system with all my programs, settings, and files in just 3 hours give or take 1. I turn into a machine when I start clicking away and typing and doing so many things at once. The only thing that holds me back is the speed of the computer and Windows Update.
█▒▒▒▒▒██▒█▒██ █▒█████▒▒▒▒▒█ █▒██████▒█▒██ █▒█████▒▒▒▒▒█ █▒▒▒▒▒██▒█▒██
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Vikram A Punathambekar wrote:
However... it's become very sluggish now (I've had it for 2+ years). I still don't want to format it because reinstalling (and more importantly, customizing) everything would easily take 3-5 days.
Yeah but the time you loose over the course of a month is worth the one or two days spent reinstalling (3-5 days is far too long mate.)
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote:
I don't see it happening, at least not until it becomes pointless.
At least 2 days for the IT guys to reinstall all our enterprisey software, and over a week, a day's worth for my customizations. BTW, that should have been 'lose', Percy. ;)
Cheers, Vikram.
"...we are disempowered to cultivate in their communities an inclination to assimilate to our culture." - Stan Shannon.
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charlieg wrote:
We just don't have time to "scrub the hard drive" on a whim.
I usually repave my machines once a year just as a matter of course. That's about how long Windows lasts for me before it starts to noticeably degrade to the point where it's worth the pain of rebuilding the machine (and it's not like I go nuts installing and uninstalling lots of different apps, either :rolleyes:). The first thing I do when I get a new machine is reformat it, re-install a clean copy of Windows plus a core set of tools (e.g. firewall, disk defragmenter, enhanced command-line processor, etc.) and then take an image of it. I then reinstall my dev tools and take another image. This saves a huge amount of time when it comes to repaving. This was particularly the case with my Dell laptop - I had a lot of headaches setting it up initially because of Dell supplying the wrong drivers but once I got everything right, I imaged it and never have to worry about it again. I've just finished rebuilding two PC's and half-a-dozen virtual machines and imaging made it so much easier. With the VM's especially, being able to quickly switch between snapshots was a major bonus :cool:
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall. Awasu 2.2.4 [^]: A free RSS/Atom feed reader with support for Code Project.
Taka Muraoka wrote:
enhanced command-line processor
Quick question, what commandline processor do you use? I tried bash, but it comes with a very large load of other stuff that I really don't need. Normally I stick with the standard windows console, but I am wondering if there's something better out there besides powershell and bash.
WM. What about weapons of mass-construction? "What? Its an Apple MacBook Pro. They are sexy!" - Paul Watson
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Hello Taka, What imaging software do you recommend?
Simply Elegant Designs JimmyRopes Designs
Think inside the box! ProActive Secure Systems
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopesJimmyRopes wrote:
What imaging software do you recommend?
I use Acronis TrueImage. It's been pretty reliable and works well. I think it's only failed on me once, not being able to restore from an image because it thought it was corrupt (even though I had previously verified it). But I was still able to open the image and manually extract files from it. I reckon someone from Acronis must hang out here because every time I recommend it, I get voted a 5 :-) :rolleyes:
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall. Awasu 2.2.4 [^]: A free RSS/Atom feed reader with support for Code Project.
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At least 2 days for the IT guys to reinstall all our enterprisey software, and over a week, a day's worth for my customizations. BTW, that should have been 'lose', Percy. ;)
Cheers, Vikram.
"...we are disempowered to cultivate in their communities an inclination to assimilate to our culture." - Stan Shannon.
What enterprisey software do you use that takes two days to install?
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote:
I don't see it happening, at least not until it becomes pointless.
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Taka Muraoka wrote:
enhanced command-line processor
Quick question, what commandline processor do you use? I tried bash, but it comes with a very large load of other stuff that I really don't need. Normally I stick with the standard windows console, but I am wondering if there's something better out there besides powershell and bash.
WM. What about weapons of mass-construction? "What? Its an Apple MacBook Pro. They are sexy!" - Paul Watson
WillemM wrote:
Quick question, what commandline processor do you use?
I used to use Cygwin plus a very old version of 4NT but the latest version of 4NT lets me do almost everything I need. It's very powerful but it's scripting syntax is still very much like CMD i.e. horrible. I do any non-trivial script in Python but it's handy having something with a bit of grunt for simple scripts.
0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall. Awasu 2.2.4 [^]: A free RSS/Atom feed reader with support for Code Project.
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What enterprisey software do you use that takes two days to install?
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote:
I don't see it happening, at least not until it becomes pointless.
Win XP VS .NET IBM WSAD Remedy Notes X| X| X| MS Office SQL Server Visio This is what IT installs. At any rate, what I remember on a Sunday night. :zzz: Apart from that, I have to install NDoc, NUnit, FxCop, Firefox, Slickrun, Winamp, IrfanView, TweakUI, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember. 'Night all. :zzz:
Cheers, Vikram.
"...we are disempowered to cultivate in their communities an inclination to assimilate to our culture." - Stan Shannon.
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I've had my Dell laptop now for almost 3 years (about 100 days left in warranty), and I have this 'issue' with a graphics flicker. We've updated drivers, swapped graphics boards, still have the flicker. I know what is coming next - either a motherboard swap (shudder) or an OS re-install (shudder - shudder). These solutions seem to be pretty big hammers. So, you developers out there that maintain your own systems, you know who you are, especially the independents. We just don't have time to "scrub the hard drive" on a whim. Further, we usually have to have a really good reason to scrub the drive and reinstall the dozens of programs that we have installed. How many of you have had issues with your system (beta s/w excluded) such that an os re-install corrected the problem? Curious. Thanks.
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
I can't see any clear reason to suspect the OS of causing screen flicker. A driver can cause that if it's set to screen values the physical screen can't support, and a motherboard or video card can also cause problems. The most likely culprit is the 3 year old LCD screen. They do have a limited lifetime, and 3 years is about when I'd expect to see trouble brewing. I've certainly got many issues with Windows, and have to rebuild systems from scratch regularly, but that's the last thing I would suspect is causing screen flicker.
"...a photo album is like Life, but flat and stuck to pages." - Shog9
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I can't see any clear reason to suspect the OS of causing screen flicker. A driver can cause that if it's set to screen values the physical screen can't support, and a motherboard or video card can also cause problems. The most likely culprit is the 3 year old LCD screen. They do have a limited lifetime, and 3 years is about when I'd expect to see trouble brewing. I've certainly got many issues with Windows, and have to rebuild systems from scratch regularly, but that's the last thing I would suspect is causing screen flicker.
"...a photo album is like Life, but flat and stuck to pages." - Shog9
Roger, All good points, but I leave it as an exercise to the student to try and describe "flicker" in words. This is not a panel wide flicker, it's almost as if something burps in the electronics of the video card and a small refresh occurs... it happens at "random" times and is becoming more (just did it :)) frequent. It may be a small part of the display, or it may be the entire display. It also does it on internal and external monitors. So far, it has evaded diagnosis. chg
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
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Roger, All good points, but I leave it as an exercise to the student to try and describe "flicker" in words. This is not a panel wide flicker, it's almost as if something burps in the electronics of the video card and a small refresh occurs... it happens at "random" times and is becoming more (just did it :)) frequent. It may be a small part of the display, or it may be the entire display. It also does it on internal and external monitors. So far, it has evaded diagnosis. chg
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
Hmmm... a friend of mine has a display-wide flicker - the problem turned out to be a bad wire connecting the backlight to the motherboard. But if the flicker is confined to s small part of the display - ie. one control or something - it is probably a software problem. Does it look like a control repainting?
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I've had my Dell laptop now for almost 3 years (about 100 days left in warranty), and I have this 'issue' with a graphics flicker. We've updated drivers, swapped graphics boards, still have the flicker. I know what is coming next - either a motherboard swap (shudder) or an OS re-install (shudder - shudder). These solutions seem to be pretty big hammers. So, you developers out there that maintain your own systems, you know who you are, especially the independents. We just don't have time to "scrub the hard drive" on a whim. Further, we usually have to have a really good reason to scrub the drive and reinstall the dozens of programs that we have installed. How many of you have had issues with your system (beta s/w excluded) such that an os re-install corrected the problem? Curious. Thanks.
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Whoever said children were cheaper by the dozen... lied. My son's PDA is an M249 SAW. My other son commutes in an M1A2 Abrams
I think in your case investing some money in a program like Acronis True Image would be a good idea. Do a full image of your system. Then reformat and reinstall everything. If the problem is gone you are good to go. If it remains you can ship the box for repair (or whatever) or you can restore your OS from the Acronis image. Very low, to no risk involved.