[Closed] What's annoying you currently? II

My condolences too James. My thoughts will be with you tomorrow. Stay strong. We are all here for you.

That you can't travel back in time? I'm sure I told you that before Tom??

James, our thoughts are with you.

My condolences James. I wish you all the best for tomorrow.

Thanks all. It was OK, as far as these things go.

In trying to carry too much stuff down into the basement, I slipped in the stairs and fell on my spinal tap and left elbow. Great commotion and pain as things fell all over the place.

Geez, lately I've been feeling a bit like the "unlucky man", which is a famous song over here. Or like this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUD_eitVzj8

Sorry to hear that man.

You need some The Verve in your life right now Thor.

Mate, you do not need updates. Have them permanently disabled through control panel. All of our windows computers at the studios are having updates off, always. It's faster, you don't need to defragment disks all the time and you don't need them. At all.

Bollocks. We run windows 7 x64 on our pcs at the studio with antivirus (f-secure or avira) and we have absolutely no problems whatsoever. This is bollocks marketing by microsoft to force you staff the pc with crap that gets you defragmented and unstable all the time.

Think I'll turn it off.

Btw, now that you mention antivirus, which do you find best?

Peter

Hehe, well, I currently have Norton. Came with a free subscription, which only has a few days left, so I have to find an alternative now, preferently freeware. It has worked alright though. Found some threats from time to time. Of course it could merely be making all these threats up to make me feel that it's protecting me. I get the feeling that antivirus programs tend to be hypersensitive, to convince the users that they're really good at their job.

AVG I've used in the past. Seemed like crap. I've used avast too, which seemed pretty good, but it was the one I was using when I got a major trojan that destroyed my last computer.

Peter

I'd also recommend Avira. I use it and have no problems with it. It updates regularly (you can choose how it updates, automatic or manual) and it only updates additional information rather (like Norton) the whole definitions database every time (as far as I understand it.)

Being an ordinary user, and not a "power user" as I'd define Demetris, I'd always be reluctant to dispense with Windows' updates. I don't know enough about this sort of thing to know whether I should or should not be downloading the updates or not. I can't tell if they are important or not. Cynics would say that's what Windows is hoping for.

I had an update yesterday where I had to reboot the PC in order for the updates to install completely but I didn't have to do it right there and then. I could have ignored the request and just waited until I was finished. I believe that you can set up the update process to be automatic or manual. And in manual mode you can choose various levels of control: completely manual check that you do yourself, you can set it so that you are informed that there are updates available and then you can choose to download and install, you can also be told that there are updates and they are downloaded but you are asked if you want to install them now. Or, as I said, you can have the updates downloaded automatically and installed automatically. Lots of choice.

As I mentioned, I'm not too knowledgeable about whether I need these updates or not. And this means that I'm not too knowledgeable about potential threats when I'm surfing the web (I too don't frequent dodgy sites). I'd rather have some level of defence that's up-to-date rather than have something happen and then try to pick up the pieces after some threat has arrived on my PC.

Uninstall EVERYTHING, ALWAYS with Revo Uninstaller. No left-overs intentionally left from the programs if you just uninstall them via windows. Hassle-free.

As for updates, be careful when applying if you don't want to turn them off completely (i can't imagine why, but still). Always backup before installing and restart if you don't want to run into loosing data after nasty black / blue screen of deaths after rebooting or "bootmgr corrupted / missing" messages.

You don't need anything complex to run windows, this is what the general public doesn't understand and fills the pc's with useless software that conflicts each other, burdens the pc and makes it run slower than a turtle.

WINDOWS 7 is what i have
avira antivirus free
revo uninstaller - also check what autoruns with windows and uncheck all the unnecessary stuff
ccleaner
and defragment the disks via windows disk defrag program when install new applications or when analyze disks and find them more than 3% fragmented.
windows updates turned off via control panel

My pcs with those settings work like a charm, very fast, very clean, problem free.

I don't think there is any problem with turning off automatic updates, but I can't think that anyone should seriously never download any, which seems to be what is being suggested. Some of them are a waste of time, but some are rather important at plugging security gaps, others are nice bug fixes, occasionally there is even a new feature or two.

I do agree with Alan, though - I can't believe Microsoft hasn't done anything about the forced resets. The times I've left the computer doing something overnight, only to come back in the morning and find that it rebooted itself at 2am, are not among my happiest Microsoft moments.