Challenge

[Dizzle07]

Alright, here's the challenge. It's not really a "fun" challenge or anything, but here goes: My computer is totally cluttered up. Stuff runs on startup that I don't want to, files are associated with programs I don't want them to be, there's partial files all over my computer, and it runs slow as snot after a few hours of use. How do I solve this?

A simple answer would be "reformat". While a good answer, it will happen again, and installing windows xp is a bit of a pain. I have it configured to my liking (minus some stuff) and want to cut the cancer from my computer, as it were.

What programs could help me with this and how can I get my computer running like it's meant to run?

Example of what kind of stuff I want to fix: Double clicking a folder opens it in acdsee by default. VERY annoying.

[dani82]

you could try TuneUp Utilities 2003, it has many option to improve your computer (i guess*), while it many not get your computer back to the way it's supposed to be, it's a start.

* had it since i'd built my computer, can't really tell the difference with or without the program installed.

[cypher_soundz]

Well, if you select a file with the extension that you want to open and hold down shift and right click you can see a "open with..." option in the drop down list, click that and tell the OS what program to open it with. To stop things loading up at start up you can either load up regedit and edit the registry or use a program to do it for you like codestuff.cjb.net also you might want to have a look at a ad aware or spybot. They will take any spyware/adware from your computer if it is this type of stuff loading up. Also defrag your drive afterwards, as you are on here i guess that encoding is something that you do, well ripping 9 gb to your HD fragments up your drive quickly.
Regards
cyph

[Dizzle07]

How can I get the folders' default behavior back to open instead of something else? I'm starting to get fed up with winXP (surprise surprise).

[Tuesday]

hey, if you have load of crap running at start up you can disable it by going: start->run and typing msconfig, going to the startup tab and disabling anything you dont want to run.

Also, it sounds like you could do with ad-aware (http://www.snapfiles.com/get/adaware.html), its a program for disabling spyware and other annoying apps.

[r6d2]

There is nothing as a good install from scratch. However, you need to make sure you don't let the system get spyware. It is always your choice, just be careful and know what you're doing so your system won't get messy again. Otherwise, you are at the mercy of third party tools.

Learn, get a good firewall, a good anti virus and you're done. XP is by far the easiest to configure OS known to me.

[communist]

Seriously - do a reformat and clean install :|
Then make an image of that installation so you can always restore to a healthy setup within minutes.
IMHO 'fixing' heavily stuffed up windows versions is mostly a waste of time.

But it may help to:
- remove all uneccessary programs
- defrag hard-drive
- remove all the junk from services (start -> run -> services.msc [ENTER])
- remove any kind of spy-ware that you might have ( get adaware from www.lavasoft.de )

If programs start hijacking file associations (without request) its best to either get rid of the program or just check the program settings / windows file association settings.

[Dizzle07]

I like the thought of making an image to revert to... I think I'm going to do that. And maybe get another computer to run linux on. Thanks for steering me in the right direction :-)

[ChristianHJW]

Thanks to making images with Norton Ghost i actually managed to keep a single Windows 2000 installation on my server running absolutely perfect for about 3 years. Whenever something bad happened, i went back to the last working image. This went fine until i finally screwed up everything when installing new HDDs, copying the old working partition over to a new HDD, but booting up Windows with both ( the old and the new ) HDDs running and forgot to assign another partition for the swap file, using the same partition ID as for the old Windows, before deleting/reformatting the old HDD. Windows will then try to boot, but never work because it doesnt find it swap drive. The thing to avoid is

- after you copied/mirrored the old HDD to the new one using Norton Ghost, never boot Windows with both HDDs present
- put your swap file on a 3rd HDD in the Windows setup, and after the old HDD got reformated/deleted, change the swap drive to the c partition or wherever you have Windows installed. I actually thought once about using an old HDD only for the swap drive, connected to my RAID controller ....