smart computer use?

My primary computer at work is running Windows XP. It is a workhorse machine. If it goes down, my billable hrs drop instantly and my workflow is horribly interrupted.

I need to make certain decisions to make sure that this machine keeps running at optimal levels at all times.

Today, I was prompted to install Windows XP SP3 (Service Pack 3). I declined.

Why did I decline this particular Windows update?

The first and foremost reason that I declined this update is because about 2 weeks ago a client called me. He asked me if I was able to help him get his computer working (I’m not a computer tech, I’m web developer, so people think that I am a computer tech sometimes… common mistake I guess).

I really didn’t have any insight, and considering that he lives about 1 hr away, there really is nothing I could do. When a computer doesn’t start, there could be any myriad of problems, none of which can be solved over the phone by a busy web developer in a short amount of time.

But, I figured I’d at least give it a quick run, seeing if maybe I could help him out, planning to quickly tell him to find a local computer tech if it sounded like I was going to get nowhere.

I first asked “Did you do anything recently install anything new on your computer?”.

“Yes, I installed that new Service Pack 3 update this morning… and when I re-started my computer it wouldn’t start!”, is what he said.

Nuts.

I knew right away I wasn’t going to be able to help him. But, I still asked “When you boot your computer, does anything show on the screen at all? Does it prompt to go into safe mode or anything?”

“Nope, I just get a black screen, nothing…” he said.

And that was about the point where I proceeded to explain that I wouldn’t be able to provide him with an effective solution to his problem over the phone. I explained that he should get in contact with a computer tech to see what they can figure out.

Now, back to my decline of Service Pack 3…

So yeah, that is the first thing that popped into my head when I got prompted for Service Pack 3 for Windows XP.

Then, when I clicked the Windows Update icon I got a prompt that says “Back up all files… blah blah blah”…

The first thing I told myself was “I don’t need to go through with this… my machine works fine and is up to date other than SP3″.

And I hit cancel.

I don’t need any troubles from a Windows Update, especially when it has a bit of a bad reputation on the internet:

“My external disks are having trouble starting up, which results in Windows not starting up,” complained user Michael Faklis, in a post Wednesday. “After three attempts [to install XP SP3] with different configurations each time, System Restore was the only way to get me out of deep s**t,” said ‘Doug W’.

Another user said the service pack prevented him from starting his computer. “I downloaded and installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals,” wrote ‘Paul’. “Now I can’t get the computer to boot.”

It’s actually pretty easy to find more comments like these.

Maybe another day

I still might consider eventually running the Windows XP Service Pack 3 update, but it’ll need to be a day when I have time to do a complete Windows backup (not just my files) and then also have extra time to kill just in case the update fails or crashes my computer.

I just finished reloading the main desktop machine in my home studio. My main machine is an old-school 2.5 gig Pentium 4 with about 768mb of RAM.

It’s not a fast machine, really, but it’s not a slow machine either. It was built about 5 years ago, and it’s been used as a web development machine ever since.

I reloaded this machine with Windows XP Professional. It’s a good operating system. Windows XP seems to be at it’s peak, so it’s a confident system to run on a machine. Windows XP is also lighter on system resources than Windows Vista, so I am opting to use XP on my older machines to ensure that they still can run at a nice clip.

The reload of Windows XP went too smooth. All I needed to install after the reload was:

• UltraEdit
• FileZilla
• Winamp
• AVP, erm, I mean AVG anti-virus
• Mozilla Firefox

And now I’m pretty much set.

This machine hadn’t been reloaded for a couple years. It was running all kinds of crazy software and had been put through the ringer resources-consumption-wise. I am glad to now take this old machine and put it in my home office/studio. The machine won’t be asked to do much other than ftp some files and serve as a code editor. It might also get some minor Flash work thrown at it. There may also be some blogging. But, there isn’t anything that I’ll demand of this machine beyond what it can handle.

I might also try to run Unreal Tournament GOTY Edition on this one. This machine was pretty much built to spec to handle UT GOTY Edition. Nothing new though, gotta stay with the old-school games on this machine.

I had the feeling that this might be the last time I load Windows XP onto a machine. Anything new I buy or use will more than likely have Windows Vista or some form of Linux on it. All my Windows XP machines seem to be at their final stage right now.

We’ll see, I guess. What will become of Windows XP?

I’ve been using Windows Vista for a couple months on a laptop. This has been my first experience with Vista. I have been pretty happy with the operating system overall, but there is one nagging thing I repeatedly get annoyed with.

Windows Vista, at least on my laptop machine, can’t copy or move files at a fast rate in many instances. I frequently have to wait 5-10 minutes to extract the files from an approximately 100k zip file or similar. That is pretty rediculous. I’m actually typing this as I wait for a some files to copy for a web site installation, and it’s taking way to long for that copy to execute.

I’ve been able to find information about turning off certain indexing services on Vista to speed up this kinda stuff. I had a problem with not being able to copy files from an XP machine over a network to this Vista machine when I first got this laptop. I did some research on Google and found that some people were eliminating this issue by disabling some indexing services on their macine. I tried it and it worked, but only for the network transfers. It didn’t fix my local file moving and copying issues. The local file system operations are still way to slow for my liking.

Here’s a quote from a related forum thread, kinda funny.

It’s quicker to copy stuff to a USB pen drive and walk between the machines! As with the guy above, I can get 500kb/s+ downloading from the Internet, so what’s with Vista copying?

Good stuff. There’s tons of stuff out there on the Internet similar to this.

After this 12.5 minute unzipping process of a 100k file ends I’ll probably not try this again tonight. I’m going to probably just call it quits and go to the office tomorrow to use my XP machine to install my plugins and finish the web site installation. It’s so much faster.

This might just be my overreacting, but I think the thought is valid.

It seems that at certain times I am just a slave to my computer software needing to update itself. Between using 3 different computers on a somewhat daily basis there is sometimes more time spent getting distracted by prompts for updates. And when stuff prompts me to update it, it’s always at an inconvenient time as far as my computer use goes.

Windows XP pretty much is always prompting for some sort of update. I get prompted by the Java runtime engine to update frequently. WordPress screams to be updated from right underneath the main options menu, but not very frequently. Firefox releases an update. Thunderbird prompts to download latest update.

AVG anti-virus at least updates itself. Sometimes it throws a prompt up that actually sits and tells me it’s gonna count down from 30 before it gets out of my way. Why not 5 seconds? That’d be much more reasonable.

And then I move onto the next machine and pretty much go through all the similar update motions at other random intervals.

There’s all of that bothersome stuff.

And then Propellerheads goes and releases version 4 of Reason. So I actually go through the entire process of ordering, paying for, and receiving in the mail a Reason 4 upgrade.

It’s probably going to be worth my time to actually pay attention to this matter and disable a bunch of the auto update processes. Life will once again resume without updating madness.

If you use Windows, you either already know or now should know that your computer likes to start up all sorts of applications and run them in the background.

AutoRuns for Windows will help you to get a better grasp on all these automatically starting applications. From an article published by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell:

This utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows Me and XP.

The download link is on the bottom of that page as well. Try it out it you want to better manage all the auto-running stuff on your Windows computer.