Re: OT: improving Vista tips?

On Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:10:07 +0100, "[ste parker]"
<imaginey@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
On Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:45:13 +0100, "[ste parker]"
<imaginey@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
I haven't, but I've had to rescue a few systems in that time.

1) was shutting down Windows a few minutes after booting (crashing the
RPC subsystem, system reboots itself because it can't talk to itself
any more), but otherwise didn't do any harm.
That wasn't the thing that you tend to get if you connect XP pre-SP1 to
the 'net unfirewalled and get some spyware or whatever it was near
immediately was it? That was my first experience of realising that XP
needs a firewall (even the basic default one), having never used one before.

That's the feller. Penetrated over a USB dsl modem.

Happened over bloody dialup for me. I was in the slightly comical
situation of booting, dialing up and hoping I could search the net fast
enough for the solution before the fucking thing shut itself down again!

Yep, me too - though I can't recall if I actually did, or if I just
went home and looked it up there. It was a Win2k box.

Same for me in the most part, although I've no idea what my gf's parents
are doing to their PC but I'm seriously considering a reinstall on that
one.

Just do it, it's quicker than fixing the damn thing again!

It would be, but given all the countless ancient *** attached by USB
and god knows what similarly ancient programs that they don't know if
they need or not when I ask, I always lose the will. I've already
uninstalled a dodgy broken copy of Office and put on something that
actually worked, only to find out they'd been using sodding Outlook as
their address book. Outlook, just for that! Never mind there's one
that would have sufficed already there in Windows, ffs.

Right. I'd be very tempted to build them a new box and take the old
one away, so anything they do want can be delivered onto the new
working system.

Mind you, uninstalling Office shouldn't have blown out the Outlook
account - that lives in the user/Application Settings folder
somewhere, doesn't it?

Now, see - this sort of nonsense is why I went Apple, and try and
persuade all my friends'n'relations to do the same. Trouble from
sister no.1 since going apple? None. Sister no.2? None. Sister no.3?
None, until a couple of weeks back when some dip*** reformatted her
other (Vista) laptop while she was on hols. WTF?

Cheers - Jaimie
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