The problem with objectdock for people like me is that I hardly ever see my wallpaper or my desktop in the first place- I load all my programs from the start bar and switch between them. I only have my recycle bin on the desktop so the objectdock launch bar will hardly ever be used.
Personally I like it but it all just eats resources so I have mine setup so all visual themes and special animated menus and stuff are off.
The only thing I like added in XP is the "drop shadows under icon text" so thats on, other that than my desktop looks exactly the same as it did when I ran 95/98.
Still, willing to give this a shot anyway. If I dont like it just remove it.
Also: to the people saying why re-install every 6 months? Why wouldnt you? I couldn't have a rotting old install just sat there running like a dog :|
Originally Posted by BioSniper Also: to the people saying why re-install every 6 months? Why wouldnt you? I couldn't have a rotting old install just sat there running like a dog :|
I did a clean re-install Friday evening, box was taking an extra few seconds to get going and the partitioning that was fine for 98SE was really far too small a C: for XP.
Much nippier now, but it's a job I normally need a decent excuse to do, like a new drive or OS. Reinstalling Win is easy, the big suites aren't too bad, but reinstalling umpteen dozen little utilities that really improve on MS, Moz, etc, is a pain.
Originally Posted by :: kna :: The same reason you throw out those old jars at the back of the fridge, time to clear out all that old rubbish.
What does that mean? I don't get it, why would someone reinstall their OS? The only reason I could see is if something was severely wrong with the install, and the machine wouldn't boot or something, but even then you just fix it. From time to time I hear people saying they do this "regularly", but no one has ever given me a good reason why. Starting a machine over from scratch is just so much of a hassle, I can't imagine doing it. I buy a machine, I install the OS. Next time I install is 3-5 years later, but it's on a new machine.
Originally Posted by TheSpoonman From time to time I hear people saying they do this "regularly", but no one has ever given me a good reason why. Starting a machine over from scratch is just so much of a hassle, I can't imagine doing it. I buy a machine, I install the OS. Next time I install is 3-5 years later, but it's on a new machine.
See cpemma's post a couple up. This is a place where people do actually worry if their computer takes a few extra seconds to do something. It's all about streamlining
Weren't people having a race at one time to see who's computer cold booted fastest? What was the final score?
@TheSpoonman: I reinstall my OS every so often for many different reasons:
A) I dislike anti-spyware and anti-virus software that runs in the background, for whatever reason it alwasy seems to be using more resources than what I am saving by running it in the software. It does mean that after 2 months my system's always clogged full of adware etc.
B) I always find myself downloading things and trying things out etc, however my HDD space is limited (only 80GB) and therefore need to clear things out every once in a while simply because my harddisk is full, and I fail to do so meaning my harddisk gets full (and I mean full) after about 4 months.
C) Games run slower due to XP's registry getting clogged up, spyware as mentioned above and all the other crap I don't even know is running.
D) Reinstalling costs me no more than a weekend, and having a system boot in 25 seconds as opposed to 25 minutes is great! It also allows me to take good things from the previous OS install and leave the bad bits out, like games I never play won't be reinstalled, leaving more HDD space for other things.
E) I just like having a nippy, fresh, cleaned up system, not one that is all full and messed up with three years of me using it. To the average Joe, yes it's a hassle to reinstall the OS, but to me it's worth the effort.
Originally Posted by BioSniper Personally I like it but it all just eats resources so I have mine setup so all visual themes and special animated menus and stuff are off.
The only thing I like added in XP is the "drop shadows under icon text" so thats on, other that than my desktop looks exactly the same as it did when I ran 95/98.
Still, willing to give this a shot anyway. If I dont like it just remove it.
your memory? i'm considering trying it, but i don't want it to eat up too much. i have 2.5 gigs of pc3200, though, so...
Originally Posted by Constructacon See cpemma's post a couple up. This is a place where people do actually worry if their computer takes a few extra seconds to do something. It's all about streamlining
So, why are we setting up things like objectdock and Konfabulator? :) I've run 'em myself for a while, and while they don't take much in terms of resources, they take a lot more than not running them.
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Originally Posted by smoguzbenjamin @TheSpoonman: I reinstall my OS every so often for many different reasons:
A) I dislike anti-spyware and anti-virus software that runs in the background, for whatever reason it alwasy seems to be using more resources than what I am saving by running it in the software. It does mean that after 2 months my system's always clogged full of adware etc.
So, a) run Firefox and/or b) run MS's antispyware once a week or so (so far the best once I've found) and/or c) run your AV once a week or so, too. I haven't seen a piece of spyware on my machine in well over a year. I think the last virus I has was Jerusalem. :) Even leaving the AS running has minimal resource impact, less than running Knofabulator and Objectdock (7.6M of RAM usage as opposed to over 16M). AV, since it uses a filter-level driver will have a performance impact above and beyond RAM usage, which is why I don't run it full-time. ClamAV is nice in that it's free, updated a little quicker than the big vendors sometimes, and doesn't force you to run it in the background like the big names. Setting it up as a scheduled nightly task works just fine for me.
You should consider running AV full-time, though. If you've got that many problems, you've prolly been infected pretty regularly, too. That means your machine could be a zombie for up to 6 months before you reinstall, affecting other machines on the Internet.
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Originally Posted by smoguzbenjamin B) I always find myself downloading things and trying things out etc, however my HDD space is limited (only 80GB) and therefore need to clear things out every once in a while simply because my harddisk is full, and I fail to do so meaning my harddisk gets full (and I mean full) after about 4 months.
Man, I remember when I was limited by my 80 MEGAbyte hd! I thought after upgrading my 5MB to a 10M, that going from 10 to 80 would mean I'd never need to worry about space again! :) But, I digress...You wipe your harddrive, reinstall the OS, and go through the tedius process of re-tweaking everything all over again solely to clear up your HD? As an SE, I'm always doing the same with my work laptop, which only has a 30G drive, and the way I've found to clear it off is to use Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.
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Originally Posted by smoguzbenjamin C) Games run slower due to XP's registry getting clogged up, spyware as mentioned above and all the other crap I don't even know is running.
Clogged up? What does that mean? If you've got software installed, it'll have entries in the registry (unless it's poorly written and still uses an ini). If you reinstall your OS, and then reinstall the software those entries come back. There are some programs that leave reg entries behind (after you uninstall) of course, but those entries don't make any difference. If you're worried about them you can use a product like RegClean Supreme once in a while to clear them out. They really don't make any difference, though. Even after 3-5 years of installing and uninstalling software left and right running a regclean has never made any noticeable difference in performance for me. Well, no, if I right-click in Explorer and choose New ->, the submenu comes up faster. :)
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Originally Posted by smoguzbenjamin D) Reinstalling costs me no more than a weekend, and having a system boot in 25 seconds as opposed to 25 minutes is great! It also allows me to take good things from the previous OS install and leave the bad bits out, like games I never play won't be reinstalled, leaving more HDD space for other things.
Ok, again, if you just want to free up drive space uninstalling those old games will do that. As for boot times, well, they've never been that important to me as I either don't reboot all that often or use the hibernation features of my laptops (you can use hibernation on a lot of desktops, too if you're worried about electricity usage). However, if you want to improve those speeds proper maintenance takes less time and works better. When you install an app, see if it places items in the startup areas of your registry (HKLM\Software\MS\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, and the same in HKCU to name the two most common) then delete them if you don't want them running at startup.
For example, I just upgraded to Quicktime 7.0 over the weekend. It puts an entry in HKLM's run called "Quicktime Task". That's the blue "Q" in your tray. It's purpose is to keep qt "semi-running" so that the once a week I might click on a link that has an embedded MOV it'll load 5 seconds faster. Not a good use of 8M of RAM in my opinion, so I remove it. Realplayer does something similar. I have a vbscript I wrote that I run as a scheduled task every night that removes entries from all of the startup areas except those I want to keep (I have it e-mail me and tell me about new ones before deleting them so I can be sure I want them removed). I only keep about 3-5 entries in each one. My machine goes from off to working desktop in under a minute, which includes mounting my encrypted partition (I use TrueCrypt on my laptops), and recreating the pagefile (I have my machine delete them at shutdown for security, but mostly to minimize its fragmentation). The majority of the reason for my "slow" boot times is the fact that the laptop drives are only 5400RPM. Stupid slow laptop drives. If you've got faster drives, which I assume you do, then regular maintenance will go a lot further than reinstalling.
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Originally Posted by smoguzbenjamin E) I just like having a nippy, fresh, cleaned up system, not one that is all full and messed up with three years of me using it. To the average Joe, yes it's a hassle to reinstall the OS, but to me it's worth the effort.
To me, reinstalling the OS over and over again seems more like the kind of thing an average joe would do. That's why vendors put restore CDs in their boxes. It's "easier" than actually fixing problems. Me, I think it's just easier to fix things as I go along. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results...well...that's the definition of insanity, isn't it? :)
The zombie remark is a good one, I might just want to turn some kind of AV on for that purpose, obviously having my PC full of virusses is my business but I don't want to bother other people with it.
The thing is, I prefer to put my maintenance time into one weekend every so many months, than having to do it for a few minutes every week. I don't run my PC overnight due to power consumption and therefore don't run things nightly, and quite frankly can't be bothered to spend time weekly to check up on my system.
In any case, I prefer to reinstall periodically, simply to clean out all the trash that I don't know about that's accumulated on my PC (perhaps due to my lack of AV software), and to me, it's the simplest way of restoring my PC back to the nippy thing it's supposed to be. I'm used to doing it and it doesn't cost me much effort, so why not? The re-tweaking takes me all of an hour and I enjoy doing so. Maybe it's only a placebo, but it gives me something to do over the weekend anyway.
As to running Konfabulator: :D
I have a window in my case and 2 CCFL's which have no functional purpose whatsoever except to look fancy. Same with Konfabulator, simple 'nuff.
Okay, I've checked out Konfabulator and actually like it... a little. It's fast, it has goody little 'widgets' and so and so on... so much for the obvious... But it's not as flexible as I would like to.
I did a bit of googling and found Samurize! Now, here's a damn flexible tool for all of your desktop-modding needs. It may have a bit steeper learning-curve, but once you got a hang of the basics, you'll never need another desktop-modding tool again! I'll guarantee that!
Originally Posted by TheSpoonman What does that mean? I don't get it, why would someone reinstall their OS? The only reason I could see is if something was severely wrong with the install, and the machine wouldn't boot or something, but even then you just fix it. From time to time I hear people saying they do this "regularly", but no one has ever given me a good reason why. Starting a machine over from scratch is just so much of a hassle, I can't imagine doing it. I buy a machine, I install the OS. Next time I install is 3-5 years later, but it's on a new machine.
Most machines benefit from a clean install after a certain amount of time, not least due to the pile up of apps which are installed/modified/removed leaving a load of crap around your system.. your registry gets bigger, HDD space shrinks, things get loaded into memory and don't remove themselves properly.
Sure if you install one set of apps at the start then do nothing but run those apps, never upgrade drivers and do the same thing every day then you'll likely not need a reinstall. However, if you're like me and basically drive your PC into the ground installing, modifying and removing things left, right and centre then you will benefit from a fresh, clean install every so often to remove the detritus left behind.
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Originally Posted by TheSpoonman To me, reinstalling the OS over and over again seems more like the kind of thing an average joe would do.
And to me and most other people it seems exactly the opposite. You average joe wouldn't dare reinstall, they'd just get wound up in a mess of trying to fix various problems and leave themselves with something unmanageable and like trying to navigate round a system with treacle like responsiveness, when they should really reinstall.
Originally Posted by :: kna :: Most machines benefit from a clean install after a certain amount of time, not least due to the pile up of apps which are installed/modified/removed leaving a load of crap around your system.. your registry gets bigger, HDD space shrinks, things get loaded into memory and don't remove themselves properly.
Sure if you install one set of apps at the start then do nothing but run those apps, never upgrade drivers and do the same thing every day then you'll likely not need a reinstall. However, if you're like me and basically drive your PC into the ground installing, modifying and removing things left, right and centre then you will benefit from a fresh, clean install every so often to remove the detritus left behind.
And to me and most other people it seems exactly the opposite. You average joe wouldn't dare reinstall, they'd just get wound up in a mess of trying to fix various problems and leave themselves with something unmanageable and like trying to navigate round a system with treacle like responsiveness, when they should really reinstall.
You put into words exactly what I couldn't. Agreed with the entire post :) I also have a habit of installing/uninstalling about 10 apps a week :p
Most machines benefit from a clean install after a certain amount of time, not least due to the pile up of apps which are installed/modified/removed leaving a load of crap around your system.. your registry gets bigger, HDD space shrinks, things get loaded into memory and don't remove themselves properly.
When you uninstall an app, the uninstall process typically removes all files installed on the system as well as all entries added to the registry. I say typically because we know that's not always true. Some entries and files do get left behind. Keep in mind that in some cases, they're supposed to be left behind. Windows coding standards dictate that a package leave behind any files added or modified by the user. It's been a while since I perused the standards in detail, but I'm pretty sure that applies to registry entries as well. Regardless, we're talking microscopic digital "dust", nothing more. A couple extra DLLs left lying in your system directory (the most common place files are left behind) amounts to at MOST a meg or two of extra DLLs over the course of a couple of years. As for registry entries, again, the amount left behind by poorly written uninstallers is negligable at best.
There are two cases where these might make some performance impact: extra ClassIDs left behind might slow down DCOM operations due to an excessive search list and extra DLLs in your path increase the time it takes to find the right DLLs. But, the performance impact because of 5 or 6 or even 5 or 600 extra entries or DLLs would be imperceptible, even with a stopwatch on today's systems.
There is a simple reason why your system appears snappier after doing a reinstall: everything that was set to autoload has been removed. Eventually, though, you get to the point where all of that stuff is back and you have to reinstall again. Wouldn't it be easier to spend the couple of minutes a month it might take to do some basic maintenance than spend a weekend, or even half a day, reinstalling everything?
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Originally Posted by :: kna ::
Sure if you install one set of apps at the start then do nothing but run those apps, never upgrade drivers and do the same thing every day then you'll likely not need a reinstall. However, if you're like me and basically drive your PC into the ground installing, modifying and removing things left, right and centre then you will benefit from a fresh, clean install every so often to remove the detritus left behind.
Being one who will install and test every application that fits a type before settling on one, and also doesn't reinstall his OS ever, I can tell you that those statements are completely false. As an example, just this weekend I got fed up with BitTornado and decided to find a better bittorrent client. I installed about 5-10 of them before deciding to go with Azureus (being a Java app, it's good awful slow and resource hog, but it has all the features I wanted, but found lacking in other apps). Since it's typically started before going to bed, resource usage is a non-issue. That's how I find the software I use. According to these "reinstall is necessary" theories, I should need to reinstall my OS every 15 minutes, yet after a year and a half this machine functions no differently than it did when I first set it up (aside from having a better bittorrent client, of course. :) )
Another example would be my test server at home. I installed Windows 2000 server on it the day the OS RTMed (December 15th, 1999. My birthday, I tell everyone it was a present from Bill). I just replaced the machine a couple of months back with new hardware. That install was over five years old and saw more action than most desktop systems (it served as my game console, media center PC, home automation server, Quake/Half-Life/etc server, webserver running both Apache and IIS, etc, etc).
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Originally Posted by :: kna ::
And to me and most other people it seems exactly the opposite. You average joe wouldn't dare reinstall, they'd just get wound up in a mess of trying to fix various problems and leave themselves with something unmanageable and like trying to navigate round a system with treacle like responsiveness, when they should really reinstall.
Most people believe Greenland is approximately the same size as Africa because that's how it looks on their maps, but that don't make it true. "Common" knowledge is no substitute for REAL knowledge. Most Joe Users reinstall pretty regularly because they've been trained to do so by people "who are good with computers" and OEM vendor support which is staffed by people "who are good with computers". Joe User doesn't tweak his system, hell, most barely even maintain a usable Start Menu. Whenever they have a problem with their computer, they call their OEM who tells them to stick in the restore CD and reboot. Voila! Problem fixed! I took that hammer out of my bag a LOOOOOOONG time ago when I decided it was too much trouble. It's that fundamental misunderstanding of how Windows, and computers in general, work that perpetuates myths like this.
You might have a point mate but you can't deny that reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling your OS leaves you with a clean, zippy, and ready-to go machine ;) You might not generate the clutter that makes people like me and others reinstall, but I sure as hell do and will continue to reinstall my OS as long as it remains a viable option to me :)
Shareware programs in particular leave hidden stuff behind so you can't just remove, wipe the directory and reinstall for another 30 days trial. One advantage of the clean reinstall is that you can. ;)
I've noticed things are much better now than in 9x days, when old programs would install old versions of dll system files and generally be allowed to mess up if you didn't run SFC regularly.
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...you can't deny that reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling your OS leaves you with a clean, zippy, and ready-to go machine
I can. After a clean install of XP and a few dozen programs, Norton found a few hundred orphans cluttering up the registry.
And four programs have installed different Java Runtime Engines; XP/IE, my HP printer (despite claims it checks for any existing JRE), Starry Night, and me, with the latest version for Firefox that IE is happy to share. Time for some more sharing of resources.
I'm having trouble finding a decent weather widget for konfabulator that uses a UK soruce, like the bbc site or met office data. The ones i find seem to use american sources which are just woefully wrong consistantly.
If I'm honest you ask why I reinstall reguarly, I've answered the question. If you want to carry on trying to convince me otherwise that's your call, but I'm afraid it's on as deaf ears as my argument is to you.
Without having to explain my life history, me and pretty much everyone else with whom I work in the industry tried it your way at some point and it never works as well as you would like it to, especially on systems which get a lot of use. I appreciate you have the patience to go through it with a fine-toothed comb and pick out the grit, but I just don't have time to go around cleaning up after applications which don't obey the rules.
Spending 30 mins reinstalling once every 6-8 months saves me a lot more time than pawing over the nooks and crannies of my system trying to find something which shouldn't be there. Besides the fact of course, it's just satisfying after a fresh install.
You stick with the way you think it works, I'll stick with mine and we'll call it quits. ;)
Originally Posted by :: kna :: ...it's just satisfying after a fresh install.
It is, but if you can do it in under an hour you're cheating with a ghoster.
A real re-install gives you chance to totally re-organise your directory system if, like me, you spend a lot of time under the hood or just insist on keeping your CDs in genre + alphabetical order.
takes like 20mins to get to a new desktop if that, then mabye another 20mins to get most of the basic apps installed, after that i just reinstall stuff as and when i need it
easy to do it in under and hour :p
Originally Posted by cpemma A real re-install gives you chance to totally re-organise your directory system if, like me, you spend a lot of time under the hood or just insist on keeping your CDs in genre + alphabetical order.
Another reason to reinstall.
But we're waaaaay off-topic here as the thread was about Windows desktop customisation, which I have done after reading that and I enjoy messing around with it :)
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<A88>
Found a link though: http://crystalxp.zerackiel.net/bricopack-vista-inspirat.php
:)
Personally I like it but it all just eats resources so I have mine setup so all visual themes and special animated menus and stuff are off.
The only thing I like added in XP is the "drop shadows under icon text" so thats on, other that than my desktop looks exactly the same as it did when I ran 95/98.
Still, willing to give this a shot anyway. If I dont like it just remove it.
Also: to the people saying why re-install every 6 months? Why wouldnt you? I couldn't have a rotting old install just sat there running like a dog :|
Much nippier now, but it's a job I normally need a decent excuse to do, like a new drive or OS. Reinstalling Win is easy, the big suites aren't too bad, but reinstalling umpteen dozen little utilities that really improve on MS, Moz, etc, is a pain.
And I've lost my Hall of Fame in Kyodai... :'(
What does that mean? I don't get it, why would someone reinstall their OS? The only reason I could see is if something was severely wrong with the install, and the machine wouldn't boot or something, but even then you just fix it. From time to time I hear people saying they do this "regularly", but no one has ever given me a good reason why. Starting a machine over from scratch is just so much of a hassle, I can't imagine doing it. I buy a machine, I install the OS. Next time I install is 3-5 years later, but it's on a new machine.
Weren't people having a race at one time to see who's computer cold booted fastest? What was the final score?
A) I dislike anti-spyware and anti-virus software that runs in the background, for whatever reason it alwasy seems to be using more resources than what I am saving by running it in the software. It does mean that after 2 months my system's always clogged full of adware etc.
B) I always find myself downloading things and trying things out etc, however my HDD space is limited (only 80GB) and therefore need to clear things out every once in a while simply because my harddisk is full, and I fail to do so meaning my harddisk gets full (and I mean full) after about 4 months.
C) Games run slower due to XP's registry getting clogged up, spyware as mentioned above and all the other crap I don't even know is running.
D) Reinstalling costs me no more than a weekend, and having a system boot in 25 seconds as opposed to 25 minutes is great! It also allows me to take good things from the previous OS install and leave the bad bits out, like games I never play won't be reinstalled, leaving more HDD space for other things.
E) I just like having a nippy, fresh, cleaned up system, not one that is all full and messed up with three years of me using it. To the average Joe, yes it's a hassle to reinstall the OS, but to me it's worth the effort.
your memory? i'm considering trying it, but i don't want it to eat up too much. i have 2.5 gigs of pc3200, though, so...
let me know.
So, why are we setting up things like objectdock and Konfabulator? :) I've run 'em myself for a while, and while they don't take much in terms of resources, they take a lot more than not running them.
So, a) run Firefox and/or b) run MS's antispyware once a week or so (so far the best once I've found) and/or c) run your AV once a week or so, too. I haven't seen a piece of spyware on my machine in well over a year. I think the last virus I has was Jerusalem. :) Even leaving the AS running has minimal resource impact, less than running Knofabulator and Objectdock (7.6M of RAM usage as opposed to over 16M). AV, since it uses a filter-level driver will have a performance impact above and beyond RAM usage, which is why I don't run it full-time. ClamAV is nice in that it's free, updated a little quicker than the big vendors sometimes, and doesn't force you to run it in the background like the big names. Setting it up as a scheduled nightly task works just fine for me.
You should consider running AV full-time, though. If you've got that many problems, you've prolly been infected pretty regularly, too. That means your machine could be a zombie for up to 6 months before you reinstall, affecting other machines on the Internet.
Man, I remember when I was limited by my 80 MEGAbyte hd! I thought after upgrading my 5MB to a 10M, that going from 10 to 80 would mean I'd never need to worry about space again! :) But, I digress...You wipe your harddrive, reinstall the OS, and go through the tedius process of re-tweaking everything all over again solely to clear up your HD? As an SE, I'm always doing the same with my work laptop, which only has a 30G drive, and the way I've found to clear it off is to use Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.
Clogged up? What does that mean? If you've got software installed, it'll have entries in the registry (unless it's poorly written and still uses an ini). If you reinstall your OS, and then reinstall the software those entries come back. There are some programs that leave reg entries behind (after you uninstall) of course, but those entries don't make any difference. If you're worried about them you can use a product like RegClean Supreme once in a while to clear them out. They really don't make any difference, though. Even after 3-5 years of installing and uninstalling software left and right running a regclean has never made any noticeable difference in performance for me. Well, no, if I right-click in Explorer and choose New ->, the submenu comes up faster. :)
Ok, again, if you just want to free up drive space uninstalling those old games will do that. As for boot times, well, they've never been that important to me as I either don't reboot all that often or use the hibernation features of my laptops (you can use hibernation on a lot of desktops, too if you're worried about electricity usage). However, if you want to improve those speeds proper maintenance takes less time and works better. When you install an app, see if it places items in the startup areas of your registry (HKLM\Software\MS\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, and the same in HKCU to name the two most common) then delete them if you don't want them running at startup.
For example, I just upgraded to Quicktime 7.0 over the weekend. It puts an entry in HKLM's run called "Quicktime Task". That's the blue "Q" in your tray. It's purpose is to keep qt "semi-running" so that the once a week I might click on a link that has an embedded MOV it'll load 5 seconds faster. Not a good use of 8M of RAM in my opinion, so I remove it. Realplayer does something similar. I have a vbscript I wrote that I run as a scheduled task every night that removes entries from all of the startup areas except those I want to keep (I have it e-mail me and tell me about new ones before deleting them so I can be sure I want them removed). I only keep about 3-5 entries in each one. My machine goes from off to working desktop in under a minute, which includes mounting my encrypted partition (I use TrueCrypt on my laptops), and recreating the pagefile (I have my machine delete them at shutdown for security, but mostly to minimize its fragmentation). The majority of the reason for my "slow" boot times is the fact that the laptop drives are only 5400RPM. Stupid slow laptop drives. If you've got faster drives, which I assume you do, then regular maintenance will go a lot further than reinstalling.
To me, reinstalling the OS over and over again seems more like the kind of thing an average joe would do. That's why vendors put restore CDs in their boxes. It's "easier" than actually fixing problems. Me, I think it's just easier to fix things as I go along. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results...well...that's the definition of insanity, isn't it? :)
The zombie remark is a good one, I might just want to turn some kind of AV on for that purpose, obviously having my PC full of virusses is my business but I don't want to bother other people with it.
The thing is, I prefer to put my maintenance time into one weekend every so many months, than having to do it for a few minutes every week. I don't run my PC overnight due to power consumption and therefore don't run things nightly, and quite frankly can't be bothered to spend time weekly to check up on my system.
In any case, I prefer to reinstall periodically, simply to clean out all the trash that I don't know about that's accumulated on my PC (perhaps due to my lack of AV software), and to me, it's the simplest way of restoring my PC back to the nippy thing it's supposed to be. I'm used to doing it and it doesn't cost me much effort, so why not? The re-tweaking takes me all of an hour and I enjoy doing so. Maybe it's only a placebo, but it gives me something to do over the weekend anyway.
As to running Konfabulator: :D
I have a window in my case and 2 CCFL's which have no functional purpose whatsoever except to look fancy. Same with Konfabulator, simple 'nuff.
I did a bit of googling and found Samurize! Now, here's a damn flexible tool for all of your desktop-modding needs. It may have a bit steeper learning-curve, but once you got a hang of the basics, you'll never need another desktop-modding tool again! I'll guarantee that!
Sure if you install one set of apps at the start then do nothing but run those apps, never upgrade drivers and do the same thing every day then you'll likely not need a reinstall. However, if you're like me and basically drive your PC into the ground installing, modifying and removing things left, right and centre then you will benefit from a fresh, clean install every so often to remove the detritus left behind.
You put into words exactly what I couldn't. Agreed with the entire post :) I also have a habit of installing/uninstalling about 10 apps a week :p
When you uninstall an app, the uninstall process typically removes all files installed on the system as well as all entries added to the registry. I say typically because we know that's not always true. Some entries and files do get left behind. Keep in mind that in some cases, they're supposed to be left behind. Windows coding standards dictate that a package leave behind any files added or modified by the user. It's been a while since I perused the standards in detail, but I'm pretty sure that applies to registry entries as well. Regardless, we're talking microscopic digital "dust", nothing more. A couple extra DLLs left lying in your system directory (the most common place files are left behind) amounts to at MOST a meg or two of extra DLLs over the course of a couple of years. As for registry entries, again, the amount left behind by poorly written uninstallers is negligable at best.
There are two cases where these might make some performance impact: extra ClassIDs left behind might slow down DCOM operations due to an excessive search list and extra DLLs in your path increase the time it takes to find the right DLLs. But, the performance impact because of 5 or 6 or even 5 or 600 extra entries or DLLs would be imperceptible, even with a stopwatch on today's systems.
There is a simple reason why your system appears snappier after doing a reinstall: everything that was set to autoload has been removed. Eventually, though, you get to the point where all of that stuff is back and you have to reinstall again. Wouldn't it be easier to spend the couple of minutes a month it might take to do some basic maintenance than spend a weekend, or even half a day, reinstalling everything?
Being one who will install and test every application that fits a type before settling on one, and also doesn't reinstall his OS ever, I can tell you that those statements are completely false. As an example, just this weekend I got fed up with BitTornado and decided to find a better bittorrent client. I installed about 5-10 of them before deciding to go with Azureus (being a Java app, it's good awful slow and resource hog, but it has all the features I wanted, but found lacking in other apps). Since it's typically started before going to bed, resource usage is a non-issue. That's how I find the software I use. According to these "reinstall is necessary" theories, I should need to reinstall my OS every 15 minutes, yet after a year and a half this machine functions no differently than it did when I first set it up (aside from having a better bittorrent client, of course. :) )
Another example would be my test server at home. I installed Windows 2000 server on it the day the OS RTMed (December 15th, 1999. My birthday, I tell everyone it was a present from Bill). I just replaced the machine a couple of months back with new hardware. That install was over five years old and saw more action than most desktop systems (it served as my game console, media center PC, home automation server, Quake/Half-Life/etc server, webserver running both Apache and IIS, etc, etc).
Most people believe Greenland is approximately the same size as Africa because that's how it looks on their maps, but that don't make it true. "Common" knowledge is no substitute for REAL knowledge. Most Joe Users reinstall pretty regularly because they've been trained to do so by people "who are good with computers" and OEM vendor support which is staffed by people "who are good with computers". Joe User doesn't tweak his system, hell, most barely even maintain a usable Start Menu. Whenever they have a problem with their computer, they call their OEM who tells them to stick in the restore CD and reboot. Voila! Problem fixed! I took that hammer out of my bag a LOOOOOOONG time ago when I decided it was too much trouble. It's that fundamental misunderstanding of how Windows, and computers in general, work that perpetuates myths like this.
I've noticed things are much better now than in 9x days, when old programs would install old versions of dll system files and generally be allowed to mess up if you didn't run SFC regularly.
And four programs have installed different Java Runtime Engines; XP/IE, my HP printer (despite claims it checks for any existing JRE), Starry Night, and me, with the latest version for Firefox that IE is happy to share. Time for some more sharing of resources.
Without having to explain my life history, me and pretty much everyone else with whom I work in the industry tried it your way at some point and it never works as well as you would like it to, especially on systems which get a lot of use. I appreciate you have the patience to go through it with a fine-toothed comb and pick out the grit, but I just don't have time to go around cleaning up after applications which don't obey the rules.
Spending 30 mins reinstalling once every 6-8 months saves me a lot more time than pawing over the nooks and crannies of my system trying to find something which shouldn't be there. Besides the fact of course, it's just satisfying after a fresh install.
You stick with the way you think it works, I'll stick with mine and we'll call it quits. ;)
A real re-install gives you chance to totally re-organise your directory system if, like me, you spend a lot of time under the hood or just insist on keeping your CDs in genre + alphabetical order.
Icons are for wimps. :p
easy to do it in under and hour :p
But we're waaaaay off-topic here as the thread was about Windows desktop customisation, which I have done after reading that and I enjoy messing around with it :)