De-crapping Windows XP is so PC

A couple of you have already migrated to Linux of different flavors, and I'm happy for you, but I am not ready to Go There quite yet. I may get there - and the migration path it will entail - sometime in the future, but I'm not convinced that is the right thing to do, given the level of self-support it would require with some of the applications I'm running.

Got a real good laugh from someone that said I should only use “Designed for Windows XP” certified programs because they'd NEVER leave leftover garbage on the machine.

Also got a good laugh from someone that said I should just buy more RAM. More memory is not the solution to all of your problems.

Far and away, many people lined up behind CCleaner (www.ccleaner.com). It is freeware, runs spanking fast, deletes both all the “crap” files that XP and other popular applications accumulate during the course of normal operations, and also does a bang-up job cleaning up the REGISTRY. For a little sugar on top, it also allows you to directly delete programs and unwanted startup entries.

A few people had a deep love for the tools buried within XP, like msconfig, and couldn't see the point in any external software for de-crapping XP. C'mon! Run CCleaner once or twice and you'll never go back to the scattered set of XP utilities you love so much.

There's a school of thought that says you just need to re-install XP every-so-often because it makes your computer all fresh and minty and fasty, but I just can't buy into the amount of time it takes to gen up a clean XP load with all the patches applied, then spend the time to apply it to the system. One bloke did this last week; says he spent about 5 hours reformatting the C drive, installing a fresh XP and then watching the 77 patch files get applied after reactivation. Ouch!

A variety of this is to clean up XP, apply all the patches, mirror the disk, take it off-line. When things inevitably get slow, put the mirror copy back on line and then restore the freshness. Disks are cheap, yes, not sure if I could keep both the OS and all the apps I have updated and happy. Greg Sawicki e-mailed in the best outlined procedure—

1. partition the boot disk into 3
- first 15GB for NTFS C:(SYSTEM)
- middle part for NFTS D:(DATA)
- remaining 10-15GB VFAT32 X:(GHOST)
2. Install XP on C:
3. Reconfigure”My Documents” to D:
4. at various stages of install create ghost image of C: and store on X:
- bare.gho - after first xp boot
- base.gho - bare plus essential drivers
- full.gho - bare plus apps plus winupdates

Depends when and how my XP misbehaves I waste no time to reghost C: from image. Clean, simple and fast.

If I was testing software on a regular basis, this strikes me as the best way to go.

Since I'm not, I'm going to stick to CCleaner for a while, along with some other tweaks. My next plunger effort will be directed against Outlook Express, since it's long overdue for mail archiving. µ