http://www.bootdisk.com/ 0027 January 2008
HouseCall
Welcome to the 27th Edition of HouseCall
INDEX
1) PC Clock Alters Itself
2) Registry Software
3) An OE Basic Repair Kit
4) Free, Fast, Remote PC Control Utility
5) Use The Logout Tab?
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1) PC Clock Alters Itself
ded wrote - The clock on my computer alters itself. I correct it and it doesn't seem to cause any other probs that I am aware of. Why does it do this? (windows xp.)
*** I've had computers with perfect cmos batteries and fresh OS and the clock never was accurate. Sometimes the cmos battery circuit on the motherboard goes bad and the only thing you can do in that case is use a time synchronizer.
Or, sometimes it happens as a result of some dodgy background app. you are running 24/7.
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2) Registry Software
Andy Petro wrote - Is registry software worth getting . Which is the best. Are there any free ones.
VanguardLH. said - Do you have a backup & restore plan in place? When (and not if) the registry cleaner corrupts your registry and when you can no longer boot into Windows, just how are you going to restore that OS partition so it is usable again? Even if you use a registry cleaner that provides for backups of its changes so you can revert back to the prior state, how are you going to perform that restore if you cannot boot the OS after hosing over its registry? What about entries in the registry that look to be orphaned under the current OS load instance but are used under a different OS environment? You delete what looks orphaned only to find out that they are required under a different environment.
Say there was an unusually high amount of orphaned entries in your registry, like over 50MB. By deleting it, you would speed up how long it takes Windows to load the registry's files when it starts up - by all of maybe 1 second. Oooh, aaah. All that risk of modifying the registry to save maybe a second, or less, during the Windows startup. Most folks that clean the registry end up deleting only 10KB, or less. They are doing nothing to improve their Windows load time. Since the registry is only read from the memory copy of it, and since memory is random access, there is no difference to read one byte of the registry (in memory) from the another byte in the registry (in memory). The extra data in memory for orphaned entries has no effect on the time to retrieve items from the memory copy of the registry.
Cleaning the registry will NOT improve performance in reading from the memory copy of the registry. The reduced size of the registry's .dat files might reduce the load time of Windows by all of a second and probably much less. And you want to risk the stability of your OS for inconsequential changes to its registry. The same boobs that get suckered into these registry cleanup "tools" are the same ones that get suckered into the memory defragment "tools".
A registry cleaner should only be used if you yourself can correctly cleanup the registry. The cleaner is just a tool to automate the same process but you should know every change that it intends to make and understand each of those changes. After all, and regardless of the stagnant expertise coded into the utility, *YOU* are the final authority in what registry changes are performed whether you do it manually or with a utility.
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3) An OE Basic Repair Kit
An Outlook Express basic repair kit:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/community/columns/oerepair.mspx
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4) Free, Fast, Remote PC Control Utility
My son, the PC geek recommended this app. for tweaking other peoples computers:
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5) Use The Logout Tab?
Cindy asked - I often visit websites that offer a log out option. Should I use it?
*** Yes. Even tho sites such as Paypal "timeout" after a few minutes of non-activity, one _should_ always use the logout tab when available, even if they dont have a "timeout" period. Be safe.
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