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"How much do I hate XP........"

Please can someone advise me on how to fix my boyfriends computer that I inadvertently screwed over the weekend.....

He has XP Pro on it but on SP1 - Broadband so I installed Lavasoft Ad-aware to find it had over 200 objects and nasty data miners.... During the clean up I kicked off the Norton/symantec live updates which then froze the puter and I had to crash out of it. On rebooting the puter up again I found that none of the .exe files can be found and none of the programs will open......

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated......

Cheers

Novice - you dont say.......

Tyla wrote:
> Doesn't Norton Ghost already provide this kind of concept?

Ghost is nothing like portage. I'm not sure how portage helps you restore application profiles between reinstalls - they are usually kept in .applicationrc files in the users home directory (save these to save your settings between reinstalls) although something like portage for Windows would be the greatest single improvement to be made to Windows, probably even bigger than multitasking.

gamesfreak wrote:
> unknown kernel wrote:
> Somebody should write a portage style system for Windows, and
> persuade all software developers everywhere, ever to adopt its
> standards - then we could have an application profile that gets
> restored on a reinstall.
>
> That'd be a fantastic idea, but it'd have to be made by Microsoft for
> it to work properly.

Doesn't Norton Ghost already provide this kind of concept?

unknown kernel wrote:
> Somebody should write a portage style system for Windows, and
> persuade all software developers everywhere, ever to adopt its
> standards - then we could have an application profile that gets
> restored on a reinstall.

That'd be a fantastic idea, but it'd have to be made by Microsoft for it to work properly.

Thanks for all the tips but have given the box to the techno monkeys and they have wipped the OS and rebuilt it, so in the end my boyfriend has his old crappy machine back with SP2, fully patched, upgraded OS, full security patched and programs loaded making the bloody thing 10 times better than what he originally had.

Oh well maybe I might get a free dinner out of this once he realises that I actually did him a favour by breaking it in the first place - doubt it though!

Laterz dudes.....

Novice

Have you actually tried System Restore by the way, NN? I've found that it actually does work, although my experience has been mostly restricted to Windows occasional habit of screwing up my wireless network FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

gamesfreak wrote:
> What I do nowadays is keep an 'Installers' folder, downloading all
> program installers to there and keeping them.

I have one of those: it contains such gems as Firefox 0.7, Napster and Windows 3.1. Slightly flawed, that.

Somebody should write a portage style system for Windows, and persuade all software developers everywhere, ever to adopt its standards - then we could have an application profile that gets restored on a reinstall.

On my desk by Monday please.

Would you be prepared to advise your Grandmother, say, to do the same, given that she's hundreds of miles away, has no aptitude for technical things and doesn't even know what a 'driver' is? It's all well and good saying what you would do but they are not you, they may not spend even an hour a week even thinking about a computer and they don't want the hassle of spending an entire weekend going through this frightening voodoo "reinstall" process.

Put it this way, if the gearbox in your car broke down, would you take the advice of some guy on the internet to take it apart and put it back together again or would you pay someone who knew what they were doing to do it instead? What if the central heating in your house failed, would you be willing to strip it out and rebuild it? For 95% of people a computer is a magic beige box that just works, just like your dishwasher is to you (except it breaks a lot more often). For those people who don't know anything about computers and who have no interest in knowing anything about computers other than how to book holidays online, an OS reinstall is a major major headache they can do without, and advising someone matter-of-factly over the internet to wipe Windows and start again is entirely non-trivial.

Having said that, it didn't stop a DELL telephone operator in India spending four hours on the phone guiding a little old lady I know through a Windows reinstall, heh. It worked afterwards too 'n' all.

My advice stick with what you know.

[URL]http://img26.exs.cx/img26/8692/girlcomputer6wq.jpg[/URL]

I'd personally reinstall.

What I do nowadays is keep an 'Installers' folder, downloading all program installers to there and keeping them.

When it comes to re-install time (6 months), you just back up your important files as well as the installers folder, reinstall, then put them back on.

Problem solved.

God bless disk images.