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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.......

The problem with imaging for me is that the last time I reinstalled was probably over a year ago, so if I'd taken a 'perfect' snapshot then it would have out-of-date programs on it now; and I've found numerous programs that I can't live without since then, plus even more that I'd be better off without.

I tried Norton Ghost, it takes forever cloning a 40GB partition. Acronis TrueImage restored it in under an hour, and is just more hassle free than Ghost. You don't even need to reboot.

The best thing to do for Windows is to install it and set it up with it configured the way you want, and the main programs installed, then run Norton Ghost or whatever. That's what I've got. 3 DVDs with the image on, so I can have a fully working system in a couple of hours.

Disk "image". I would say google it, but you already knew that, didn't you? :O)

lcarus wrote:
> Tsk, stop that, will you? This ain't a competition on who knows more
> than the other. Christ. If it was I can easily say I have Gentoo,
> Getoox for Xbox, Debian, SuSe and RedHat + Fedora Core 2 knowledge.
> But I won't.... oh.

I was just under the impression that you was unsure about what Portage entailed that was all, some members of the forum might be unsure on what the hell we are talking about.

Don't take it personally or anything

Hmmm, interesting.

So it's almost like System Restore, but not.

That's the whole point of it. You get a "perfect" installation, clone it, and when it does fail you can copy it back. Existing settings are still there, it's just an exact replica of the date you cloned it. It saves a hell of a lot of time installing ALL the apps you need and adjusting them to your preferences; in fact, it takes less time than an OS reinstall.


Tsk, stop that, will you? This ain't a competition on who knows more than the other. Christ. If it was I can easily say I have Gentoo, Getoox for Xbox, Debian, SuSe and RedHat + Fedora Core 2 knowledge. But I won't.... oh.

lcarus wrote:
> Or, use disk imaging. Which Ghost does.

Yeah but, from my understanding of this, if you System is screwed beforehand, whats the point in doing this?

Starting fresh etc, thats what we are talking about.

Oh and Portage is a package management system on Gentoo Linux, it's like a central repository for programs. You type

emerge

And it fetchs the lot, installs it etc for you.

You don't need to go around searching for stuff, it's all in a central database which you can search through for stuff you need.

Or, use disk imaging. Which Ghost does.

Miserableman wrote:
> Ghost is nothing like portage. I'm not sure how portage helps you
> restore application profiles between reinstalls

I don't think he meant application configurations

He meant something like the 'world' file which keeps a list of applications installed by portage.

All you have to do is save that file, put it back on then do an

emerge e world

Which rebuilds the whole system.

Near enough getting back to the previous system you had before.

Windows portage would be brilliant.