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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.......

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Or, use disk imaging. Which Ghost does.

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.

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.

Hmmm, interesting.

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