On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:56:00 -0700, banoffi
<banoffi RemoveThis @discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
>For the past few months my computer has become very slow yet i using less
>that one quarter of my hardrive space.
How much hard drive space you are using has almost nothing to do with
the speed of your computer.
>also there was an unexplaned incient
>where i lost all my documents and music files but kept all of my photographs
>and i have found no explantation for this, i also tried everything to restore
>my documents but couldnt. at the same time my computer has stopped giving me
>pop ups, by this i mean for example when my battery is low usually i get a
>pop up telling me but i no longer get these. so i figured it would be best to
>completely re install windows hoping this will fix the problems.
>any thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated.
Except as a last resort, I am almost always against reinstalling
Windows to solve unexplained problems.
With a modicum of care, it should never be necessary to reinstall
Windows (XP or any other version). I've run Windows 3.0, 3.1, WFWG
3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, each for
the period of time before the next version came out, and each on two
machines here. I never reinstalled any of them, and I have never had
anything more than an occasional minor problem.
It's my belief that this mistaken notion stems from the technical
support people at many of the larger OEMs. Their solution to almost
any problem they don't quickly know the answer to is "reformat and
reinstall." That's the perfect solution for them. It gets you off the
phone quickly, it almost always works, and it doesn't require them to
do any real troubleshooting (a skill that most of them obviously don't
possess in any great degree).
But it leaves you with all the work and all the problems. You have to
restore all your data backups, you have to reinstall all your
programs, you have to reinstall all the Windows and application
updates,you have to locate and install all the needed drivers for your
system, you have to recustomize Windows and all your apps to work the
way you're comfortable with.
Besides all those things being time-consuming and troublesome, you may
have trouble with some of them: can you find all your application CDs?
Can you find all the needed installation codes? Do you have data
backups to restore? Do you even remember all the customizations and
tweaks you may have installed to make everything work the way you
like? Occasionally there are problems that are so difficult to solve
that Windows should be reinstalled cleanly. But they are few and far
between; reinstallation should not be a substitute for
troubleshooting; it should be a last resort, to be done only after all
other attempts at troubleshooting by a qualified person have failed.
Over and above all of that, reinstallation will solve your problems,
but you won't find out what caused them. If the problems resulted from
something you've been doing wrong, or not doing (which is very
likely), you are highly likely to repeat the behavior that caused
them, and quickly find yourself back where you started.
If you are experiencing a recent slowdown, one of the most common
causes of that these days is spyware. I can't tell you that that's the
problem for sure, of course, but the first thing to do is make sure
that your system is malware-free. I recommend that you go to Malke's
Malware Removal site at
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Removing_Malware and
follow the instructions there.
--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP Windows - Shell/User
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