I appreciate all of the comments I received regarding System Restore. I don’t think we will all agree on its usefulness but we at least have the choice of using it or not. Regarding the fact that it does not, per se, “uninstall” the offending software, this is quite true. It will, however, remove those “hooks” in the registry and most of the time that is my goal. Once I have my computer back in working order I can then find time as needed to clean out program files, registry mentions, etc. Just my way of dealing with a mini-crisis.

On to startups. These are the programs down in your taskbar down by the clock on the right hand side of your desktop. They have become one of the more irritating things when I am trying to help someone get their computer working properly over the phone. There seem to be more and more of them. Seems that every program you put on your machine or that comes installed when you purchase the machine has to have some startup icon and the ability to “call home.”

Most of the folks I deal with have no clue what these are and the names they give me over the phone often don’t give me any information. I have a friend in Florida who just purchased a new Gateway. All he uses his computer for is research and email — that’s it. He mentioned that it is very slow and he is running Windows Vista. I wrote back that most likely an upgrade in memory might help him out. I was assuming it probably came with 512MB of RAM. He wrote back and advised me that yeah, that is probably his problem as he only has .99GB. So now I’m thinking that should handle what he is attempting to use that machine for.

I came to find out that he has a TON of icons in the taskbar. Now, I’m sure that with running Vista on his machine that some added memory would not hurt, but removing some of those startups will definitely help.

I’m just wondering… is there ever going to come a time when we can purchase a computer and then CHOOSE what we want in the taskbar rather than having to remove what someone else decided we absolutely positively had to have? I know, rhetorical question, but my goodness, this is really getting out of hand. It’s like paying for SPAM!

Okay, rant over. Not a very helpful post but I feel better.

[tags]windows, vista, registry, taskbar, RAM, SPAM, icons[/tags]