Hi all. On someone else's laptop killing an evening hoping someone'll ive me some idea how to resurrect my PC from the dead. Again. In the meantime, I've been musing on how to stop my rig crashing, conflicting, or otherwise fucking up massively for seemingly minature reasons.
I read a few long threads of people arging the toss between Win7 & vista, and ended up thinking: wouldn't I get the most bang for my buck by just clean installing XP Pro, service packing it all the way to current, then overclocking my e6600 intel from 2.4 to 3.6?
Once done, get a tattoo saying "only install what you absolutely need" and think about even using an old IDE as a second boot drive, on which to install every one of the fifty jillion progs I use once in a blue moon, so as to not care if it crashes or BSODs. On the main boot drive, don't customise it at all, with the possible exception of something like windowblinds, which will mean I'm not personally fiddling with explorer.exe.
Pros: free. Some protection against conflicts and misc lockups.
Cons: less personalised user experience, hassle rebooting to use progs which are supposed to save me time.
Can anyone think of a better way of doing this? Example: I've got an ooold prog called namewiz which batch renames files based on simple rules. I rarely use it. But, once every so often, I need to use it and it's handy to be able to whip it open from the start menu, use and close. Similarly photoshop. Nero sits in the background, loading loads of crap at startup, but gets used once every 2 weeks max. And so on. Any way around this? I don't want to dump the progs because having them available when i want them is one of the reasons I use PCs. How about VM? I don't really know much about it - is this something whicih it's for?
I read a few long threads of people arging the toss between Win7 & vista, and ended up thinking: wouldn't I get the most bang for my buck by just clean installing XP Pro, service packing it all the way to current, then overclocking my e6600 intel from 2.4 to 3.6?
Once done, get a tattoo saying "only install what you absolutely need" and think about even using an old IDE as a second boot drive, on which to install every one of the fifty jillion progs I use once in a blue moon, so as to not care if it crashes or BSODs. On the main boot drive, don't customise it at all, with the possible exception of something like windowblinds, which will mean I'm not personally fiddling with explorer.exe.
Pros: free. Some protection against conflicts and misc lockups.
Cons: less personalised user experience, hassle rebooting to use progs which are supposed to save me time.
Can anyone think of a better way of doing this? Example: I've got an ooold prog called namewiz which batch renames files based on simple rules. I rarely use it. But, once every so often, I need to use it and it's handy to be able to whip it open from the start menu, use and close. Similarly photoshop. Nero sits in the background, loading loads of crap at startup, but gets used once every 2 weeks max. And so on. Any way around this? I don't want to dump the progs because having them available when i want them is one of the reasons I use PCs. How about VM? I don't really know much about it - is this something whicih it's for?
Facebook
Twitter