Windows Vista Questions

[ChuckR]

My wife has a HP system which came with Vista. All Updates are applied. Along with a load of other stuff.
Questions:
1. Can I remove all .NET files. She will never program.
2. Can I remove all Silverlight?
3. Does Security Essentials replace Windows Defender? Should I remove Defender. On my Windows 7 system It is off.
4. What can I shut off so her boot is reasonable. All she does is Word, Pictures, Internet, Solitaire.

All other suggestions on cleaning up her Vista system will be appreciated.

 

[FishAk]

Have you considered sleep mode, or an SSD?

 

[Chiefcrowe]

you should be able to remove .net. you only need that for certain programs, which she may not use.

silverlight is also not required unless you need things like netflix streaming.

if you use MSE you can disable defender because it's not needed anymore.

 

[Nothinman]

My wife has a HP system which came with Vista. All Updates are applied. Along with a load of other stuff.
Questions:
1. Can I remove all .NET files. She will never program.
2. Can I remove all Silverlight?
3. Does Security Essentials replace Windows Defender? Should I remove Defender. On my Windows 7 system It is off.
4. What can I shut off so her boot is reasonable. All she does is Word, Pictures, Internet, Solitaire.

All other suggestions on cleaning up her Vista system will be appreciated.

1. The .Net runtimes are used to run .Net apps, not develop them. Unless the laptop somehow came with Visual Studio, you have nothing to worry about and removing those now will just cause issues later as more .Net apps become popular.

2. I think Netflix is the only major website to use it so far, so if she's not streaming Netflix you should probably be ok. But what do you gain by removing it besides a few megs of disk space?

4. If you have to ask, nothing. Seriously, going through and randomly disabling services that don't look important will just cause you issues later on down the road. They're not affecting performance so why not just leave them be?

 

[corkyg]

3. Yes. Security Essentials takes care of that for you.

 

[JackMDS]

The usual scenario is that some people mange to cut 10 to 20 seconds from the Boot.

Then one day some application (or function) does not work because something was shut off.

At that times the 10-20 sec. short boot translates to hours (or days) of aggravating debugging.

I still remember the times when the forums here were full with desperadoes that used to shut down everything Network related because of the "Black Viper" advice to shut Off Services, and then did not understand why they can not have Internet connection. - :'(

 

[ChuckR]

She has a Desktop, not a Laptop. I cleaned out the Register and it had 465 bad entries. Yes I verified the program found true error conditions. Defrag says it doesn't need defragging.
How can I even see what is started at Boot when the HELP says to use Defender which is disabled.
Is there another path. On my Windows 7 machine I use WinPatrol. I just had a thought, wow they are useful, can I use msconfig.exe in VISTA?

 

[lxskllr]

The usual scenario is that some people mange to cut 10 to 20 seconds from the Boot.

Then one day some application (or function) does not work because something was shut off.

At that times the 10-20 sec. short boot translates to hours (or days) of aggravating debugging.

I still remember the times when the forums here were full with desperadoes that used to shut down everything Network related because of the "Black Viper" advice to shut Off Services, and then did not understand why they can not have Internet connection. - :'(

Yup. If you're lucky, you remember what you did to hose your system. Other times the fail delay is long enough that you have no idea what's wrong. Regarding BlackViper in particular... The n00bs were especially drawn to his (failure)guide, so they had no idea what they were doing, and couldn't even begin to fix things when they went south.

Edit:
Pro tip; don't clean the registry unless you're having a specific problem. It doesn't do anything, and you're trusting an automated program to automagically remove things you may very well need.

Msconfig works fine in Vista.

 

[ChuckR]

Thanks
I am not a complete Novice. After 33 years at IBM, I tend to be carefull when cleaning up. I clean the register as a way to identify what happened that didn't cleanup properly.
Buying a pre-built gets so much extra garbage/overhead that can interfere with a clean and simple used system. Example is Symantec and Nero. I am still trying to cleanup all the NERO programs that leave garbage when removed on my Windows 7 64bit machine.
HP leaves so many programs and has poor help on what they are.

 

[lxskllr]

I'm a fan of virgin installs if you have a copy of generic media. AFAIC you don't need ANYTHING that comes as an extra on oem computers. I've spent a lot of time honing my preferred application list, and I've yet to be surprised by any "awesome" extras oems include.

 

[ChuckR]

I agree.