Re: file searching/vista help

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

J R FOX wrote:
> the standard
> Windows mantra is sure to come up: "Well, you could
> always reinstall the OS and everything else from
> scratch . . . . "  Yeah, I COULD . . . if I had
> nothing better to do for the next month ! This is
> laughable, infuriating, and an indictment of gravely
> flawed design.

Précisement, as M. Poirot would say.
> very important to have fully
> slipstreamed, patched-to-current-levels Windows plus
> their necessary apps, that can be readily deployed
> from image or CD.
But getting such a CD is not exactly easy, esp. for Vista, for
which, last time I looked, BARTPE wasn't available. My laptop
came with a utility from Acer that does let me make a complete
backup to DVD (or CD, but it would take 6 of those, and my burner
burns DVDs) and then do a system restore from it. Did it once,
and it saved my bacon. Took a couple of hours, but not the weeks
that reinstalling Windows and all apps (and cleaning the garbage
out of the out-of-the-box Windows installation) would take. Wish
I could get something like that for the office, but AFAIK the
only commercial products are Norton Ghost (and I consider
Symantec a virus monger) and Acronis True Image, which I tried,
and liked at first, but then every time I tried to make a
subsequent backup, it would malfunction and I would be told I had
to upgrade.
> fixes are probably important to have (unless your
> computer is hermetically sealed, and you never
> download anything or go out on the 'Net); if you
> dismiss them en masse, I think this would be very much
> at your peril.
Well, that's what BBB wants one to think. But I've NEVER added
updates (I'll put them on if available when I'm setting up a
system, but not once I've added apps), and so far have not (knock
wood!) fallen prey to any major infestations. Of course, I don't
have an always-on connection, use Firefox and Thunderbird, don't
Google (because of the danger of being steered to sites that have
been poisoned by cross-site scripting), and am very careful (to
the point of paranoia) about what I do on-line. But we now have
broadband at the office, and my coworkers are not, perhaps, as
savvy as they might be. Though that cuts both ways: since they
don't understand error messages, they tend to panic when they get
one.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx