How to Run Windows Update in Windows XP
Routine maintenance is highly recommended to guarantee efficient and reliable PC performance, even when there is nothing clearly wrong with your computer. Failure to perform maintenance on your PC will eventually cost you – whether it’s in the form of money spent on repair or replacement, loss of data and/or time wasted.
These days money unnecessarily spent hurts more than ever, and the important files that we keep stored on our computers are sometimes irreplaceable. Maintenance can help you achieve the best performance out of your PC without making a costly trip to your local repair shop to help you fix a problem you could have prevented yourself.
Running Windows Update is essential to maintaining your OS
Windows Update is a service provided by Microsoft that provides updates for the Microsoft Windows operating system and its installed components, including Internet Explorer. Microsoft release patches and updates to Windows and Windows applications through this mechanism.
Running Windows Update is not something that should be thought of as a time-consuming waste of bandwidth, rather as an essential part of system maintenance, just like keeping Antivirus definitions up to date.
Security updates or critical updates eliminate vulnerability to known malware and security exploits. Other updates correct errors and enhance functionality. If you opt to turn off Windows update notifications, you make your PC vulnerable – and if you get stung by a security problem or “bug”, well, you only have yourself to blame.
There is no excuse for running an out of date system. Many vendors release patches even for older versions of their software, so if your business depends on that Windows 98 computer, then you should still be able to keep it up to date. Of course, you should also upgrade to something newer anyway, so that when the time comes for support to be dropped, you don’t get caught out!
The maintenance of your computer is important in order to minimize personal loss and to provide you with more peace of mind. While we often associate personal loss primarily with financial loss, there is much more at stake when it comes to your personal computer.
More about Windows Update
Security updates are routinely provided on the second Tuesday of each month, Patch Tuesday, but can be provided whenever a new update is urgently required to prevent a newly discovered or prevalent exploit targeting Windows users. Windows Update can be configured to install critical updates automatically so long as your computer is connected to the Internet, without you needing to install them manually, or even be aware that an update is required.
Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7 provide a Control Panel to configure update settings and check for updates. The Windows Update Control Panel is also the means to download Windows Ultimate Extras, optional software for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. For previous versions of Microsoft Windows, updates can be downloaded from the Windows Update website.
Jun 272010
Just like in the medical profession, all PC problems that are detected early will be sure to save time, money and major frustration issues.
Viruses and Early Detection
The first viruses were written for nothing more than pranks. Today, viruses are meant to cause major damage to the Operating System, your personal data, and to even steal your identity. This makes it imperative to do early detection of viruses in order to minimize the extent of the damage and/or theft of identity factors.
A virus will download on to your computer without your authorization. This virus can be Malware, Spyware, a Trojan, or many other types of malicious and unwanted software. Since you did not authorize it to download, your probably don’t even know it is there, until it starts rearing its ugly head. This would be in the form of pop ups, error messages, alerts, missing files, crashing, and freezing.
It is a rather easy process to detect viruses on your computer. Most software programs on the market today have free scans that can actually detect the viruses you have on your computer. If the scan detects a virus, I will decide whether to delete it with a repair key or not. Don’t forget to fix the damage that was done to other files on the operating system, and not just delete the virus itself.
Any other favorite viruses scan software out there? Please post a comment with the name so we can all benefit.
Stability and Early Detection
When you first get your computer, everything runs nice and smooth. As you work and play on your computer, you begin to move things around, download different programs, quite an update in the middle, “Undo” programs, and maybe even deleted files you think are unnecessary. On a Windows Operating System, this creates stability problems that you see as crashing and freezing.
Windows was originally created as a file sharing system. The shared library concept allows your Windows operating system to cooperate with other programs, share resources and allowing the same library to be used by multiple programs at the same time. This makes your system very functional when all the pieces are in the right place. Start changing the locations, and the system stops responding properly.
In order to find unstable programs, you can also run a free scan. Just make sure that the scan will detect application errors, and not just registry errors. For instance, you should find out exactly which programs are causing the problems, and how often they crash. Also useful would be a chart for crash history which details the frequency and severity of the crashes. The more crashes, the severe your stability issues. The more severe your stability issues, the more likely you are to lose data and your entire operating system if left untreated. The sooner you detect and fix stability issues, the less likely you are to lose information on your computer (this includes photos, music, documents, games, passwords, favorites, and more).
Any other recommended scans for stability issues? Please post them in comments.
It is all in the early detection of viruses and stability issues. Once you know what’s there, you will know what to do with it. So do some early detection, and avoid major PC damage in the future.
If you’re computer is crashing and freezing all the time and some funny looking blue screen pops up every once in awhile, you may have some problems with your PC. Even if you don’t think you have problems with your PC, you probably still do. When your Internet Explorer shuts down every once in awhile while you’re browsing or you get an error message when you try to run a program, something is wrong with your PC. At this point, you have a couple options. You may want to choose a registry cleaner or you might want to use an anti-virus service. What happens if you need both or something completely different? Let’s clear up some confusion, in case there is any.
Registry Cleaners
Registry cleaners work much like industrial lubricant for machines; kind of like oiling the cogs so that the machine will run better, this is a function which comes as regular maintenance and doesn’t provide any long term assurance for functionality of actual files or components within your machine. The actual technical purpose is to remove obsolete links to orphaned files, let’s say for instance that you’ve created a link on your desktop to a file on your hard drive, after you’ve deleted that file the link still remains but points to a file which doesn’t exist on your machine any longer – this is called an orphaned link.
Sometimes there is certain software which installs a new version of a DLL on your machine, but instead of deleting the old link referring to an obsolete version it just creates a new link to point at the new DLL – and this happens for many files on each install of new software, which means the old remaining links stack up and can cause a slowdown which won’t be noticed by a human being on a singular incident but might cause a general slowdown in the long run.
Anti-Virus Software
Anti-Virus software prevents, detects, and removes viruses, Trojans, malware, spyware, and the like. They help protect your computer against hackers and identity theft. Anti-Virus programs are usually more updated to be able to protect against the most updated viruses. You also need to be careful when choosing your Anti-Virus/Spyware software because if it isn’t designed well it may also mistake important files for viruses (and like Registry Cleaners) accidentally delete important files or essential components that allow your computer to run properly. **Let’s not forget that in most cases, these programs don’t reverse the damage that has been done to corrupted and damaged files.
Now what happens when you need to use a service that will both “tune up” your PC and remove malware? More often than not, it isn’t just one problem that’s slowing your computer down. If you have error messages and your computer is slower, it might be a combination of problems that will require a program that removes anti-viruses and fixes bugs within the registry. If only there were a product out there that could do everything. Actually, this is the idea behind the Reimage software. It’s one program that you use one time to remove viruses, Trojans, malware AND to clean the registry AND determine hardware issues. The product also repairs and reverses the damage done by replacing deleted, missing, or corrupted components of essential files with new and updated files stored in Reimage’s online warehouse (a database of over 25 million essential components/spare parts to replace those that were damaged on your PC ).
If you are choosing between a registry cleaner and an anti-virus program, you need to know what is actually causing the problem on your computer, otherwise if you choose the wrong solution, you might make the state of your computer even worse. If you have a program that deals with all the problems, all you need to focus on is letting the program fix your PC.
My first post and I am doing it without my PC, why? Because my Vista is down again.
One of my Vista’s 500,000 objects has probably been overrun by another object causing my entire machine to hang and run slowly. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Microsoft are doing an amazing job building the most common and scalable platform that anyone ever made – but, with so many moving parts, statistically, something will not work right.
So, what can I do now, having no PC to work with?
I tried to update my Vista to service pack 1, had a whole problem with that too, after 2 days of “fun” I found that I had to remove some files, reinstall some KB and pray. Nothing helped.I can spend hours, or days, understanding what is wrong with it. Frankly, I have better things to do. Alternatively, I can reinstall my PC – because when my Vista was new it worked (quite) well… Right now my backup is at about 39% …
Reinstalling is actually a pretty bad option, which is frustrating. I need to backup my documents, licenses, software, reinstall all over again, find the drivers, re-enter the licenses and hope that I am not going to forget anything.
I would gladly use our own product Reimage but we are not supporting Vista, my R&D team is promising me a working product by mid 2009 …
Googeling “Vista Repair”
Being at this “frustrating” situation I was even ready to pay for a simple promise, so I googled “VISTA repair”. I did not expect anything but a scam. There are so many products promising me that they can miraculously fix my PC.
All of those registry cleaners, registry scanners, registry thingies, registry sliders, registry fixers & mixers, registry and registry optimizers. Why the Registry ? it is just one big sitting database of Windows. It just became such a buzz word. If it was fixing star-trek ships, it would be “Re-modulating the buffers”. The registry is a database, called Configuration Manager inside the windows kernel – nothing really to optimize there, it is working very well from the days of NT 3.51 (15 years ago), these folks would go through this big database and look for something that looks like a file name, these programs will check if this file name exists on the disk. If not, they will delete it from the records. By definition, Windows automatically ignores these keys. In essence, these registry cleaners do nothing.
The registry industry marketing is amazing- “I had 2498723762348 errors and my [insert the product name here] fixed it for me”. Random name, random state. My mother would buy that! Furthermore, when they scan the system they would associate the location of a key to a group and write: you have 74 errors in your fonts!
Windows has about 100 different sub systems, .NET components, network subsystem, video, drivers, synchronization, security, internal / external application communication mechanisms, etc. PC repair is not that simple …