Thursday, June 22, 2006
Computer Professional?
I still have a lot of work to do on my new blog project (the sidebars need actual relevant links) Brink, but I did get the second entry up last night. Given the cursory and lay nature descriptions of each topic I am writing on, I’m not sure there is much point to the whole thing, other than to summarize hopeful signs of near future progress I have gleamed from a rather prolific reading of lay science news articles from various sources.
My wife and I had a near fight the other night over the phone. She feels I may be exaggerating when I call myself a computer professional, because I evidently didn’t solve all her computer woes on my last visit to China in May. Seems she expected me to work wonders on a machine whose menus are all in Chinese. Worse she thinks I did something that caused it to quit functioning more than a month after I left, though it had been slow and balky before I added a few simple programs to clean out some Trojans, malware, and viruses, edit the startup registry, and keep third party products from changing the startup registry without authorization. It is possible this work exacerbated an existing underlining problem, but I’m more inclined to think the damage had already been done, and was lying in wait. Also perhaps if I’d been more aggressive in pruning back her startup registry to only necessary items, things would have been fine. My computer runs fine with less than a dozen startups in the registry, whereas her lap top had well over a hundred. Also since I have never done a reinstall of a Windows operating system from scratch, I guess I don’t get to call myself a Computer Scientist (which is the title my employers put on my business cards) in her eyes. I feel I could do this -- with certain provisos. I had no intention of trying this for the first time under a time constraint, in a foreign country on a machine without English menus (though there probably is some way to toggle the menu languages in Windows, and I should find it out before my next visit).
One last note about the overzealousness of third party software products thinking they need space in your startup registry. When I received my Dell system a little over 3 years ago, if you put it in sleep mode it would NEVER wake up. This was straight out of the box. I pruned out all the garbage in the startup registry from trial software, and software I don’t use, and even software I did use, but couldn't see any vital reason it needs to be informed the computer was turned on. The boot time became about one third of what it had been, and it could now reliably recover from sleep mode. When they put an entry in your startup it most likely means one of three things; either the app will try to call home on startup to check for updates (or worse); or it is trying to modify the start up behavior of another product on your computer; or it wants to sit in the background at all times monitoring net traffic. MSN Messenger can damn well wait until I launch it to run, not sit in the background sucking up CPU cycles just so it can tell me so and so is logged onto the net. When I’m in a mind to chat with people and let them know I’m at my computer I will launch it myself. Geez I’m tired of every app thinking it should be in control of my desktop.
