Blogging Ottinger (tim)

I have a laptop that a family friend gave me to work on, and which I sadly procrastinated for quite a while. I’ve been all-Linux for a while, so I’m not used to dealing with all the vagaries of XP infections. I would have gotten to this sooner but it keeps getting moved around the house (yeah, I have a family). I finally found it sitting in its bag on the guest room bed this weekend and started squaring it away on Sunday evening.

It was extremely slow, and is running windows, so you know what that means. Yes, it had rootkits and trojans and virii and you-name-it. I tried to download some programs to clean it, but that was a waste of time. I also couldn’t get it to read from USB, so I ended up burning a CD of my favorite rescue tools.

I started with Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware which has been an old standby for removing certain kinds of spyware. It was useful again.

It is a personal family laptop, so I loaded it up with the personal versions of the AVG suite of tools from Grisoft. I’ve had really good success with Grisoft back when i was a Windows user. This time was no different. It wiped out a bunch of problems right away. I installed the anti-rootkit, the anti-virus, and the anti-spyware. All of them helped.

Suddenly blessed with somewhat improved performance, I changed the virtual memory system to be a fixed size. This is one of the best fragmentation-prevention tips I’ve gotten over the years. I then got a copy of PageDefrag, which used to be from SysInternals, but now is a product of Microsoft. I ran this on the next boot, along with a similar product that does registry cleaning.

Of course, the next step was defragging. This ran overnight and by 10:00 the next day it was 13% done. The disk is only 1/2 full, but there you have it. I personally suspect that overnight the laptop suspended, because that’s too ridiculous. Defragging with the microsoft defrag program is incredibly slow. It’s a shame that it has to be done so often. When I was last had a fulltime windows job, I installed Diskeeper and scheduled the defragging so I didn’t have to mess with it. Diskeeper is a great program for Windows, but it is a for-pay program too. I don’t obligate my friends by installing payware on their computers. I showed my son the screen with the defragger running, and he just rolled his eyes and groaned. I feel the same way. I thought an operating system was supposed to manage the computer’s resources. Maybe I ask too much from the world wealthiest and most successful operating system manufacturer. Maybe only a handful of unpaid volunteers can make a file system that really works, and corporations with thousands of expert developers and a self-imposed timeline cannot do the same.

After defragging, I will want to recreate the page file again, in a larger size. This will hopefully cause it to be allocated in one place near the middle of the disk. That will help considerably if it works. Of course, I’ll want to defrag again after that, but it will happen much more quickly.

I really forgot how good I have it as a non-Windows guy. I don’t deal with all these nightmares on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis. I just use my computer. I may have the occasional eventful OS upgrade, but so do Microsoft users. I upgrade less painfully and more often. I also don’t have the ongoing need to shore up my OS with security and performance tools from all over the web. I have it easy. I have it good. So I can’t play some PC games, and use Mono rather than Visual Studio. It’s a good trade.

The anti-rootkit and anti-virus ended up disabling the wireless driver, so I’ll have to locate one and reinstall it. Windows is clearly not the wrinkle-free life some suppose it to be. Otherwise, things are going as well as can be expected. It should be finished by some time today or tomorrow. I would have been able to completely wipe it and install Linux (Debian or Ubuntu) in about an hour. I almost feel guilty returning it with Windows still on it. I know it’s going to have trouble again as the virus nuts outrace the antivirus nuts yet again in the future. But it’s not my machine, and it would seem a cruel joke to swap operating systems. Heh, “I fixed your windows machine for you; I installed Linux on it.”