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[NightmarePatrol]

Last year at this time I was embattled with 3 other people in fixing a screw up of monsterous proportions. None of us even got to take out kids trick-or-treating. We were not pleased at all. It was 24x7 for 6 days. It... was... horrid...

Being with the kids will be relaxing for me this year.

[gator]

Here are some things that you can do to speed up your computer.
1. Restart

Restarting your computer fixes %90 of issues and will free up memory from applications that are no longer using it. You should restart your computer once a week at minimum

[NightmarePatrol]

Gator, where on earth did you hear that?

[gore range]

...I loath restarting the machine as it resets all the Microsoft stuff that screws up my MOZILLA internet access programs and I have to go back in and terminate them one by one....

....can't go wrong with ZULU time ....

[NightmarePatrol]

The server for this site is in MST. The next incarnation I am going to try to have user configurable time zones. That way nobody has to do math. Right now I have to manually adjust for UTC offsets. (Thanks Hermitage... I forgot to do that yesterday)

I keep one microsoft system sitting around the house. I had to upgrade from server 2003 to Windows 7 because some of the stuff I wanted to run would not run under server 2003. Mainly because they didn't want their  "free" product running on server OS.

Other than that I don't touch microsoft stuff. I'll stick to my penguin powered computing tools. 

[gator]

Gator, where on earth did you hear that?

www.techsack.com 

[NightmarePatrol]

Uptime is king! I use computers at work that haven't been rebooted in about 2 years and they work just fine. Unfortunately rebooting the system only fixes the symptoms and not the problem. Sometimes you have to reboot the system but rebooting the system to make it run better isn't really repairing the problem. The "reboot your system" mentality started when PC techs couldn't find the problem, but knew that rebooting it would make the symptoms go away at least temporarily.  I could prattle on about this topic for hours an bore everyone to tears, but I won't. I will however leave you with this.

Quite a few years ago at COMDEX, Bill Gates compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT." But then you would have to buy more seats.
6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five per cent of the roads.
7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car default" warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
9. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
10. Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grab hold of the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
12. Everytime GM introduced a new model car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You'd press the "start" button to shut off the engine.

[CindyLouWho]

Funny stuff.

[gator]

Well everyone has their own opinons. I have been rebooting my PC once a week for years and havent had one problems from doing so. Actually after I have rebooted it responds quicker. For anyone to say that they have never rebooted their computer manually well I guess I'd have to believe them. Whether they know it or not their system has been rebooted a number of times. When Microsoft updates it automatically reboots, adding software you have to reboot, when you have an electric surge or your power goes off, your PC automatically reboots and around here that can be often. Well anyways I will continue to reboot as I have had great success over the years with my PC.

[gore range]

....having had more issues than I like with the automatic Microsoft updates-

....I was instructed by the $39.95-a-call Microsoft Technical Assistance assist.....

.... (named "Kenneth" talking from a location where he was not authorized to disclose but did reveal he was working the night shift when I was talking to him during the mid-morning Rocky Mountain hours and clearly sounded as though the blue birds of happiness were blessing him with an off-shored job )....

....as to  how to remove the system-crash-causing automatic update/re-boot to restore my system to a previous update so I could operate it....

....and how to set my machine up so that I had to manually approve each incoming 'automatic' update in order to know which 'automatic' update to yank after it shuts my system down once I install  it.....

....Kenny was, I suspect, much cooler than Bill would like; definitely reminded me of the PC/MAC commercials .....

....I can't control power failures, but still, such requires going in and yanking the archeological MS programs proven to be endemic in reboots to keep my system chuffing along like the Union Pacific Big Boy I've come to love....

....but, that's just Tigger knowing how to make the trains run on time....

[NightmarePatrol]

.... (named "Kenneth" talking from a location where he was not authorized to disclose but did reveal he was working the night shift when I was talking to him during the mid-morning Rocky Mountain hours and clearly sounded as though the blue birds of happiness were blessing him with an off-shored job )....

Explicit language warning!

: Tech Support : Foamy The Squirrel

[gator]

    I like that NP...

[NightmarePatrol]

Foamy is my hero

[TiFeMb]

np, are you sure you're not just foamy in disguise???

[Jayhawk]

Rebooting is always a good place to start, because it often solves minor problems such as a program that won't let go of memory. It's the same way when you're perplexed solving a problem: Stop, get a good night's sleep and confront the problem with a fresh mind in the morning.

But i'll agree it won't do much but mask a larger, underlying problem.

There's also something seriously wrong somewhere if you have to reset a cable modem every day or so. I've had Time Warner cable for 8+ years. I can go months without a reset.

Early on i had some problems with someone else on the network hard-coding an IP address into their settings -- the same number i had been dynamically assigned, so suddenly i was the duplicate user when i turned my computer on. TW was able to trace and zap those users.

it seems to me there was another time when my connection was dropping frequently. I think it was solved with a combination of them hitting my modem remotely with some kind of reset and, on a separate occasion, them reauthorizing the modem's MAC number (not macintosh; it's a modem ID number)... the number fell out of their system somehow.

for those resetting a cable modem, don't just use the on-off or pause button. Unplug the power cord and let it sit idle for a couple minutes to totally clear its memory before plugging it in again.

it's also possible the modem itself is bad. A cable connection should go a long time without a reset, particularly if you have a wireless hub connected to it to maintain the connection even when a computer isn't actively using it.