Well, here we are - 1 week since I took delivery of my new XPS M1530 laptop from Dell and I am surprised that I haven't commited suicide just yet. Initially I was bedazzled by the smooth lines, the generous 15.4 inch widescreen, the brushed aluminium appearence, the biometric thumb print reader!! Vista!!! McAfee!!!!
I performed my first hard reset of my device last night...
Vista appears to be full of bugs. Though I have dumped alot of unecessary startup operations and processes that just don't need to be there at startup I have found that certain programs like IE7 and WMP11 shut down inexplicably after reporting errors for which no solution can be found at this time (the old "Do You Want To Send An Error Report?" trick). I have it running as close to the stripped down version of XP I was running on my old system whereby I always had improved performance but it is not impressive. However I am willing to give MS time to iron out these bugs via updates because they will, inevitably, get their act together.
The reason I had to hard reset last night is because, somehow, I managed to pick up something like 42 trojans, malicious software, adware and other assorted viruses which so compromised my system that I could not perform any meaningful tasks without having some form of pop up ordering me to get virus protection NOW!!! No matter what I did to get rid of them (run McAfee in Safe Mode, D/L Stinger, Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware) I could not clean my system.
Which brings me to McAfee...
In my opinion McAfee is not a good program. I was willing to give McAfee a try again after moving away from it a year ago, partly because it was an bonus 15 month subscription with the computer. But after running 3 scans in normal and safe mode - where it did not pick up a single nefarious item. I removed it, D/L'ed AVG and ran a scan which uncovered the gang of trojans and their cronies. I was still unable to remove them - don't ask me why - and the one's I was able to remove also removed certain .dll files that apparently are part of the OS and therefore critical...hence a barage of startup messages telling me that this file was missing and that file was missing and processes couldn't be run. Why McAfee continues to fail, in my opinion, to effectively guard my system is beyond me and when I get a chance (now that I have hard reset my laptop) I will be removing it from my system in favor of AVG's free version, coupling that with Spybot S&D and Registry Fixer, remain satisfied with Windows Firewall and be done with it. Oh and I've told Dell this as well.
The physical laptop is not well put together. The plastic seams were snapped together properly when I recieved it, the surrounds of the display were warped slightly as a result though a simple running my finger across these fixed this issue. There were remnants of the plastic wrapping each individual cover plate or component were originally wrapped in that I had to spend a few minutes picking out and I am still not convinced that the keyboard is actually flat! You know what...I know I'm a whiny
about these things but, to my mind, they just should not be an issue in the first place. A prduct with the Dell badge on it should not come to me in this kind of state. And I mean, it was actually packed okay. It's just that the laptop itself was not put together well.
Now that my XPS is back to it's factory state and that I've backed up my data, I've begun putting things back together. But sweet Jesus, it's been not even a week!! I don't know what I did to so infect my system in this way because I'm pretty conservative when it comes to running my system, but to have it collapse to the point where I have to reset it like this really took the wind out of my sails.
My question is - I want to run my Vista system with the minimum of fuss and I don't want a whole heap of B.S. startup processes running. However unlike XP where I knew what I was doing in using msconfig to make startup changes, Vista to me presents a whole different way of doing things. I would appreciate any thoughts, advice, recommendations in this regard.
So there you go...Am hoping week two gets better...
I performed my first hard reset of my device last night...
Vista appears to be full of bugs. Though I have dumped alot of unecessary startup operations and processes that just don't need to be there at startup I have found that certain programs like IE7 and WMP11 shut down inexplicably after reporting errors for which no solution can be found at this time (the old "Do You Want To Send An Error Report?" trick). I have it running as close to the stripped down version of XP I was running on my old system whereby I always had improved performance but it is not impressive. However I am willing to give MS time to iron out these bugs via updates because they will, inevitably, get their act together.
The reason I had to hard reset last night is because, somehow, I managed to pick up something like 42 trojans, malicious software, adware and other assorted viruses which so compromised my system that I could not perform any meaningful tasks without having some form of pop up ordering me to get virus protection NOW!!! No matter what I did to get rid of them (run McAfee in Safe Mode, D/L Stinger, Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware) I could not clean my system.
Which brings me to McAfee...
In my opinion McAfee is not a good program. I was willing to give McAfee a try again after moving away from it a year ago, partly because it was an bonus 15 month subscription with the computer. But after running 3 scans in normal and safe mode - where it did not pick up a single nefarious item. I removed it, D/L'ed AVG and ran a scan which uncovered the gang of trojans and their cronies. I was still unable to remove them - don't ask me why - and the one's I was able to remove also removed certain .dll files that apparently are part of the OS and therefore critical...hence a barage of startup messages telling me that this file was missing and that file was missing and processes couldn't be run. Why McAfee continues to fail, in my opinion, to effectively guard my system is beyond me and when I get a chance (now that I have hard reset my laptop) I will be removing it from my system in favor of AVG's free version, coupling that with Spybot S&D and Registry Fixer, remain satisfied with Windows Firewall and be done with it. Oh and I've told Dell this as well.
The physical laptop is not well put together. The plastic seams were snapped together properly when I recieved it, the surrounds of the display were warped slightly as a result though a simple running my finger across these fixed this issue. There were remnants of the plastic wrapping each individual cover plate or component were originally wrapped in that I had to spend a few minutes picking out and I am still not convinced that the keyboard is actually flat! You know what...I know I'm a whiny
about these things but, to my mind, they just should not be an issue in the first place. A prduct with the Dell badge on it should not come to me in this kind of state. And I mean, it was actually packed okay. It's just that the laptop itself was not put together well.Now that my XPS is back to it's factory state and that I've backed up my data, I've begun putting things back together. But sweet Jesus, it's been not even a week!! I don't know what I did to so infect my system in this way because I'm pretty conservative when it comes to running my system, but to have it collapse to the point where I have to reset it like this really took the wind out of my sails.
My question is - I want to run my Vista system with the minimum of fuss and I don't want a whole heap of B.S. startup processes running. However unlike XP where I knew what I was doing in using msconfig to make startup changes, Vista to me presents a whole different way of doing things. I would appreciate any thoughts, advice, recommendations in this regard.
So there you go...Am hoping week two gets better...
