mchampfl
09-01-1999, 08:07 PM
i have given up! i'm to old for this stuff! no more crusades for me! my motto today is to avoid doing battle with the registry at all costs. it just simply isn't worth it. and what do i do about these problems??...
enter my superhero, PowerQuest's DriveImage utility! i carry around in my hip pocket a CDRW with an image of a 600mb virgin win95 partition on it. this partition was built from scratch on the model of the most popular pc in our office. it has preinstalled on it (for which we have legitimate licenses) office97, wordperfect, lotus123, accounting, netware client, email, winzip, quickview, printers, network, drive maps, etc, etc, etc.
if a user's machine starts misbehaving, i don't spend more than 15-30 minutes chasing gremlins or attempting exorcisms. i whip out my CDRW and my superhero DriveImage dos boot diskette and push the button. sit and chat with the user, drink a soda, wait 20 minutes, and voila'! they're back in business, fresh as baby's breath!
and what if the machine in question is not the same model/configuration as the one in which the partition was built? no problem! ah, the miracle of plug-n-play! that's why i use win95. give it an extra 10 minutes, 7 or 8 reboots, ALL my drivers sitting right on the CDRW - piece of cake!
of course, this presumes that all pc's in the office are foundationally the same. i had to lobby for this to some degree, and there are a few machines that i'll have to install an additional piece of software or two.
nt40 would require you to keep a unique partition for each type of machine - but even this is better than groping in the dark voids of the registry. and the users cannot expect to keep a custom environment other than what they can save onto the network. (therein lies half my problem anyway - screensavers, instant messengers, games, etc.)
i also do this on my home pc. i no longer am afraid of my kids and their sadistic desire to turn my pc into a frankenstein. i have 2 partitions - c: has my foundational installs on it (wp, spreadsheet, pim, browser, printers, etc.) and EVERYTHING else on d:. data, subsequent software installs, internet cache, EVERYTHING. when i build c:, i save an image of it and restore it whenever i need to. if i want to add something to the foundation, i restore, install, and recreate the image. sure i have to reinstall all the software that was on d: after a restore, but most of those are games that the kids have lost interest in anyway. so i only bother with the ones they're screaming for.
restoring a partition avoids addressing the problem in its fundamentals, but when i can give the boss a repair time of 20-30 minutes that is not open-ended, it sure keeps him happy!
why not, you say, just restore a virgin registry? because the registry is not always the culprit. the other major source of instability is .dll conflicts (a whole different conversation). a virgin PARTITION solves all of these dilemmas with one possible exception that i'm a little weak on. and that's hardware entries. when the partition is applied to a machine different from what it was originally built on, pnp kicks in very nicely. but i worry that some entries may be left that could come back and haunt me - although i have not experienced that problem in the 2 years i have had this practice in place. i have on a couple of occasions had to go into device manager and delete EVERYTHING and then reboot and/or run 'detect new hardware'. even this seems to work fine.
now, i'm sharing this here because you may find value in my approach, but more so to get your reaction to it. do you have a better (read that less time, hassle, money, groping) way of managing windows instability?
enter my superhero, PowerQuest's DriveImage utility! i carry around in my hip pocket a CDRW with an image of a 600mb virgin win95 partition on it. this partition was built from scratch on the model of the most popular pc in our office. it has preinstalled on it (for which we have legitimate licenses) office97, wordperfect, lotus123, accounting, netware client, email, winzip, quickview, printers, network, drive maps, etc, etc, etc.
if a user's machine starts misbehaving, i don't spend more than 15-30 minutes chasing gremlins or attempting exorcisms. i whip out my CDRW and my superhero DriveImage dos boot diskette and push the button. sit and chat with the user, drink a soda, wait 20 minutes, and voila'! they're back in business, fresh as baby's breath!
and what if the machine in question is not the same model/configuration as the one in which the partition was built? no problem! ah, the miracle of plug-n-play! that's why i use win95. give it an extra 10 minutes, 7 or 8 reboots, ALL my drivers sitting right on the CDRW - piece of cake!
of course, this presumes that all pc's in the office are foundationally the same. i had to lobby for this to some degree, and there are a few machines that i'll have to install an additional piece of software or two.
nt40 would require you to keep a unique partition for each type of machine - but even this is better than groping in the dark voids of the registry. and the users cannot expect to keep a custom environment other than what they can save onto the network. (therein lies half my problem anyway - screensavers, instant messengers, games, etc.)
i also do this on my home pc. i no longer am afraid of my kids and their sadistic desire to turn my pc into a frankenstein. i have 2 partitions - c: has my foundational installs on it (wp, spreadsheet, pim, browser, printers, etc.) and EVERYTHING else on d:. data, subsequent software installs, internet cache, EVERYTHING. when i build c:, i save an image of it and restore it whenever i need to. if i want to add something to the foundation, i restore, install, and recreate the image. sure i have to reinstall all the software that was on d: after a restore, but most of those are games that the kids have lost interest in anyway. so i only bother with the ones they're screaming for.
restoring a partition avoids addressing the problem in its fundamentals, but when i can give the boss a repair time of 20-30 minutes that is not open-ended, it sure keeps him happy!
why not, you say, just restore a virgin registry? because the registry is not always the culprit. the other major source of instability is .dll conflicts (a whole different conversation). a virgin PARTITION solves all of these dilemmas with one possible exception that i'm a little weak on. and that's hardware entries. when the partition is applied to a machine different from what it was originally built on, pnp kicks in very nicely. but i worry that some entries may be left that could come back and haunt me - although i have not experienced that problem in the 2 years i have had this practice in place. i have on a couple of occasions had to go into device manager and delete EVERYTHING and then reboot and/or run 'detect new hardware'. even this seems to work fine.
now, i'm sharing this here because you may find value in my approach, but more so to get your reaction to it. do you have a better (read that less time, hassle, money, groping) way of managing windows instability?