Comments on: Best and worst computing advice you know?

By: Best and worse computing advice – readers’ choice | Rarst.net

Best and worse computing advice – readers’ choice | Rarst.net — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:08:36 +0000

[...] and worse computing advice – readers’ choiceLast week I wrote a post on what I consider classic good and bad computing advices and asked for input from readers as well. Quite a few good suggestions were made in comments and [...]

By: Rarst

Rarst — Thu, 06 May 2010 22:01:39 +0000

@Samer

Yep, defrag is excellent advice! Don’t know how I missed it in post. Maybe cause I don’t do it much lately since upgrade to SSD at my desktop.

Latter I’d correct to “clean registry with this crappy tool”. I am quite content with CCleaner in this regard. It is enough to get some obvious garbage cleaned out, but shallow and well developed to not break anything.

By: Samer

Samer — Thu, 06 May 2010 21:46:49 +0000

Best:
Defrag your hard drive

Worst:
Clean your registry.

By: Geek Squeaks’ of the Week (#58) « What's On My PC

Geek Squeaks’ of the Week (#58) « What's On My PC — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:12:12 +0000

[...] Rarst.net Best and worst computing advice you know? [...]

By: Rarst

Rarst — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:07:49 +0000

@Sandrina

That one could and should be excellent advice, thus many people give it as such. It’s a pity that there are always some developers that screw update process or break things in new version.

It hits especially hard with portable, where there is much less stuff to worry about. Distribs from PortableApps sometimes drive me crazy with clashes of portable packaging with apps’ native update mechanisms.

By: Sandrina

Sandrina — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:00:35 +0000

Update software or OS.
Sometimes it is good advice sometimes bad.

By: Rarst

Rarst — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:13:53 +0000

@Chocobito

Using portable covers “do not install loads of stuff” nicely. It’s a pity there are always must-have apps remaining that don’t have portable version. :(

Deleting to uninstall actually passes fine, but only as last resort. There are plenty of cases (especially with native Windows installer) when overly complex uninstallation procedure just fails and you are stuck with unwanted and/or broken program.

By: Chocobito

Chocobito — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:32:18 +0000

Best advice: Don’t accumulate piles of software installed in your hard drive.

Worst advice: Delete the folder of that program for rid of him.

By: Rarst

Rarst — Mon, 03 May 2010 08:31:06 +0000

@Klemen

Tricky indeed. Sadly there is no alternative to AV for regular user. It is better than nothing and as much as regular user can manage by himself.

@Rush

Yeah, nervous clicking is bad. And people who do that are least likely to give a damn about advices.

Messing with registry – that kind of advice just makes you mad and wanting to immediately fix Internet. :)

By: Rush

Rush — Mon, 03 May 2010 05:06:07 +0000

Best advice: Stop clicking. If it didn’t work when you clicked it before, it either will or wont eventually but your computer is neither afraid of your impatience nor hurt when you click or type “harder”.
Worst advice: “Type regedit in the run box, and then you can just look through there and get rid of anything you don’t think you need.” (I saw this on one of the forums. Thought I was going to have a stroke.)