 Number 196 - September 1999 |
| PC Maintenance Best Done Manually | ||
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by Dwight Silverman, Golden Triangle PC Club, Beaumont, TX via Saginaw Valley's Blue Chip News | ||
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At least once a day, I
get an e-mail that reads something like this: "Hi. I've been going crazy
trying to install and run (insert a game, educational, productivity or
utility software title here), but every time I try it (insert: locks up,
crashes, reboots). Help!"
There is a series of questions I always ask at this point, if the information was not included in the e-mail. "Have you upgraded your video or sound card drivers to the latest versions? Have you applied all the available upgrade patches to your operating system?" But in the last year, I've started asking a new question: "Do you have a program on your system that runs in the background specifically, a virus scanner, a crash catcher or an installation monitor?" If the answer is yes, I recommend disabling it. Most of the time, that fixes the problem. KEEP IT SIMPLE If you rely on the Windows 95/98 operating system with the instabilities inherent from Microsoft bending over backward to make it compatible with older versions of Windows and MS-DOS then you are better off running a system that is free of complications. As with many things in life, simple is better. The programs that are causing grief sit in the background of a computer's operation, watching for specific events, such as virus-like activity,the start-up of an installation program or the beginnings of a crash. When triggered, these programs swing into action. In general, their intentions are good. Viruses are nasty things--no one wants them frolicking on a personal computer. Ditto for program or system crashes. And with an installation monitor, an uninstall program has a better road map for what to do when it comes time to remove a given piece of software. But using these things comes at a price, and it's a price that I am not sure is worth it--system stability. The fact is that while many of these programs are convenient, they can cause more problems than they solve. And there are alternatives to using them, though those alternatives require that a user be vigilant and actively maintain his or her computer. This is a dilemma, because most PC users are lazy. They'd rather have software perform a tedious task for them, than remember to do it regularly themselves. When was the last time you manually scanned your entire hard drive for viruses, or scanned a software disk before you installed a new program? When was the last time you made a full backup of your hard drive's contents? A TALK WITH SYMANTEC'S CEO I recently discussed this point of view with Gordon Eubanks, the chief executive of Symantec Corp., a software company that thrives by selling PC utility software. Many of its titles rely heavily on modules that run in the background of a Windows 95, 98 or NT PC. Among the best known are the Norton Utilities, Norton AntiVirus and CleanSweep Deluxe, which it just acquired in its purchase of Quarterdeck. When I told Eubanks I was thinking about writing a column urging readers not to use programs that run in the background, the color drained from the poor man's face and he put his hand on his chest. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. He brought up the point I mentioned earlier--that PC users are unwilling to do their own maintenance. And he added that, in an era in which PC's are connected via the global Internet, programs such as in-the-background virus checkers become even more crucial. He suggested I try using his company's full suite of utility products Norton System Works, in an integrated fashion. Eubanks argued that many of the problems that I've described come when users try to mix-and-match software--a virus scanner from one company, a crash-catcher from another. |
(Indeed, I've heard from
many users who think they're extra safe by running two or three
different virus scanners in the background. This is similar to the
belief that, if two aspirin tablets will knock out a headache in an
hour, 20 will do it in five minutes. It doesn't work that way.)
I agreed to his challenge, and tried Norton System Works for about a month. Then, I ran without it for the same period. I used all of the in-the-background features, and experimented with running them in different combinations. Sorry, Gordon, but the results were not pretty. Although the programs are well designed and quite useful when run manually, the components that run in the background were, in my opinion, more trouble than they were worth. Using Norton System Doctor noticeably slowed my 200 megahertz Pentium MMX Dell system, with 64 megabytes of memory. This seriously depressed me, because I really like Norton System Doctor--I am a sucker for all the information it offers about a system's status. But all those gauges and meters exact a performance price. With CrashGuard 4.0 and Norton AntiVirus 5.0 also running, my computer felt more like a 133-megahertz system. With CrashGuard, which is a well-designed program that halts application crashes long enough for you to save your work, I found I had more crashes, particularly in Netscape Communicator 4.5. When I disabled CrashGuard, Communicator crashed less However, CrashGuard saved my butt on a couple of occasions, allowing me to recover crucial documents in an unruly word processor. CrashGuard also caught a "blue screen of death" crash--an impressive feature in the newest version--and allowed me to save my work. Norton AntiVirus gave me the most conflicts with other applications. In some cases, programs refused to install unless I disabled it. In a couple of cases, I would click on a program and it would not launch unless the virus scanner was turned off. But during the month I ran "clean," my system was zippier and more stable. My conclusion: I'll continue to advise readers to not use background-based software if they have recurring problems. I'll also strongly suggest they set up a regular maintenance routine for their PC, and recommend using programs such as the non-background components of Norton System Works to handle those jobs. But each user must weigh what is more important--the security provided by background-based programs, or the system hassles that come with them.
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Number 196 - September 1999 |
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