Tracking down and preventing unwanted reboots

[Tracey Capen]

LANGALIST PLUS Tracking down and preventing unwanted reboots By Fred Langa Unwanted restarts can be more than an exercise in frustration and wasted time — they can easily result in lost data. Fortunately, there are only three main causes of unintended reboots, so finding — and controlling — them is usually not hard. The full text of this column is posted at WindowsSecrets.com/2010/08/12/04 (paid content, opens in a new window/tab). Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.

[cyberdiva]

Fred, I was surprised at the advice you gave Keith regarding his DVD burner, which would only read copied DVDs, not originals. You treated the issue as if the DVD burner wouldn't work at all. That might be a wise strategy for getting the company to replace it, but it totally passes over the rather interesting question of why the burner could read copied DVDs but not originals. I was hoping you'd address that intriguing question and disappointed that you did not.

[pcguy]

Re Pros and cons of 'Search Everything' I use Agent Ransack a free util to search inside of files. I try not to use too many Google products on my computer.

[buggsy2]

Second the recommendation for Agent Ransack. It has one disadvantage: it doesn't save an index file. Its advantages are many: option regular expression searching of filenames and contents, fast, creates a file index on the first pass and uses that for subsequent searches in the same session, and best of all, doesn't miss anything! I find both google and MS search, even Win7, still miss files.

[rdinning]

I recently switched to Windoz 7 and have had to reevaluate many of my utilities. I still use Search Everything as it seems to work as well and even faster in W7 as it did in XP SP3.

However another utility Absolute Uninstaller does not. It appears to work and removes most things but it leaves some bits around. The similar Uninstall in jv16 Power Tools 2010 solves this and cleans up everything when it removes an installed program, even some fossils in the registry.

I also have a question. Fred langa's excellent article on keeping your XP system clean was interesting as I was doing almost all of that when running XP. But he mentions cleaning up the old $NtUninstall{xxx}$ files which I did religiously. However, my new W7 machine has about 50 updates and I can't find where to clean them up. They are not stored in the Windows directory as they were in XP and a search for them did not find them. Where are they? I suspect the MS has changed their name to make them unfindable.

[bobprimak]

I recently switched to Windoz 7 and have had to reevaluate many of my utilities. I still use Search Everything as it seems to work as well and even faster in W7 as it did in XP SP3.

However another utility Absolute Uninstaller does not. It appears to work and removes most things but it leaves some bits around. The similar Uninstall in jv16 Power Tools 2010 solves this and cleans up everything when it removes an installed program, even some fossils in the registry.

I also have a question. Fred langa's excellent article on keeping your XP system clean was interesting as I was doing almost all of that when running XP. But he mentions cleaning up the old $NtUninstall{xxx}$ files which I did religiously. However, my new W7 machine has about 50 updates and I can't find where to clean them up. They are not stored in the Windows directory as they were in XP and a search for them did not find them. Where are they? I suspect the MS has changed their name to make them unfindable.

There are two completely different products now on the market which have the Absolute Uninstaller title. Glary Utilities contains the free one, and there is a Glary Pro version ($30.00) which can do a better job of cleaning up residues from failed installs and failed uninstalls for which the program's own uninstaller will no longer run. The Pro version also is said to do a better job in 64-bit environments than the free version, but I cannot verify this.

The other product is for-pay only and also claims to remove more remnants than the free version of Glary Utilities Absolute Uninstaller.

So, depending on which product is being referred to, there are different levels of thoroughness, depending on whether you want to pay for a Pro version or not.

My Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Toshiba Satellite laptop does not accumulate much junk when using the free Glary Absolute Uninstaller. But other folks may be having a different experience with this product. Combined with the Glary Utilities Registry Optimizer module, their Uninstaller seems to keep things pretty clean for me. Glary Utilities also has a system cleaner, but I prefer CCleaner for that job. And I use Defraggler (from the CCleaner folks) to defragment once a week or so. The combined effect is that I am keeping my disk space usage about steady after more than a month of using the Toshiba laptop. For 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium, that's very good results.

I never sweat the details about "junk files" unless they can be removed with the tools I have mentioned. The risk of removing something important outweighs the benefits of cleaning up junk just for the sake of cleaning it up. If I can't save disk space or speed up Windows, I leave the junk alone. That goes for my Windows XP Pro SP3 (32-bit) laptop as well. Those old Windows Update Uninstall files don't take up enough disk space to bother me (I have a total of 100GB space on that hard drive), and their removal would do nothing to speed up or stabilize the operating system or the programs. But to speed up Virus Scans, maybe it's time to clean house in there. I might get 20 minutes per week back for my efforts.

[mbroom1]

Re: Unwanted restarts. Some years ago, I had an unintended reboot problem that went unsolved for weeks. The cause turned out to be a memory chip gone bad, but the 1st half-dozen memory-check utilities I tried failed to find the problem (and Dell's tech support had no clue). I wonder if chips or relevant utilities are better now; I hope so.

[BobRogers]

Re: Search Everything...I installed on a Win XP system and soon discovered that all my links in Outlook 2000 email were broken. I uninstalled and everything returned to normal, so just be aware in case the same thing happens to you.

[DavidSalahi]

I use X1 (http://www.x1.com/) to index my files. Indexes contents of the files you specify as a background task. Searches are lightning fast. Search for any combination of file contents, file name, file extension. Sort search results by any column (or two columns). Searches not only documents but Outlook.

Couldn't live without it.
David Salahi

[stumpy]

re Search Everything
I have used Search Everything for several years combined with saving documents and web pages using meaningful file names rather than accepting the default names.
As a result I can find anything I want.
I previously tried Google Desktop and Copernic but both of these became slow and unresponsive over time.