Patch Lady – it’s O-souji time for your computer

There is a Japanese new year custom – that your home and your work needs to be clean and tidy – it’s O-souji time.  So too should we review our computers to see if they are clean and tidy as they should be.  Now there are some uber geeks that feel that the only way to truly “clean” a crusty Windows install is to totally reinstall the operating system.  While this is much easier in Windows 10, it still seems a bit extreme to me.

But if that’s your cup of tea (or bottle of Champagne given the time of the year), it means you are much more organized that I am, or you have converted yourself to a totally online/in the cloud technology setup.  Before you start reinstalling your operating system ensure you know your installation key codes for the various applications you have.   Office – if you have purchased it with a Microsoft linked account can be logged into and reinstalled.  Windows 10 can be downloaded and placed on a bootable flash drive.  When I reinstalled my Lenovo X1 carbon, I found that I had to go to the vendor’s website and install the bios updates and drivers from Lenovo before my beloved laptop would connect properly to the Internet, hook to cellular and stop showing all those bang “!” in the device manager.  Windows 10 is a digital license tied to the hardware and should (operative being should) reactivate without a hitch.

If you need to reinstall Windows 7, it gets much trickier.  You can download an iso of Windows 7, or even Windows 8.1 but you need a valid product key, and then a road map to get all the rest of the updates installed.  (and hang loose as part of the newly announced Windows Secrets rollout I’m working on a revamped spreadsheet of patches to install and avoid).

If the nuke and reinstall isn’t your thing, there are other ways to O-souji your computer.  The first thing I always do this time of year is review if I need a new computer in the first place.  If everything is pretty peppy (Spectre patch impact notwithstanding), then I review if there are any minor upgrades that are easy to do.  Do I need a better monitor?  A new keyboard?  (given that if you look at my hardworking computers you’ll see a shiny spot on the space bar and worn off buttons here and there)  If everything is not as peppy as it could be can I open up the computer or laptop and easily add ram or a newer SSD?  One can easily use cloning software to move your existing software to a new hard drive.  If you don’t have a SSD drive, treat yourself with an after Christmas present of an upgrade.  It will really make your older system majorly speed up.

Now I start digging into the c drive.  Have I backed it up?  Do I have a year’s worth of funky downloads, pictures that I don’t remember that need organized, or any other files that would be better off on an external usb hard drive or a NAS unit?  I use something like treesize free to review what is hogging my c drive space.

Now I start asking myself if there are better alternatives to my main programs that I can try out.  Office alternatives to try out like LibreOffice?  How about reevaluating antivirus and just using defender?  (really, I truly think a lot of upgrade problems are often caused by out dated antivirus).

Bottom line it’s O-souji time and what are you going to clean up on your computer?