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I almost never turn my computer off, for most of the reasons already stated. At night is when it does its virus scans and backups. I often run programs that can take many hours to complete (such as transcoding video), and so the computer needs to be on for that. Even when I’m away I leave it on, as sometimes I remote on to it to run some task.

I even skip Patch Tuesdays sometimes, which will surely raise the ire of some here. I’ve had multiple runs of 100+ day uptime.

As for Google docs, I have an innate aversion to anything that is dependent on the internet to run. We may get there some day but for now I’ll stick to something I can run anywhere I am.

There are offline version of the Google Apps. I’m pretty much completely switched from Office to Google Docs. They’re not as feature-packed as Office, but they have everything I need. I like that they’re in the “cloud” — not only do I never have to worry about backup, but I can access my docs from any internet connected computer in the world. Need to update something in Paris? Stop in an Internet cafe (grab a coffee) and log into my Google account, et voilà, I have all my docs right there. The icing on the cake is the collaboration features — there is nothing in the Office world that matches Google Docs for collaboration.

In my opinion, Vista got a bad rap for two main reasons:

1) Yes, it was hardware-hungry, but this was not much of an issue on new systems. The problem arises when someone who has been running XP for some years tries to upgrade to Vista. OS upgrades are always dicey (a fresh install is preferable), and that coupled with the older hardware people were trying to use made for a very poor Vista experience.

2) The hardware manufacturers, curse their souls, just can’t resist loading up their computers with tons of poorly written crapware. Many of these programs barely ran on XP; on Vista, it killed it.

As a proof of concept, I built my own computer and installed a clean, OEM copy of Vista Business on it, and used that as my main production computer. It ran fast and smooth for over three months without fail, without crashing or rebooting once.

As an OS, Vista works. Apples to apples (ha!), it’s better than XP. But once people and vendors start tossing other fruit into the mix, it can become a gooey mess.

Of course, this discussion is moot, since Windows 7 trumps them all. I would never recommend Vista to anyone today.

All good tips above; here’s another couple:

On a clean machine, download Process Explorer. Rename the procexp.exe program file to iexplore.exe. Some malware will stop *every* .exe program; but they will never stop iexplore.exe, as the malware needs Internet Explorer to do its crimes. Take the renamed Process Explorer to the infected machine, and run it. From there, you should be able to kill the malware processes, after which you can run MalwareBytes or any other malware fighting tool (I might recommend ComboFix).

Some malware will corrupt the registry so that anytime you run a .exe it will run another instance of the malware. Fixing this is tricky. First, start a command prompt using command.com (not cmd — which is an exe and will launch the malware). Change to the c:windows folder, and copy regedit.exe to regedit.com. Run regedit.com and go to the key hkey_classes_root/.exe and look at the values for evidence of malware. You should compare this key to a known good machine for reference. After fixing this up, your machine should be able to run programs without continually reinfecting itself.

Of course, reformatting and reinstalling Windows might be the easiest option at this point…

Having separate partitions for OS and Data is great in theory, but unless you take steps to move the Users folder to the D: partition, most users will just continue to save all their data on the C: partition, by default. I can’t tell you how many computers I’ve seen with small, full C: drives and huge, empty D: drives.

Having Windows 7 being able to repartition on the fly is nice, but in most cases it’s easier to just set up one big C: partition and be done with it.

Can we add WinZip to the list? This was a great program in its day, but ZIP functionality has been built into Windows since XP, and the free 7-Zip program is superior in every way. I’m not sure why people still buy WinZip, aside from inertia.