Dec 15 2006

Maintenance – IE7 Why you shouldn’t install it. – Part 2

Category: Insanity,Life Stories,Weirderm @ 9:51 am

blog.the-erm.com » Blog Archive » IE7 Why you shouldn’t install it.

After working on their computer last night I discovered …

I did an inventory of the running processes/services on their computer.

There were a lot of ‘not mandatory, but don’t disable unless you think it’s causing problems’ type programs.

I decided to give them gaim for an instant messenger vs aol instant messenger. Thats when the weirdness started to occur.

I’ve never had a problem with zone alarm in all the time I’ve used it. It’s recommended software in my book. -unless you’re using dialup. Some people would beg to differ, but I digress.

The bug occurs when you fill up your ‘allowed programs’ list. Once it’s full no other program can be enabled/disabled to access the internet.

At any rate I did the old uninstall, and reinstall of zone alarm, and all was well. Gaim could access the internet, and the firewall could still be running.

This was great to have a fresh new list, because I could disable even more services that didn’t need to be running.

I’m not sure if I did the right thing, but I disabled norton go back as well. The system seems to work better without it. – The system being a laptop.

I still have concerns of leaving kodak running all the time. It just doesn’t seem sane to me. I disabled quite a few things that just didn’t need to be running. There were lots of things that it didn’t make sense to keep running. Like 3-4 network type programs. 1 for wifi, one for lan, even 1 for dialup.

So I disabled all of them, and a couple of stupid touch pad programs that did nothing as near as I could tell.

There was a weird program called ‘notebook maximizer’ that just used up 50% of the CPU all the time, and I disabled that. I don’t see how it maximized anything.

Of all the things I removed, the only program I have any questions about is Go Back.

I’m a semi-fan of norton. When I was running windows there was a diagnosis tool that if you let it run all the time, it seriously degraded performance. They have a good anti-virus, but there are free ones out there now, and personally I’d rather just go with a free one. Of course I’m not stupid when it comes to computers. I know the security threats, and I know when I’m about to do something a little stupid.

It was a great learning experience. I learned more about windows services, and how to disable them. You’ve got to be careful when you do that stuff, considering I searched on every program/service before I disabled it I knew what it was, where it went, and what to do with it.

Speedupmypc did nothing but sit there with a splash screen … didn’t do much. Even after clearing out a bunch of extra processes. So that’s a waste of time. The site advertising it knew about all the running programs. So I figured I’d mention it.

This all being said maybe IE7 works perfectly, I however have my doubts, and I’m not in any hurry to recommend it as a browser. Firefox is much more stable.

Erm

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