yes, i agree, good computer mainanence is very important if you want it to last for a long time, however i think that the cause of the "users not having to log into password protected programs" was probably not purely a fragmented HDD problem; the drive was probably also verrry squify, so probably so was the program lol, but i dont know....
here are SLs top tips for brilliant computer maintance
1 have two hard drives - have a small-ish hard drive for all your windows stuf, say about 30 or something, then a mahusive one for all your work (i have found 400 gig IDE HDDs on
www.misco.co.uk for around GB£150). this way, if anything goes wrong with your windows stuf, you can just simply wipe that hard drive without worrying about all of your documents etc
2 maintain your hard drives - hard drives work by making errors. sounds very daft but they do. these are almost all correctable errors that it knows about an will fix later. a hard drive will go 'squify' (i mentioned that earlier) when the number of errors it is creating out numbers the number it can fix again. it makes these errors because its faster and easier, alot like if you had been given 10 maths sums to do, and the teacher said that they needed tobe done as soon as possable; you would probably make mistakes, but youd know youd be able to correct them when she handed them back to you. go to
www.grc.com to see what he has done for hard drive maintainance; its a brilliant program.
3 keep it healthy - make sure you do run things like defragmentation programs, antivirus programs, antispyware programs and so on, they realy do help. if u dont, its alot like smoking is for people, they go along fine for ages, then one day they get heart disease (sorry to compare it to something so depressing). microsoft programs such as "scandisk" and "defrag" work up to a point, then say "sorry, i just cant be bothered any more" and stop. there are better ones available on the net that dont stop untill the job is done, such as the one you can buy at
www.grc.com (thats btilliant btw, but didnt i already say that?)
4 backup - *ALWAYS* backup important stuff; your computer might get run over by a big red london bus on the way back from harrods, you never know, (would you be able to see a 1 foot tall box if it crossed the road infront of you?) so always keep copies of what you keep on it, AND KEEP THEM SOMEWHERE SAFE (CD-Rs are usualy the best, although they are quite small in storage space, the data on them can usualy be quite easy to recover if something like a flood hits, plus they dont get damaged by electromagnetec interferience)
this one is optional, but i like to do it anyway
5 format your computer every year - if you wipe the hard drives every so often, it gives them a clean slate to work from, so any spyware or viruses that your scanners might have missed will be gone and thus will no longer be calling home to say "look what i have found on this computer!". having said that, dont do that daft thing and format all of your lovely data away too, that realy would be stupid.
very long i know, and probably quite boring, lol, but if you got this far, ur as bigger geek as i am, so thats not too bad!!! LOL! (dw, being a geek is gd, means ur gd at sumfin) well at least now you know a little more about the workings of your computer!
hope that was useful, and not too boring! gime a shout if u want ne more help
SL
