FreeLists / 24hoursupport / [24hoursupport] Re: Missing help

[chizotz@xxxxxxxxx]

Hi Paul,

Well, I never much cared for system restore after I had all kinds of problems 
with it once upon a time so I have it turned off on my home machines. But it's 
also turned off on all of the systems where I work.

There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it tends to eat too much 
drive space and require too much maintenance effort to keep that problem at 
bay while still maintaining sufficient restore points to provide an adequate 
safety net. There are also problems with the restore restoring things you 
don't want restored and killing other things you want left alone, which can 
create a bigger mess than the problem you're trying to solve by restoring. 
Perhaps some of these issues have been addressed in the Windows XP version of 
system restore, but once burned forever shy.

I'm not saying that system restore is totally worthless, because thats not 
true at all. It is helpful for some folks and in some situations, as you 
pointed out. But unless Microsoft has made dramatic improvements since I last 
looked at system restore, in my situation and in my judgement it isn't worth 
the additional overhead and hassles. 

I haven't had to do a full OS re-install since moving to XP either, which is 
fantastic. Actually, it's only fantastic because I lived through every 
iteration of Windows since 3.1 :) That's how it should have been all along. 
Sometimes doing a re-install of specific application software, though, is the 
path of least resistance to fix some kinds of problems.

I'm operating under somewhat of an additional burden here at work. While my 
title is "Systems Administrator", as bizarre as it may sound I am not an admin 
on my own machine. The policy here is that admin privilages are very closely 
held, and you only have admin privilages on the systems you are directly 
responsible for. By some other-worldly logic, that does not include your own 
workstation.

As it turns out, the fix to my problem was extraordinarily simple. In Visual 
Studio, you can select the help collection to use. Somehow, my help collection 
had been set to an empty collection. I didn't do it, but that's what happened. 
As soon as the help collection to use was re-set to MSDN, voila, all my help 
files re-appeared in the IDE help system. Duh. It was that simple, but it's 
the simple stuff that'll burn you the worst. Since I didn't change the 
setting, and no one else (theoretically) has access to my machine, it never 
occurred to me to simply look for a setting to change to fix the problem; I 
was looking for system problems or changes.

Thanks to you and Spider for offering assistance. It is appreciated.

Ron




 
> Just curiosity, why is System Restore unavailable to you? Is your computer 
> on a LAN?
> Working alone at home, I haven't reinstalled since I started using WinXP. 
> Takes care of all mysterious ailments so far. Makes Win98 look primitive 
> when I think of the hours I spent reformatting and reinstalling the OS 
> along with 30 programs in years past.
> 
> Paul K.
For a web-based membership management utility and information on list policies, 
please see http://nibec.com/24hoursupport/

To unsubscribe, send a blank email to 24hoursupport-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 
"unsubscribe" (without quotes) in the subject.