[24hoursupport] Re: Missing help
- From: chizotz@xxxxxxxxx
- To: 24hoursupport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 28 May 2004 16:20:27 +0000
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.
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