[vip_students] Don't pay for software you don't need Part 2
- From: "\(NCBI\) Paul Traynor" <paul.traynor@xxxxxxx>
- To: <vip_students@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 19 May 2011 16:01:56 +0100
By: Woody
Leonhard<http://WindowsSecrets.com/images/wsn/Woody-Leonhard-1.jpg> By Woody
Leonhard
After the first article of this three-part series appeared, many of you
wrote to ask: do I really not need this software?
It's true: if you've moved up to Windows 7, there are all sorts of software
that you just don't need. Stop following outdated advice and get with the
system!
In my previous installment, I wrote that Windows 7 owners don't need to pay
for any of these important apps:
Antivirus software: Microsoft Security Essentials is free, and for the
average PC user, works just as well as the paid products - sometimes better.
Defraggers: Windows 7 defragments your drives automatically (once a week by
default), and you don't need to lift a finger or spend a sou.
Backup packages: Win7 backup isn't particularly neat or fancy, but it covers
the bases automatically and (almost always) works well.
You may or may not want to shell out shekels for Microsoft Office, but that
really depends on the level of document compatibility you need and on your
willingness to suffer the slings and arrows of the current
OpenOffice/LibreOffice debacle. It's a complex and costly problem. This
week, I'm going to gore a few more sacred (cash) cows. Specifically, I
explain why I think Registry cleaners are worse than useless, why most
people don't need partition software, and why there's no reason to pay for a
firewall. I can hear the howls already. Trust me regarding these
applications: their time has come and gone. Save your money. Buy a bigger
monitor, faster Internet, a comfy Aeron chair; upgrade to an Android phone
or iPad 2 - things that will make an obvious difference to you.
In Part 3 of this series, I'll talk about saving money on Windows and MS
Office - it makes absolutely no sense to pay for more than you need - and
take some parting shots at expensive cables, obscure Windows services, and a
few other items I love to lambaste. Stay tuned.
Some Registry cleaners do more harm than good
I'm going to get a lot of flak over this one, but I've never seen a
real-world example of a Windows 7 machine that improved in any significant
way after running a Registry cleaner. As with defraggers, Registry cleaners
may have served a useful purpose for Windows XP, but with Windows 7 I think
they're useless (correction: worse than useless).
My Senior Editor Fred Langa and I don't yet agree on this point: Fred
suspects that Registry cleaners may be useful for some Windows 7 owners,
some of the time. He's running a series of experiments right now, and we
hope to see the results in a couple of weeks. But in my experience, working
with hundreds of Windows 7 machines in all sorts of environments, I've never
found a single run of a single Registry cleaner that caused anything but
grief.
There's a great quote that (as best I can tell) originated on the DSLReports
forum A poster who goes by the handle "jabarnut" states, "The Registry is an
enormous database, and all this cleaning really doesn't amount to much .
I've said this before, but I liken it to sweeping out one parking space in a
parking lot the size of Montana." And that's the long and short of it.
Jabarnut is correct: the Registry is a giant database - a particularly
simple one. As with all big databases, sooner or later some of the entries
get stale; they refer to programs that have been deleted from the system or
to settings for obsolete versions of programs. Sure, you can go in and clean
up the pointers that lead nowhere, but why bother?
I'm ready to change my tune if Fred can find a Registry cleaner that reduces
the size of a typical Registry by, oh, 15 percent to 20 percent (that's the
point where I assume a decrease in size could improve system performance),
or if he can find a slick way to speed up a system by 10 percent to 15
percent. Failing that, it's hard for me to imagine paying any money - or
wasting any of my time - cleaning my Registry.
More important, Registry cleaners are notorious for messing up systems by
cleaning things that shouldn't be touched. My favorite example: a free
Registry cleaner called EasyCleaner, which we at Windows Secrets Newsletter
recommended some years ago. It was an excellent program, possibly best in
its class, but it doesn't appear to have been updated in a long time. If you
follow the list of fixes during EasyCleaner's waning years, you'll see that
the authors went through a litany of mistakes, instances where the cleaner
borked programs by deleting required Registry entries.
Reader DBB wrote to me recently, asking why Microsoft had abandoned its
Registry cleaners. Windows Live OneCare (a precursor to Microsoft Security
Essentials) included a much-ballyhooed online scanner and Registry cleaner,
and a Microsoft U.K. page still lists an included Registry cleaner.
DBB notes, "The mystery is that, though Microsoft has not denounced the use
of registry cleaners, it no longer provides one - at least for now. Previous
to the online scanner, Microsoft provided reg clean and then scan reg."
He's absolutely right: Microsoft used to offer Registry scanners and
cleaners. It doesn't have separate programs to perform those functions any
more.
In my experience, the vast majority of Registry cleaners available now are
either scareware come-ons or destructive - or both. Websites invite you to
run a free Registry cleaning, they hit you with the rogue-anti-malware
shtick, and then they ask for money. One Registry-cleaner site even uses
"Microsoft" in its Web address; I have no idea why Microsoft doesn't take
the site down.
DBB blames Microsoft for backpedaling - first it distributed and recommended
Registry cleaners, now it's mum on the subject. DBB asks several interesting
questions: Why doesn't Microsoft just come out and say you don't need a
Registry cleaner? Why doesn't MS go after the people who claim to sell
Microsoft Registry cleaners - when the cleaners don't come from Microsoft?
Most important, why doesn't MS come out and clearly say that you shouldn't
install or use a Registry cleaner - whether it's from Microsoft or not?
All good questions.
Win7 does all the disk partitioning you'll need
I personally hate disk partitioning. I've railed against it for years. But
rather than get into a technical argument (yes, I know that dual-boot
systems with a single hard drive need multiple partitions), I'll limit
myself to extolling the virtues of Windows 7's partition manager.
No, Windows 7 doesn't have a full-fledged disk-partition manager. But it
does everything with partitions that most people need - and it gets the job
done without messing up your hard drive. Which is more than I can say for
some third-party disk-partition managers.
Finding Windows 7's partition manager takes a little digging. Running in an
administrator-level account, click Start, Control Panel, System and
Security, and Administrative Tools. Next, double-click Computer Management.
In the left panel, under Storage, click Disk Management.
If you don't have enough unallocated space to create a new partition, you
have to shrink one or more of the existing partitions. To do that,
right-click on the partition you want to shrink and choose Shrink Volume.
Figure 1 shows the box in which you set the new size.
Type the amount of space you want to shave off the partition, and click OK.
You create a new partition by right-clicking the unallocated space and
choosing New Simple Volume; a wizard pops up that steps you through set up
and formatting.
If your hard drive is very nearly full, third-party partition software may
make it a touch easier to repartition a hard drive because some third-party
tools allow you to keep and move files while changing partitions - something
Win7's native utility doesn't allow. For most PC users, that isn't much of a
reason to spend money on a partition package.
Windows 7's firewall works only one way
Like its predecessors, Windows 7's firewall only keeps outside threats from
getting in - it's an inbound firewall. Outbound firewalls alert you when an
unauthorized program attempts to send data out of your computer. At least
that's the theory. In practice, many outbound firewalls bother you
mercilessly with inscrutable warnings saying that obscure processes are
trying to send out data.
If you simply click through and let the program phone home, you're defeating
the purpose of the outbound firewall. On the other hand, if you take the
time to track down every single outbound event warning, you might spend half
your life chasing firewall snipes.
Some people think an inbound-only firewall is woefully inadequate. I think
it's good enough for almost everybody, But if you really want one, I
recommends Sphinx Software's Windows Firewall Control (info:
http://www.sphinx-soft.com/Vista/order.html, a product that helps you tweak
the Windows firewall so it works outbound. You can download a
limited-capability free version or the more powerful Plus edition (U.S.
$30).
I have a few friends who insist on running an outbound firewall. They
uniformly recommend Comodo Firewall, which is also available in a
free-for-personal-use version
I think it's all a complete waste of time. Although I'm sure some people
have been alerted to Windows 7 infections when their outbound firewall goes
bananas, 99.99 percent of the time the outbound warnings are just noise.
Outbound firewalls don't catch the cleverest malware, anyway.
So that's Round 2 in the list of software that Windows 7 users don't need to
buy, don't even need to bother with. It's surprising how much old advice
isn't valid any more, eh?
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