Free Computer Consultant's Tip-Of-The-Week e-Zine for November 2, 2007
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I used to get a lot of questions from people asking if they should
leave their PC run all the time or shut if off.

Now, I'm finding many users in my corporate clients are just leaving
the PC running, without logging off, without closing all applications,
then wondering why their computer acts wierd sometimes.

It's Windows, folks. Windows and the poorly written applications and
device drivers you have installed have bugs; memory leaks. Over time,
sometimes hours, sometimes days, they accumulate enough to cause a
problem.

The answer to that problem is to reboot or shutdown at the end of
the day.

Rebooting does a number of positive things.

One, it guarantees that all applications have been completely exited
and can allow data center of your company to get good complete
backups of your data. Leave your program open and those data files
likely get skipped.

Two, if for some reason your anti virus or other security program
has been shut down or is inactive, rebooting will likely bring it
back to life.

Third, Windows starts up fresh without the penalty of any accumulated
memory leaks or other junk slowing it down or making it unstable.

But WAIT! Don't shut down yet. There is always the chance that the
PC won't boot up again.

Are you prepared for that?

I just had a Windows Media Center PC user turn her PC on and get

 \Windows\System32\Config\System missing or corrupt.

The data was backed up, but the data was fine. This is the SYSTEM
registry hive, and it was about 5MB in size. Since no system state
backup had been done in two years, the backup file was only 1MB in
size.

Well, it will boot at least, I thought.

Upon boot, we get:

 When trying to update a password this return status indicates
 that the value provided as the current password is not correct

 System Error : lsass.exe

At this point, you're screwed. Clean reinstall of Windows to fix it.

Repair install won't work. She had a copy of Windows Vista, but
wanted to upgrade so as to minimize the work of reinstalling apps.

Forget it. With this copy of Vista she had, upgrade could only be
performed if started from within Windows. A WORKING copy of Windows.

Does your PC need a driver disk to run Windows install? If so, have
it handy. (Most don't, but a RAID controller likely will).

Learn more about registry backup and system state backup here:

http://www.freecomputerconsultant.com/backup-registry.html

P.S. - Thanks to all who bought my new eBook. If you haven't checked
it out yet, please do.
http://www.freecomputerconsultant.com/email-etiquette-how-to-improve-your-email-image-ebook.html

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Recent Blog entries:

Fake FTC Emails Fraud Dep at FTC.gov
< http://freecomputerconsultant.com/blog/2007/10/31/fake-ftc-emails-fraud-dep-at-ftcgov/ >

Top 7 Office Pet Peeves - Reply All and BCC’ing (What?)
< http://freecomputerconsultant.com/blog/2007/10/30/top-7-office-pet-peeves-reply-all-and-bccing-what/ >

Switching to the Mac
< http://freecomputerconsultant.com/blog/2007/10/30/switching-to-the-mac/ >

Apple’s New OS X “Leopard” Operating System
< http://freecomputerconsultant.com/blog/2007/10/29/apples-new-os-x-leopard-operating-system/ >

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When was the last time you backed up YOUR PC?
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The Free Computer Consultant
http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com