longevity

Found coupons for additional dollars off my laptop purchase. Pulled the
trigger as I had planned.

Laptop should show up in a couple weeks!

I am looking for a way to extend the life of my laptop. Because I tend to
trial a lot of software – I am subject to rapid registry bloat. This
condition basically slows down your whole windows os and lots of software
that relies on the registry for finding assemblies and settings.

The windows registry is like a giant tree structure that adds branches and
leaves every time you install new software. Problem is that when you
uninstall software it doesn’t necessarily get cleaned out. Even when you
use registry fixing tools like ccleaner it doesn’t shrink!

There is some point of growth where the size creates a pervasive
performance problem. In my experience the only workable solution is to
re-install windows. This solution has tons of risk and pain ‘cuz you have
to backup and restore data (risk) and reinstall ALL of your software
(pain).

On my current machine I tried partitioning my hard drive to reduce risk – I
even pointed my windows virtual directories at a non os partition. This
was OK, but all windows software – especially open source or free ware does
not use windows virtual directories right. And it still doesn’t solve the
problem of software installation.

With the new pc I will investigate using virtualization to limit the risk
and pain.

I’ll let you know how it goes….