Hi, Paul.
That additional info helps.
It's a new pc with Win Ultimate 64 bit pre installed, 36GB raptor hard
drive, 2.4GHz quad core, 680MB nvidia 880GTS graphics and 4GB 800MHZ RAM,
and
Is that 36GB a typo? That's a very tiny drive these days, especially with
the muscle in the rest of your system.
Have got used to having the "tools" around to try and
"maintain" my old pc and was looking to install on the new.
Yep! For decades, I had to use all kinds of products and tricks to keep my
computer running. When I switched from TRS-DOS to MS-DOS in the 1980s I got
acquainted with Peter's original Norton Utilities, especially DiskEdit,
which let me twiddle bits directly on the hard drive. When a lightning
storm causes a power surge, the most likely place for the read/write head to
be is over the directory, so I rebuilt a lot of directories and FATs from
scratch. Even in the 1990s, I formed the habit of doing a Backup of my
Quicken file after every almost every entry because I just knew that there
would be at least one major glitch before my session ended.
But today's hardware and software are so much more reliable that I find
those utilities are seldom needed. Today's biggest headaches come from
malicious outsiders (spam, viruses and other malware) that I don't really
need much in the way of utilities, so long as I "practice safe hex". While
Symantec and the Department of Justice wail about the practice, I'm very
glad to see that Vista's built-in system maintenance utilities are good
enough that I really don't need many add-ons. I have a third-party
defragger, but seldom use it. My ISP filters out most of my spam. My NIS
2005 subscription expired a couple of years before Symantec updated it for
64-bit, and I found that I never missed it and never got infected, so I
haven't bothered to buy the current versions. I used Partition Magic until
about version 6, but Disk Management has handled all the partitioning,
formatting and other disk chores for me since Windows 2000. Yes, I used
Partition Mechanic and System Works and lots of others whose names I can't
even remember. But not lately. ;<)
If you think
there's no need I'll happily plod on and save the money for something
else!
We still do need third-party products for some chores. If you have a
specific need, tell us and we may have some advice or comments. Otherwise,
my recommendation is to use the money to buy a bigger hard drive - or
several! Operating systems and applications and data files are growing
exponentially!
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta in Vista Ultimate x64)
