Thread: Sigh...
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Old 23rd September 2009
Beastie Beastie is offline
Daemonology student
 
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: /dev/earth0
Posts: 335
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There are twice (and growing) as many mostly useless services in XP and later as there was in W2K. Most are completely undocumented, the "help" files containing no useful information whatsoever. All you can do is *guess* what they do from their names and description or maybe using a debugger or disassembler (which is illegal?) and wasting your time trying to read and understand the obfuscated code.

Securing the machine from the outside is a nightmare too. Even if you stop all the useless network services (plus file/printer sharing), some ports will remain open unless you delete or modify some cryptic registry keys... and break the entire connection in the process.

7 months for the "average lifespan of an OS image", you're kidding? Few days after the installation, the boot time doubles and within weeks, programs become very slow on startup, and the whole system becomes less responsive.
By that time you've also been infected by dozens of viruses, spywares, adwares, etc. even with an up-to-date AV and LUA accounts (new privilege escalation exploits are frequently discovered). And most people out there don't even update their AV definitions and work with admin privileges anyway!
Also, don't forget the many well-written setups that modify one thing or two in your system without even asking or providing a way to undo it.

As for repairing the registry, forget about it. It's probably easier and faster to wipe the partition and reinstall from scratch. The registry is one of the worst ideas in the history of computers. Even using regedit, it would be very difficult to find an error and fix it, unless of course you keep plain-text backups and spend hours comparing them with your current registry. Good luck with that: in a fresh install, it's hundreds of KBs big only, but it grows to dozens of MBs after making all your configurations/customizations and installing all the software you need.
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