Chris Crockett – Gaming and Computer Geek

I’m an IT guy, growing up to be a System Administrator for a fairly large company.  I have a blog and I have several technologically inclined friends, one of whom is also a System Administrator for a, different, fairly large company.  Despite all of these facts, this blog will not be filled with posts detailing things that happen where I work.  There is a reason, and if you know me personally, you know what that reason is.  If you don’t know me personally, just know that there won’t be much shop talk on this site.  On the other hand, I’m getting tons of experience administering Windows Server 2003 in a unique environment.  I imagine I might have a few insights to share from that perspective.

I shall admit that I believe that any computer running Windows, any version, needs a serious cleanup once in a while.  Sometimes they last two or three years, sometimes only six months.  In any case, my newest laptop, an EEEPC has just been rebuilt completely.  I had the presence of mind to take an image of the final installation, or at least mostly final.  All of my critical apps, the things that feel like appendages, are installed, all useless and suspect apps removed.  Most significantly this time, no Adobe products.  Not even Reader.  Frankly, like Microsoft, they’ve gotten big enough and popular enough to become a target for exploitation.  Microsoft has done a fine job of locking down the OS itself so now viruses target third party applications.  Things that feel a lot like OS level addons but aren’t.  Adobe Reader is just such a target these days but Adobe hasn’t shown the same level of commitment to fixing errors as Microsoft.  I know, you read that sentence and scoff.  It’s really just my own opinion, but it’s an opinion based on the fact that a major vulnerability exists in their flagship product, exploitable on any Widnows machine that gets e-mail or reads the web with Acrobat Reader installed, but they don’t feel it’s important enough to fix as soon as possible… they’ll get to it in a couple of weeks.

I might install Flash Player eventually, so many sites like to use it, but for Acrobat Reader, plenty of other readers exist.  I can recommend Foxit Reader.

It’s that time of year again, spring cleaning.  At least, spring cleaning for my laptop.  With the idea in my head that my laptop, actually my netbook, is not running like it used to I have taken an image of the previous installation, tossed in the System Restore disk and reset everything to factory fresh.  This means I have to strip out all of the stuff I don’t use, go through a few rounds of updates (in progress), install my critical apps again and then, using my brain this time, take another image of the hard drive so that I can go back to a good state again any time in the future without so much work.