A fine start..

[TSR2]

Hi Dave,

With regards defraging, I'm pretty sure Win7 won't defrag an SSD even if you tell it to. Certainly in Windows 8.1 you can do a defrag of an SSD but it doesn't defrag it, it actually runs the TRIM process. Confused?

[J0hn]

Sorry I missed this - I saw a notice on a news website about one of MS last updates messing up peoples PCs and a fix being available.

Might be nothing to do with it or might be your problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2982791

Look at known issue #3

[DaveB]

Confused.. yes thank you

I'm not sure what I'm looking at there John. They appear to be describing issues with Win8/8.1 and I'm on lowly 7

The PC started ok this evening though FSX isn't running as well as it was. I think I've hit the point of no return with addons
ATB
DaveB

[J0hn]

Okay, Dave, well it is for Windows 7 too, and includes a 'won't start' issue, but if you're sorted now, all well and good.

[Paul K]

Dave B, I've just looked up System Mechanic, and its got some great reviews. Is it as good as it sounds and what version do you use - the ordinary one or the Pro one ?

[DaveB]

Hi Paul

This is one of the things that bothered me too

ATB
DaveB

[aeroart]

Not a great way to start the day, Dave. As I keep telling my son, "Backup, backup, backup!" I recently bought him a 3T Western Digital external drive and a subscription to Macrium Reflect for his birthday. Am I a good daddy?

I have two external drives on each of two computers. I alternate backups so if one drive fails, I can restore the next-to-last image from the other drive. If you have ever had to rebuild your system using the OS' installation disk, you understand how irritating and time-consuming that is.

Reflect is an excellent program, and the company's tech support is also great. Paragon, the company that publishes it, is located on your island. They also offer a free trial version. I have no commercial connection with the company. It's just that that software has saved me hours and hours of rebuilding.

Art

[Airspeed]

Dave B, I've just looked up System Mechanic, and its got some great reviews. Is it as good as it sounds and what version do you use - the ordinary one or the Pro one ?

I have the pro version.
Overall, it probably doesn't do a lot more than Windows maintenance tools can. It's mainly that the likes of me don't know how to find and activate all those features. It makes everything more user friendly, and gives you results in understandable form, like telling you about start up programmes that aren't being used, do you want to turn them off? Found errors on hard disk, do you want to fix them? All sorts of tweaks, which I have permanently turned on, so it checks them every time I start up.
Does my system run "as fast as it did on the day I bought it"? Maybe not, because since then it's been asked to carry about 7 different flight sims, when I hardly use more than one, and the grandsons have put a heap of their games on it, not to mention all the FS add-ons and multiple fonts. Apart from that, it seems fast at first, then you get used to it and whinge when it takes more than a millisecond to do any action, so I think that unless you carry out and record speed tests, the matter of performance is partly your perspective at the time.
For me, it seems like a good spend of my limited income.

[DaveB]

Hmm.. turned the pc on this morning and CHKDSK ran again It was doing something with orphaned files amd_64

ATB
DaveB

[J0hn]

Did you try HD Tune? I'm pretty sure there's a free or trial version of it. It's excellent for checking your hard drives for errors as well as their performance.