Hard drives are crap!

Some friend of mine brought his computer for a fix. As soon as the Windows logo showed up the computer restarted. Great, just a quick format and full re-installation of Windows will do the trick.
But, it was too easy and unfortunately did not work. So I attempted to figure out what was the actual problem.

First I started with the hard drive. I used and always have been using UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) to do full diagnostics. This piece of software is great, it's free, it can be burned to a cd and is bootable. It includes NTFS reader, network browsing, virus scan, etc.
I think it's the only tool you need to diagnostic any computer problem. It always have been saving me time. 

But running a diagnostics on a hard drive can be long...

Another solution could be to listen to the sound the drive does and get a disgnostic from the following site.
http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

Read the following first...
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Windows_7_to_Dump_E-Mail__Photo_Editing_Software

IMO, yes it is a great decision. May be the best decision they have taken since a long time.

In fact, I would even take it further, Microsoft should not even bundle any apps in their OS. Ok, yes they should keep the basic necessary stuff like a notepad, paintbrush, control panel apps, but no windows media player, no msn messenger, no internet explorer. It's up to the user to download and install the necessary apps.

Still, they should offer a sort of automatic "Add/Remove Programs" service. Upon a fresh install it would reinstall all application automatically.
No CD or DVD necessary, everything would be downloaded from the web or locally from an external drive. Through your account on Windows Live it would know what software you have installed and which to install when re-installing Windows.

I would pay to subscribe to this kind of service.

If you have trouble with transferring data over to Vista from another computer over a network, this may be the solution for you.

1. Go in your Control Panel and open 'Program and Features'.
2. Click on 'Turn windows features on or off'
3. Uncheck 'Remote Differential Compression'

This feature allows data to be synchronized from a remote source with compression techniques (hence the long comparison time before actually transfering anything)

For more details about this feature, visit:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372948(VS.85).aspx

Hope this solves your problem, I know it solved mine and made my Vista experience more appealing!!