Malware from the computer vendors
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Talking about malicious software that you SHOULD uninstall comes straight from the computer vendor when you first buy your PC. Most vendor would install auto update and a gazillion software/drivers that you never asked for (besides the stupid way they partition the hard disk). HP for example installs "HP Software update" on all HP PCs/Notebooks that is of no good.
Take Graphic Drivers for example:
(1) The HP Software update utility would not download the latest graphic drivers, rather would download some 3-4 months old drivers.
(2) The vendor's site for obvious reasons would show the latest drivers on the their site
(3) Windows Update for some reason would not get the new drivers either from HP or Intel's website.
With 4 month's old graphic driver I was able to play Half-Life at 8 frames per second, with the new driver installed I could play at 28-30 frames per second. Also I found updating to the new graphic driver decreased startup time by 3-4 seconds and that RAM was free'er by 2-3 MB.
My suggestion after all this experimentation would be to do a clean install of windows if you experience slow startup speeds, the reason could well might be the drivers and pre-loaded software that comes from your vendor.
[On similar note]
One easy way to find the culprit driver that may slow the startup speed would be to enable "boot-log/No-GUI boot" option in msconfig. Next time you'd start your PC you would see the list of drivers loaded one by one in the console screen, the one that takes maximum time should be your first pick.
Take Graphic Drivers for example:
(1) The HP Software update utility would not download the latest graphic drivers, rather would download some 3-4 months old drivers.
(2) The vendor's site for obvious reasons would show the latest drivers on the their site
(3) Windows Update for some reason would not get the new drivers either from HP or Intel's website.
With 4 month's old graphic driver I was able to play Half-Life at 8 frames per second, with the new driver installed I could play at 28-30 frames per second. Also I found updating to the new graphic driver decreased startup time by 3-4 seconds and that RAM was free'er by 2-3 MB.
My suggestion after all this experimentation would be to do a clean install of windows if you experience slow startup speeds, the reason could well might be the drivers and pre-loaded software that comes from your vendor.
[On similar note]
One easy way to find the culprit driver that may slow the startup speed would be to enable "boot-log/No-GUI boot" option in msconfig. Next time you'd start your PC you would see the list of drivers loaded one by one in the console screen, the one that takes maximum time should be your first pick.
Labels: drivers, Slow Startup, Windows
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