Those Bad Things I like

When I finish to write this note I'm gonna be probably less "geek" to many than what they think I was. And I'm saying this because I'm about to say a few good things that those considered "geeks" will never say: I'm glad to have Windows Defender and System Restore running in my Q1 with Vista.

If you are a real "Geek" the first things you should disable and uninstall when you finish Vista Installation are System Restore and Windows Defender. Both of them slow down your System (this is a fact) and as a good geek that you are or gonna be, you should not allow that.

But I'm not a geek and I have them running wasting my Q1 limited resources and I'm glad they are. And I'll tell you why. About 6 month ago a friend of mine send me a file to test in Vista. I consider my friend an computer expert that knows what are virus and I know that he is using McAfee in his PC and in another hand I had AVG Free Edition running in my machine. So, I opened that executable. And what a surprise! That thing was one of those nasty worms that opens ports, changes the home page of your browser and disables your popup blocker. And guess what? AVG did not do anything, the only one that warned me about something trying to open a port in my UMPC was Windows Defender. It did not recognize the Virus but with the information that it gave me I could find the name of the worm and what to do next. So, Windows Defender saved my... you know what.

Sometimes with all the programs and drivers that I test in my Q1 I'm surprised of how fast and stable it still working. And this is the part when I'm glad to have System Restore using part of my HDD and my resources. In less than 6 months it has helped me twice. The first time when I was testing the HID eGalax drivers, in one of the early betas I got the "Blue Screen of Death". Yes, Vista still have that screen. And what saved me was the old "Save Mode" and the System Restore.

Today, and this is why I'm writing all this, System Restore saved me again. I bought a little Webcam made by GE (HO98067) thinking than being XP compatible I had a good chance to get it to work in Vista. But I was wrong. The cam driver screwed my Virtual CDROM driver and my external Lasie External DVD Burner. Do not ask me what the webcam driver has to do with these other two drivers. I do not know. But the fact is that System Restore saved my ... you know what... again.

So, I do not care too much if after reading this note you consider me less than a "geek". Because the fact is that geeks do not use Windows Defender neither System Restore... and if they do, then they do not write about it.