Thursday, February 16, 2012
BIOS, Registry, System Restore
Some people REGULARLY reinstall Windows simply to have a clean machine. The first think I did with this Toshiba Qosmio was to spend 2 hours BURNING the 4 dvds with the disk operating system image and a repair utilities disk so in the worst case scenario I should be able to revert to the way the machine was out of the box. Supposedly there is also some way to boot the machine holding down a certain function key and then tell it to REVERT to the factory settings. One think I did learn about BIOS updates is that 1.) there is NO way to back up and restore your BIOS, 2.) you should NEVER attempt to apply a BIOS update UNLESS you are really having some problem that the BIOS update promises to fix 3.) you should ALWAYS choose to burn a bios update cd and never choose the option to do a windows bios update because if the least little thing goes wrong then the machine must be sent back to the factory. 4.) yet the damn Toshiba company will send you a BIOS UPDATE notice so you think it is somethng you ought to do, like the Windows updates from Microsoft. Oh, also, a restore point does NOT affect the BIOS. A different topic is registry repair and there are many programs which purport to clean up the registry. One is ccleaner which I have tried on an old XP. It lets you BACK UP the registry so you can restore to it if something goes wrong. I am advised that it is best not to try registry cleaners. Experts say that you should only modify the registry by hand IF you know exactly what needs to be changed, but to have such knowledge seems to be equivalent to a degree in computer science.
