Let your PC start the new year right!

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ISSUE 19.02 • 2022-01-10 LANGALIST By Fred Langa Taking a little time now to thoroughly check and proactively service your Windows PC can pay off big
[See the full post at: Let your PC start the new year right!]

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lmacri, TechTango, abbodi86, geekdom

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Selecting: Comment from the full post yields this URL and a “404 not found” error:

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/let-your-pc-start-the-new-year-right-2022

On hiatus {with backup and coffee}
offline▸ Win10Pro 2004.19041.572 x64 i3-3220 RAM8GB HDD Firefox83.0b3 WindowsDefender WuMgr
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Microfix

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has been reported thanks, fixing this is outwith my authorisation.

"-rw-rw-rw-" extreme computing

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Fixed.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady

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Re: Acronis True Image

In addition to being a paid with a 30-day free trial app, Acronis True Image is available as a “free” download for those using Western Digital drives in their systems.

Simply go to the Western Digital Software & Downloads webpage and click on Acronis True Image for Western Digital.

According to Western Digital,

“Acronis True Image for Western Digital software delivers easy, efficient, cyber protection, integrating award-winning backup with an AI-based defense against ransomware and cryptojacking attacks. Acronis True Image for Western Digital backs up everything from operating systems and applications to settings and individual files, with support for both PC and Mac machines.

Download of this software provides a 5-year license to use it with your compatible drive. This software is available only under a limited time offer and must be redeemed by download and install within 90 days of purchase or by December 31, 2023, whichever is earlier.”

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AlexEiffel, lmacri

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Fred, this is a very thorough post full of handy tidbits. I’ve been a DOS and Windows user for decades and your article was a great roundup. Thanks!  I picked up the Sumo updater and HDDScan utilities. I had recently switched to Macrium Reflect 8 when it was released recently and I love it.

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Fred Langa wrote:

Taking a little time now to thoroughly check and proactively service your Windows PC can pay off big

Waiting a year to perform routine maintenance isn’t proactive, it’s reactive.

Fred Langa wrote:

In short: Your PC isn’t the same as it was a year ago. Heck, it’s probably not the same as it was last week!

Other than for a couple of new installations, mine (with the exception of the unavoidable aging of hardware) is the same as it was a year ago, and even last week.  I use Task Scheduler to perform routine maintenance on a daily/weekly schedule, to include running TeraByte’s Image for Windows in the wee hours every Sunday morning.  Fred, you turned me on to TeraByte’s software (BootItNG) more than twenty years ago, I’ve been using it ever since, and it has not failed me even once.  I keep a library of drive images on my NAS as well as two HDD’s stored offline.

If I do want to uninstall something, I use Revo Uninstaller Pro for a thorough cleanup.  It also has a very handy utility for cleaning up Windows junk files, scouring every drive/partition one selects.  I have 19 partitions scattered across six Samsung SSD’s in my daily driver, and Windows “Defragment and Optimize Drives” (which runs TRIM) is on a weekly schedule.  Samsung Magician keeps an eye on my drives’ conditions.

As for Chkdsk,

it’s already taken care of.  I stay fully patched and updated with Windows Update, but all of the programs/apps/utilities I use can check for their own updates, so I don’t use any “updater” utility.  OneDrive and Robocopy (run via Task Scheduler) do an excellent job of keeping all of my data stored in triplicate.

Create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates, in case you need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do. We don't all have to do the same things.

Computer Specs

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We use Veeam commercial backup solutions for our business.  They also offer a free Windows Backup agent.  I’ve recommended it to our users for their personal devices.  [They do require you register (create an account) in order to download.]

https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html?ad=downloads

Help to install is available at

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/installation_process.html?ver=50

Searching YouTube, you can find some 3rd party walk through install videos if you’re the type who learn by seeing rather than reading.

The nice thing, at least I think, is it offers an easy creation of a disaster recovery / bare metal boot media to restore from.  Just another free backup solution to add to your repository of potential backup software solutions.

They also offer a free “community edition” of their backup and replication suite, which can manage backups for multiple devices (small home server and workstation setup).  It’s been a couple of years since I’ve used it.  One thing I remember is it comes with 10 licenses, but they don’t count licenses quite like you’d expect.  If I remember correctly, a plain old PC/workstation counts as one license, but anything with a server edition of software installed (Windows Server 2012R2, 2016, 2019, etc.) uses 3 licenses.  Still, it worked well for our initial needs, and subsequently lead to us purchasing the commercial version as our needs grew.

And, no, I’m not a sales rep for, nor do I receive compensation, affiliate referral kickbacks or the like.  It’s just something I happened upon while searching for backup solutions, and ended up liking the product.  Their handing out a free mini “community version” that met our initial needs, was also a factor in my appreciation for their approach.

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