At 10:04 PM 2006-12-21, Steven C. Barr(x) wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Frank Strauss" <[log in to unmask]>
> > the old Quicktime would absolutely not allow itself to be
> > removed.  I spent about an hour on the phone with a very nice Apple person
> > in Canada, but his final suggestion was to wipe the hard drive and start
> > over.  A local tech tried and decided he would have to do Registry editing,
> > and it ended up cheaper in the long run to get a new computer.

First of all, "Wipe and rebuild" seems to be the suggestion offered 
by most tech support scripts (remember, most/all of the people you 
talk to on the phone are reading scripts, not really thinking) end 
with "Wipe and rebuild" as it will make the problem go away--along 
with many other things. A friend of mine has been told this by 
Sympatico (Bell Canada's DSL service), I was told this by Charter 
Cable when in Glendale, California in the early days, and I'm pretty 
sure I've had a few other techs suggest this.

>Note that Registry editing is NOT nearly as complicated as most folks
>may think! Windows provides "regedit.exe" (click on "Run" in the
>start menu and enter "regedit" in the resulting dialog box) which
>has a "Find" function which can find every occurrence of a word or
>character group in the Registry. "Find" the name (the offending
>program) and remove each occurence (usually in "Run" entries or
>those associated with file extensions).
>
>Tedious, yes...boring, yes...but not complicated (and useful to
>know if one gets hit by a virus...)

Very good advice.

Step 1. Go to Add/Remove programs
Step 2. delete files
Step 3. follow Steve's advice, above

However, if you have a virus, the first step is to go to Norton's 
information site and it will usually give you instructions for 
complete manual removal.

The last time I rebuilt a machine was when IE6 wouldn't work right. 
It happened a second time and it turned out to be corruption in the 
user settings of IE6 which I was able to copy from another machine 
and it's worked flawless since--until I upgraded to IE7.

One other hint: Two similar computers running the same version of the 
OS is perhaps the best way to troubleshoot almost anything that goes 
wrong, and even if troubleshooting fails, you are still not 100% 
down. Your data files should be cloned back and forth between the two 
with something like ViceVersa pro from http://www.tgrmn.com/

I have rambled on about storage protection here:

http://richardhess.com/notes/category/computer-data/data-storage/

Happy Holidays!

Richard

Richard L. Hess                   email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.