Stop Doing This To Your Computer 

haven't watched the vid yet but lemme tell you the people who have a hundred programs run on start up are the worst, bonus points if they got more than one antivirus software

I've been the local "tech guy" since Win 3.1... I could not agree with you more about ALL the points you made here. You validate my views 100%! Keep up the great work!

Thank you! I thought I was alone warning people about these things. Nice that there are now two of us trying to share real knowledge with our viewers! Registry cleaners have basically paid for my car! As a computer technician over 30 years, the amount of money I've made from people self-inflicting damage from system optimizers like CCLEANER and SYSTEM MECHANIC would easily exceed what I paid for my car.

As a tech enthusiast myself, I appreciate all the tips/fixes and compilation videos you make. None however, am I more appreciative of than this one (not to detract from the usefulness of all your other videos). I'm glad you stressed the importance of each adherence. All too often I see people on the internet trying to take the easy route because it sounds easier. Now you have provided a constructive video explaining the flaws of each problem, I have something to quickly link people to. 👍

The only defragmentation-program I found helped HDDs back in the day was Diskeeper. It seemed light and it also kept the system more responsive by constantly monitoring and organizing the drives. - But as someone who grew up with HDDs and diskettes, I'm extremely grateful for solid-state solutions, especially NVMe-drives. - It's how "transparent" I always wanted storage to be. - No sluggishness, next to no latency, and no noise.

Completely agree that defrag is useless and even counter-productive on an SSD. But I do miss watching the little blocks reorganising themselves on Windows 98 !

Theres a lot of snake oil out there. Your video is well researched and you cover the information well. Security Suites and Registry Defrag/Cleaners are the worst.

Agree with all your points. When I went to study for IT support, the teachers were telling us to use these driver updaters and had most of the bad practices you often will see.

Totally agree with you, when I install/repair I keep it clean. No crappy apps that you don't really need. Keep it simple no duplicate apps and download and install drivers from the manufacturer's website. You should include Tune-up suites that promises to speedup the performance but instead still precious system resources and even makes your computer more slower.

Thank you for making things so clear and understandable, which seriously makes my own life a tad easier. As a PC builder and freelance/hobbyist PC repair person (Been around since C64 times!), I would just like to add that people still rather blame Windows for being UNSTABLE, while I am convinced that it is usually not Windows that's unstable, but the HARDWARE or it's drivers. But people just see a Windows BSOD and blame the messenger. I realize it's hard to draw the line where exactly Windows ends and 'hardware' begins... PS: I am very picky about my subscriptions, but this channel really got mine from the first video that I watched. Very much on spot and useful; depite being the basics for myself. Still I want to see where this channel is going!

Unfortunately most Windows PC comes with McAfee Antivirus installed. Get rid of it

I worked in Gateway support back in 1999-2006 and we hated the bundled AV programs that came with the systems. This was back in Windows 95/98/2000 days before Microsoft Security Essentials later known as Windows Defender came about.

100% agree with the content of your video. I have so many customers who have installed stupid/unnecessary softwares, who complain their computer is running slowly. I am always uninstalling those crappy pieces of softwares as a first step. I am always recommending them to stick to Windows original functions, such as Windows Defender and to NEVER use a registry cleaning software without knowing exactly what they're doing. Unfortunately, most people don't trust me... and when they call me one more time some weeks or months later, I see they've reinstalled their crap.

Linux & BSD would tend to disagree that the registry is faster than plain text configuration. There are pros and cons to each approach but all in all, systems are so complex these days, that doing deep customization to any OS is an overwhelming mess. I miss config.sys and autoexec.bat :(

I remember back in college some of my friends in other majors would come to me because they couldn't get the paid version of AVG Internet Security Suite to uninstall properly, and I would have to explain that if it still leaves hooks in the system, that the only fix is to go in and manually delete the folders and registry keys, and some of the folders, somehow even the admin account couldn't delete them because they didn't have permission and there were DLL's in there that would autostart services, so therefor the only way to truly remove it is to boot a live ISO of Linux and delete the folders that way, and with all of this hassle it's easier to just back up everything important like school projects and license info for Microsoft Office and whatever else they needed and just reinstall Vista and all the drivers, because I could do that 3 times over in the time it takes to do all that other song and dance.

I used to tell people that Norton started out good... They were two dudes that didn't like all the crime and such in the local park. they put a rowboat in the pond and would hang out with their rifles. A few months later they wanted some more comfort, so got a bigger rowboat with a cooler. Then after a bit a fancier boat with a fridge and a grill on the back. Then they wanted to up their arms and put some heavy guns on it. After a while though it was a battleship and no one wanted to go to the park anymore because you couldn't even see the sun. and the battleship filled the entire pond.

Before I switched to nvmes and ssds, I used to use crap cleaner and o&o defrag. But stopped using both after the switch to ssds and nvmes. Although, dropping crap cleaner took a whole lot longer to do. As for AV, I used to use Kaspersky back in the day and up until 6 months ago, I was using bitdefender, but dropped it. Now all I use on my Windows system is Defender and Ublock Origin. But I rarely use my Windows system these days. I basically keep it around to play with the new versions of Wiindows. Great video as always.

I'm tech support for all of my friends (have been since the days of 8-bit computing). I am going to include a link to this video with any repairs or builds I do moving forward. Nothing is more frustrating than handing a friend their zippy new or cleaned system, only to go back 2 days later to find windows takes 5 minutes to boot up and task manager is filled with dozens of resource heavy TSR's that I did not install (there is no reason for a casual game to boot with windows.) Worst offenders for bloatware: GeekSquad and other retail based tech support desks. Had a friend upgrade his laptop memory with them recently (a Dell Inspiron which has no easy access to memory modules without removing the mobo) and his system came back with all kinds of new auto-load software. Can't speak for all locations, but...um no, actually I can.

I like the little little round Borg light on your computer case. It's a fun little add-on, and looks cool in your backdrop.

I appreciate this info, being a mechanical engineer, I'm a computer dummy, I like tech talk that expose the bull that prey on ignorance

I started using computers back in the 80's and this video justifies my decisions over the years. Thank You. I don't keep up with the tech like I used to and understand the core concepts haven't really changed. I never update anything unless forced to and those come straight from the manufacturer. The only problem I face ATM is the SSD used for Windows/Documents/etc. is beginning to get full and I'm having an issue trying to figure out what files/folders which would be recreated if necessary can be removed for space. The real storage drive used for the x86 files I can maintain easily myself, but the User Drive is daunting - because of things like you mention with the registry - I don't want to delete a file I need. I already move save games in and out to save space. I also move pictures, videos or any downloaded file OFF the C: drive onto another for the same reasons. NVM: I was motivated to learn I can move my DOCS folder :)

Thank you for the great skills and knowledge you've imparted to me. I greatly appreciate your contribution on the video to my success in my work at my department. I consider I was lucky to have you as a teacher, and then I was even more fortunate to have you as a mentor. Thank you for always sharing your professional knowledge and expertise. It's so inspiring to have a master who helps others. thank you again. 😃😃

I used to work in an Air Force lab and the policy was always wait 6 months after updates, especially on servers. That lesson was learned the hard way. A single update has broken several thousand systems at once. Not a fun job restoring all of those systems so that they were working again. Personally, I delay the updates. The hours I work and when the computer wants to update don't exactly agree. When I want to switch to Linux, I usually do the update before rebooting.

If I buy a computer already built like a laptop simply because those are impractical to build myself, I often just do a clean install of Windows. That gets rid of any bloatware that the manufacturer installed. I would also prefer to upgrade from the Home edition that comes on most prebuilt PCs up to Professional. I want to be able to edit group policies if ever a need arises. Also the professional edition doesn't come with those terrible bloatware games like Candy Crush. I honestly never play that game at all. I would not play it even if I was 10 years old!!

Wow! This has been a trip down memory Lane. I’ve been a Linux/BSD user for a number of years now. I actually learned how to clean the registry myself when it became evident that packages that simply refused to uninstall, were doing so from the registry. The last time I had to do that was back in the Window XP days. I agree about the importance of keeping your computer patched. It would be even nicer if a home user could choose to receive security updates only and Microsoft would honor that choice. It would be even better if update were more efficient and reliable. The slowest update utility in Linux is faster than Microsoft update. How do I know? I still have friends who use Windows. Out of curiosity, how long does it take to install Windows 11 these days including the updates? Just a basic install. Anyway, you sound like a pretty cool dude. Your channel just showed up and I checked it out. I’ll leave a thumbs up but I won’t be subscribing, LOL. Take care and have fun.

Very informative, I suspected this, but you confirmed it. Thanks.

The problem with Windows Update is not the content that it is delivering. The big problem is the automatic reboots. That makes using it a complete non-starter for me. An operating system should never, ever, be restarting a PC on its own whims. EVER!!! Besides halting on an unrecoverable exception - i.e. the infamous BSOD stop error - the OS does NOT get to decide on its own when a system reboots. No, popping up a little notification saying it's about to happen does not make it any more acceptable. What if the server is headless and never gets logged into interactively? Do you think that notification will be of any use? I have completely eliminated Windows as the OS behind any of my non-interactive systems as a direct answer to Microsoft's decisions around automatic reboots becoming increasingly aggressive and more difficult to suppress. As for my interactive systems, they all have Windows Update set to do nothing unless manually instructed to do so. This is the only way short of disabling it entirely to prevent Windows from automatically rebooting the system, and it is ridiculously convoluted to do so these days. It requires specialist knowledge and either the use of group policy (which only available in Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows) or a straight up registry hack to pull off. In other words, good luck to the average home user. I can forgive/tolerate many things in the design of an OS, but uncommanded reboots that are effectively nearly impossible to prevent is absolutely not one of them. Until Microsoft addresses this issue, which it doesn't look like they have any intention of doing, for me Windows Update will never again remain in automatic mode. If that ever becomes impossible, I will be disabling it entirely.

Can't argue with any of this highly sensible advice. Thank goodness threre are people with inside knowledge who freely spread advice to keep others safe. This is a real eye-opener and I'm going to take the advice adhering to it closely. So very useful and thank you - got to give this a like.

I believe Defender was part of Sysinternals, which was exceptionally good, at least until Microsoft bought them out and 'tweaked' it. I used Sysinternals quite a bit.

"Every supported version of Windows today should be using an SSD." Key word is "should". People are *still* buying new systems with Windows 11 and a mechanical drive as the boot drive... and then complaining about bad performance. Regarding driver updater programs, I 100% agree on "generic" updaters that claim to update everything; however updaters from the actual vendors, for example NVIDIA's updater for their drivers, or Intel's, or for OEMs like Dell their updater that just does the BIOS and the hardware they ship on a system, while some might argue how useful they are (even though updates often include security patches), chances are they aren't going to be malware vectors.

Simple, sensible, and straight forward.... it's why I stop by. Thanks!

There are six computers in my house. The newest came with Windows 11. Five of them run Windows 10, and four of those are "officially" unable to run Windows 11. All run well and do the jobs that are needed of them. Am I going to junk 4 of them just because Microsoft decided that they aren't good enough? Hell no. There is a reason that people still use "unsupported" versions of Windows, and it isn't to "stick it to the man".

If you are running a SSD compatible OS - like Windows; you should be using "defrag" as the OS will use the "defrag" cycle to trim sectors of deleted for use thus making writing to the disk quicker as the erase step is complete. If you have non-OEM SSD like Seagate you can allocate part of the disk as a buffer for this work to happen at a hardware level in the background.

Thanks for your helpful explaining. You come over well, and easy to understand.

Not to mention modern Windows default defrag often does this automatically in the background if I'm not mistaken.

the 1st snake oil i was "tasted" before is tune up utilities program..

Even Microsoft does not recommend using registry cleaners. They discontinued their own registry cleaner from Windows 95

One of my grandmother's old laptops ended up with a nasty piece of adware that hijacked nearly every window that came up. McAffee was totally useless.I finally struggled through installing an ad blocker in chrome, and there was at least a dozen or more ads being blocked every second. After finding the adware process in task manager i tried unsucessfully to delete it because it restarted itself too quickly to actually delete it. Next up i went looking around and installed an auto clicker. I lined up the confirmation boxes to end the process and delete the file, and i activated the auto clicker. That finally worked to delete the adware and she was able to browse facebook in peace.

0:57 That's not entirely true. The original drink was definitely not snake oil but a mixture of wine and coca extract, designed as a painkiller and a treatment for nervous disorders, developed by John Pemberton, who was an actual doctor/surgeon. The recipe totally changed though because first the city where he lived banned alcohol so the wine was replaced by a sugar and kola nut syrup and in 1903 the coca extract was changed to an extract from coca leafs that were treated to take the cocaine out because at that point cola was no longer used as medicine but sold as a 'fruity soda drink with a kick' and addiction risks became a concern. A few additional tweaks to the recipe later and the Coca Cola we still drink today was born. I bet poor old Doc Pemberton would turn in his grave if he knew 150 years later his creation is considered as 'the snake oil tonic that became a popular beverage that makes you fat and rots your teeth' 😄

For what it's worth ... I've taken a practice of getting a system stable, then disabling *ALL* anti-virus, restore points, swap files, updates and defender tools. I ran win7 this way for over 8 years during which it ran perfectly without a single issue. Now, on windows 10 I will do the same thing and so far... not a single problem. A lot of the "security vulnerabilities" that we hear so much about just never become a problem if you run your system with just a little common sense and patching the OS can -- and often does -- tend to destabilize it. Just this morning, in another video, I watched a hardware tech fixing a laptop where the BIOS had been erased by windows update ... and that's not a risk I intend to take. The truth is that Windows Update started with the best of intentions. But now it's become a bloatware distribution tool that gives Microsoft way too much power over it's users.

This was a great video! You mirrored alot of the opinions of Leo Laporte (whom I watched on TechTV, so I am a little biased). But I feel you are spot on about add on anti-virus! Anyways, loving the channel, thanks for all the useful information! Keep Rocking!

Totaly agree, I have been telling my customers basically since Win 10 and Defender that they dont need the speed sucking bloatware anti virus suites but a few still think they need it as it must be better than defender, Harvey Norman (or Hardly Normal) have been selling Norton to customers telling them it will fix all there slow running problems which finally kills any opperating speed they had. We can't complain though as it keeps us busy. Cheers Mick

I agree with the other viewer's comments on diskkeeper. I'll add that it was good at a time when Windows Defrag wasn't rewritten to what it is today. With that said, Windows Defrag is needed, especially when you have a mix of mechanical HDD's and the Nand Technolgy SSD"s. I've usually had this mix more recently, and a nice thing I've found about the latest verion(s) of Windows Defrag, is that it does a great job on mechanical HDDs AND works well for SSDs as too, by avoiding a traditional defrag on these, but instead invokes that TRIM command you mentioned, that is occasionally needed.

I agree with you. Getting Malware on a HDD you can re-format the drive and reload windows. With a SSD hard drive it's 50/50 if it can be saved. If the malware gets into the controller portion of the SSD, it's done. Back up your files often.

Outstanding!! Thank you sir

i used to work in an PC shop that also did repairs. when we got pc's in and laptops in from a big seller we would boot them up and remove all anti virus software and bloatware junk. standard practice for us as we knew it would just bog down the system. we wanted the users to have a untainted introduction to the product. we did sell a anti virus software on the side but we wouldnt install it. we didnt sell avast or norton or mcafee (those ones are disgusting bloatware and shouldnt exist in my opinion) we sold eset nod32, a low profile anti virus software that doesnt bog down the system.

I will be getting a solid state PC for the first time soon, so it's good to know I should not defrag. I had no idea. Very glad I ran across this video. I've never had an issue with CCleaner, CleanUp!, or Advanced Uninstaller Pro. In fact, the computer repair shop I volunteered at used CCleaner and CleanUp! as part of their repair protocol.

Regardless, we still need a little bit more control over Windows Update in 10 and 11, like in Windows 7 at least.

I've been working on computers since 1985. I have my own IT repair business for 20 years and recently retired. I remember the Norton Commander and writing batch files for system maintenance to run windows defragger and virus scans every morning. Windows update has been a pain in the butt at times when an update BSOD's a system, but for the most part it has been a good thing for security updates and sometimes for driver updates. Windows has been good to me because it provided me a paycheck but at times IE. Windows Me creating 10's of thousand files on it's own sucked. I have used Norton since 1985 when i worked for the Government and I have no regrets, it has saved countless computers from viruses. I have used McAfee and several others and agree for the most part the big guys in anti-virus are about the same. In the old days I had to chase the files and reboot in safe mode or run Norton from a Floppy boot disk. I agree today Windows is much better about it's security and updates which saved me countless hours nowadays on my systems. I enjoy watching your videos and agree on most things but sometimes you get it wrong as we all do at times.

It is the 'Security Suite' that turned me off to purchasing many of the antivirus software. Some were so invasive as to be detrimental to what = I = wanted to do. Norton, I particularly hated and McAfee wasn't much better. At one point many of the vast number of antivirus software publishers started toning them down because of that complaint from consumers. I had one of the first IBM compatible computers (8086) and really didn't need an antivirus until sometime after purchasing my first Pentium. For that reason, I view much of the talk about antiviruses as more hype than anything. Even now, my logs show nothing. The Defender in Windows is pretty much all you need.

Thanks for sharing! 🙂🤓

The only time you would need to update a driver is if the one you currently have installed isn't working properly or not compatible. As you said "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

You're a very wise and pragmatic person who knows the matter! Thank you!

I completely agree with you on the software that comes along for a ride in other software.

I really like your bench/table. Plenty of space!

Many of us still rely on HDDs. Defragging is a critical maintenance operation.

12:20 - Defragger - Agreed....But. I keep my operating system on an SSD and my data on a platter drive. It's about extending the life of my SSD by not using it as my work drive. Thus...I need to defrag the work drive from time to time.

very informative, thank you 🙂

I truly enjoyed watching your video on my Windows 7. I don't do anything important on it, but it's perfect for watching videos and streaming music.

Spot on!

Yes, Windows Update is important. Its just as important that Windows does lab tests before releasing them. I remember Windows Update breaking printers, and even deleting or hiding documents on the drive. I mean C',om. That is why i dont trust the Updates, and will wait 2 weeks, then install them, after they have the bugs gone

You were echoing things I’ve been telling friends and family for years. I’m not a computer professional but I’m the resident nerd at work and around friends and family.

There's a company called Gen Digital that markets Norton, Avast, LifeLock, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender and CCleaner. This company is so bad about upsell popups and aggressive marketing. Every antivirus program that I have encountered has a cleanup utility, because they do such a poor job of unistallling their own software.

Before SSD's came on the scene and somewhat fast hard drives were available, I "discovered" that if you maxxed out the RAM you could install and *THEN* put the Windows System Swap (Virtual Memory File) on a Hard Disk Drive secondary to the drive that the Operating System was installed on a Primary/Main Hard Disk Drive, you could *CONSIDERABLY* increase performance and reduce access times!!! All this due to the fact that the I/O of a single Hard Disk Drive wasn't getting hammered by system calls *AND* VM/Swap File calls!!!

I'm with you 100% on this. People ask me what antivirus I run, and I tell them just the default on Windows, no third parties. They're stunned. Defraggers are holdovers from a bygone generation. Reg cleaners were always oversold. While I want good updates, my gripe with Windows Update is when they *force* an update down and you don't know it's coming until your machine spontaneously reboots with no opportunity to defer it. Gotta be a better way to broker those. For users who need to do a short-term task, just need to fire up their machine for a simple task, but then see that update turn their objective into an hour-long effort, that's when we've lost sight of the trees for the forest. As I said, there's gotta be a better way to broker between the two extremes of *no* updates and *forced now* updates. Need a little Wisdom of Solomon to discern what that is.

Windows updates sometimes install/update your device drivers without asking you and sometimes it give you bad drivers for your devices and thats why I disable this part of it.

20:04 Actually NO people that say that are not completely wrong. Yes not doing updates leaves your system vulnerable, but Microsoft at times have pushed updates with bugs that have destroyed uses files or locked them out of them.

Microsoft recommends using an SSD on Windows 11. The Windows Subsystem for Android requires an SSD. Microsoft has been thinking of requiring SSDs for the next version of Windows

Just wanted to thank you for all your educational videos - you rock !

Finally someone spoke about the stupid oil.

19:22 - This bit here I kind of want to take issue with. I agree that disabling Windows Update completely is a mistake. But, Update as installed and configured natively on Win10 and Win11 systems is as much a risk as disabling it altogether. Win10 removed the ability for most users to hold updates and apply them upon approval. Now, for most users, they just get forced on whenever Windows wants to do them. You can put them off, and there's the whole trick of metered connections, but there should be (and used to be) an option for the user to hold updates until they are ready to install them. The reasons are two-fold: One - updates can be researched before being applied. More than once on my system alone, I have run into Windows updates that were broken upon release and had to be clawed back after install. Two - this prevents the user from being surprised by sudden shutdowns and lost work. If the user is in control of the update, this becomes much less of an issue. And I also know you can change this with certain versions or by hacking GPEditor onto the system - you should not have to. It used to be an option that was taken away for little good reason.

I hated Norton or any of those software suites. They ran all the time causing ram consumption, even if you paid for the full service, there was still pop ups to buy more or to rate them. If you played any pc games or stream videos, the scanner would scan in the background causing your games or stream to lag for a few. You were almost forbidden to pause any of it for such or they would make it so hard to pause/stop it, you'd just rage fit. The price was insane or all that crap too. I would rather spend $80 a year on a patreon or something to a youtube who teaches me something computer wise. Just learn to use your computer default cleaners, avoid shady sites and dont install anything unless its add on safe, malware safe and paywall safe. Also learn to safely clean your computer externallylike around the fans.

Pffff I could bring on this info in less than vice minutes without leaving out anything useful. But you are a perfect metaphor for explaining how much a pain a Windows system can be. It makes you feel you need to go through the hassle to do what you want to do with it.

You can disable Windows update for good with the program Windows Update Blocker 1.7, windows update is super dangerous, because windows will restart your pc without you knowing, so if you have important information in an unsafed notepad on an encrypted drive, your data will be lost forever.

Just wow, I just brought new computer and i'm glad this video recommend me first before I do something like spending for anti-virus. Thanks for making this clear to me. You have my subs bro

Good Video, Thank You!

"Snappy Drivers !" is a free driver updater. I have used it for many years with good success. Though I often still download the video driver suite manually.

Using Norton Utilities on your system is like playing Russian Roulette with an Automatic Pistol.

HDDs still have some utility. Sure, they're slower, but as long as you're not booting or putting your most common software on it, it's fine for videos and even some video games and programs.

SSD and NVME drives do NOT need defragmentation. Defragmentation is only usefull on drives with moving parts!

I used to use cCleaner, but not for the registry. I used to to empty and (hopefully) securely delete items I had in the recycle bin. I remember it had Guttman level of write passes for deletion. I never tried to confirm that it did its job, but I had liked that feature. Then the last time I looked into it, it felt "sell out" type and I gave up on it

No, magnetic drives don't have tracks "exactly like a record". The tracks DO NOT "start at the beginning of the drive and run all the way to the end of the platter". Magnetic drives have tracks that simply go around the platter *once*, forming a circle. Come on, you should know this. *Optical* discs have a single track that covers the whole surface.

XP and Vista users dude. Don't leave them out. there's still a few short million people, or... computers that rely on XP cause they run software those people still need and may always need. Unless Trim is introduced to these distros, they're gonna keep buying hard disks. Plus, wouldn't defragging a RAID setup be helpful?

I forgotten what is like in the Windows world after ditching windows for linux many years already. Yup, i ain't missing much apparently lol. Switching to linux has been the best thing i ever did.

Ah the early days when I used those crapwares. Now my windows installation is more lean than ever, and I have an ssd as my boot drive, it trims automatically, nothing that I have to do.

About 2-3 years back I had one of these driver update programs "kill" my PC's motherboard. it was steadily going through all the drivers and I just had to go to the toilet. I came back only to discover that it was in the process of upgrading the UEFI BIOS firmware 😬- and when it was done, it performed a hardware reset, only to do another, and then another, and another... yeah, really just a constant unbreakable resetting loop. This was a GIGABYTE motherboard, which means that it had an extra backup BIOS Flash-ROM. So, I took a peek in the manual for the key-press combination for activating the backup BIOS. But no luck, it was just completely unresponsive and stuck in this resetting gridlock. - To make matters worse, this was just 2 days before the Christmas holidays, so I had to find a WebShop which could send me a new motherboard from one day to the next, or I would have to do without my main PC through the holidays and I had been looking forward to doing some "winters day events" in my favorite MMORPG. Anyway I did manage to get hold of an ASRock motherboard and rebuild the PC in time. - So, fast forward to the present, or rather around March this year (2023). I wanted to build a new home-server and went and dug the old GIGABYTE motherboard out of storage. I recently added SMD soldering to my skillset and had build up the courage to try and fix it. Or as I figured, I really had nothing to loose, since it was more or less just a very fancy paperweight like that, and best case scenario; if I could get it going, I might be able to spare some money on this home-server project. So, I de-soldered the tiny Flash-ROM chip labeled M_BIOS, used my XGecu T56 programmer with an adaptor (it couldn't detect it while "in circuit") to dump its content to a BINary file, only for later investigations, downloaded the latest BIOS firmware from GIGABYTEs website, used the T56 again to flash it onto the chip, and soldered it back in its place on the motherboard. An operation I have already done a few times on some old vintage computers from the '80s, but never actually attempted on a modern SMD motherboard. - It must have been quite a sight; me standing there for 5-10 minutes, after hooking up the motherboard in my test rig, with my jaw on the floor, staring all googly-eyed in disbelief at a message going "CMOS corrupted, data has been cleared. Press a key to enter UEFI BIOS Setup." - I had not expected or even dared to hope that it would work. But I had actually managed to re-flash the BIOS in the most cumbersome and manual way. - Just to satisfy my curiosity, I went onto GIGABYTEs website again, and downloaded some BIOS firmwares from some other random motherboard models of the same era... and what do you know, one of them matched my BINary dump-file... So, the driver update had obviously just picked a firmware update for the wrong GIGABYTE motherboard. - Yeah, not touching any of those driver update assassins ever again, not even with an 11 foot pole.

Yes absolutely, if you’re running windows 7 in any business (or home) setting, DON’T!!

I used to think that people who disabled Windows update were crazy, but after 3 consecutive updates that randomly caused two different computers to become usable to the point of having to simply power them off and restart, I disabled Windows update and haven't had that problem since. I understand that there is a risk, but the effect of those updates were comparable to what a virus would do to my system.

I really enjoy logging into a PC that wont print/connect to Wireless/you name it and finding Windows 10 at 1909 or earlier. Updates are important.

I like the way yo explain the stuff, It's not commun seeing tech with charisma.

thank you for your vids. I fixed and update my win 11 iso online steps "before" issuing sfc ccommand. ❤

I’ve had customers who mistook opening either an unknown email or have extensions selected in their browser to install all extensions. Their OS got Malware with a white screen and locked up where you couldn’t deactivate the bad actors script to uninstall it.

Valid criticism of auto updates would be laptops with Intel 8th-11th Gen hardware (Especially HP). At the shop we run into many that update to either too new of a version of Windows 10 or update to 11 and have serious issues. This is because ELAN, Synaptic, etc don't have a validated driver & without disabling touchpad, touchscreen, or another core component the system BSODs to infinity. Additionally we have seen recent Windows updates force incorrect drivers for GPUs causing serious issues (11 seems to have less issues in this regard). Solid general advice for the average end user. I would probably mention during the anti-virus section that an ad/script blocker is valuable probably moreso these days. uBlock Origin is one I highly recommend & for the more tech savvy NoScript or CanvasBlocker. And preferably stop using Windows (I use Arch btw). Overall good video, kudos my dude.

Many years ago I bought a program that "fixes" the pc and updates drivers. I was left with a broken pc. Not only did it crash, it wouldn't boot. I thought drivers were extremely important, but what is more important is that the driver you have for each service is working. I narrowed the problem down to a graphics driver it said needed updating. Funny, because windows says it doesn't need updating. So, avoiding updating the 8GB graphics card allowed me to restore the PC back to order. I had spent nearly £480 on pc repair with a technician and still had problems. I resorted to the internet and fixed it myself and now it is stable. My policy is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

the big problem with windows update is the resetting random things that are not even connected to the fix, and this is why people like streamers etc are disabling them, since it can take 4 or 5 hours to find out what the heck they changed in settings this time. The bloat is something people complained about when things like the Amiga was advertising a new and improved Amiga 1 that, never landed, and some people never got off that soapbox.

Great videos and greetings from Denmark. I used to download CCleaner and all those programs more than 10 years ago, and hated when you had to unclick all those extra programs. Since then, I only update drivers and programmes from the manufactures programs or sites directly.... and yes, I have had to reinstall windows multiple times before... Now I do it maybe twice a year, just to have a fresh machine. :)

Trying to be as polite as possible 20 maybe 15 years ago this video made sense to a point. No legit technician uses any of that stuff or does any of those things. What would have been helpful is about a video of best practices and things that do work. Examples: Periodic Windows backups, enabling system restore, using RAID and NAS, best practices especially for DIY PCs to update (drivers, BIOS, software, Windows, etc). Just to mention a few ideas.

Windows Updates will start breaking and you'll have to apply the old "Delete (or rename) the Software Updates folder" fix to get it to work again. This is phase 1. After awhile, that doesn't work and your updates start failing every month. If you work on it long enough to get it to work then it downloads an update that will finally brick your system. That's the pattern I've seen. So if my Windows OS is past its prime, before Microsoft can drive a stake through its heart, I turn off Automatic Updates. This goes for servers as well as workstations.

You're absolutely right. I find no fault in what you say.

Great advice, thank you.