On Mon, 27 Jan 2014 12:12:17 -0500, "Mr. Luddite" wrote:

On 1/27/2014 12:02 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 27 Jan 2014 11:22:33 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 1/27/2014 10:03 AM, F.O.A.D. wrote:

I'm surprised so many of you windoze acolytes don't run it at least once
a month in order to seek out and repair those bad clusters the OS creates.


I don't know Harry. For kicks I just ran chkdsk on this five year old
Vista laptop for the first time since I bought it. Took about 20-25
minutes and reported zero bad files or clusters. I've used this
computer a lot.


Generally you only get crosslinked and orphan clusters when you do
power dumps without a shutdown, closing all open files.
I think it is a worse problem with FAT drives than NTFS drives.

Norton DD does a whole lot better job with this than CHKDSK. It can
fix partition table problems and other beasies that make a PC a
doorstop.


Every computer we've had, including my wife's, have been allergic to
Norton. If a new computer comes with it I never enable it. If it *has*
been enabled (like on a couple of my wife's computers) I purge the disk
of any remnants of Norton. It caused more problems than it prevented, IMO.


I've decided based on some advice from an IT professional that Microsoft Security Essentials is the
way to go. Haven't had a virus yet. [Knock on wood.]