Reinstalling Windows has begun now. Good time to clean up the house and do other stuff anyway, been in front of it nonstop the last week or so.
Thanks for trying at least. Guess I know a way to screw up someone's machine good with just a quick registry change now, heh. I'm sure there's even better ones though. I need to get myself a cheap "toy" computer for doing experiments with. Probably plenty I could learn just by messing around but don't wanna mess up my normal machines.
Guessing it must be some kinda software on a bootable Linux distro or something? Unless it boots it's own system I don't think it'd help my current situation..
Is it possible to use a different computer and connect my SSD to it, and edit the registry files for the Windows on my SSD using the OS on the other computer? Maybe there's a software for it?
*looks into what you mentioned*
Ah, you're just suggesting to me a backup software, haha.
Drive is too small to make backing up feasible. It's an SSD from the days when SSDs were small and expensive (2010 - it's a 256GB), and it doesn't have a secondary drive, so I'm constrained for space even without a backup on it. I know there's cheap storage now, but they're slow and break easily in my experience - the cheap Western Digital and Seagate drives you can get at WalMart are, in my opinion, junk that breaks if you look at it the wrong way. Further, they're slow as molasses anyway, pretty sure they're all low-rpm.
What I really want is a nicely sized external SSD. I haven't really looked it up recently so maybe I should, I know SSDs are far more reasonable now. All I know is - mechanical hard drives are something I really wanna stay away from now, they're so much more prone to failure than SSDs and they're unbearably slow anyway.
Once I have that I would do manual backups every so often. I don't want any automatic backups or restores because I like to minimize automatic tasks in Windows. I'll tell it when I'm ready for a backup.
All of that being said, I'm paranoid and nuke my drive and start over every 6 months anyway for purely security reasons. Even though after any uninstallation I'm sure to also wipe %AppData%, %ProgramData%, and of course Program Files of any leftovers, I still find myself worried something could've been introduced that I'm unaware of - it's not like I have the entire folder & file tree of Windows memorized and even if I did it'd be a cumbersome task to check for if something goes and hides a file somewhere in the system folders or something, or modified a legit file which would be even more of a pain to detect.
Lately I've been looking into switching to a blobless system and stuff because I'm one of those people that are trying to protect himself from three-letter agencies. Purism has an interesting thing going for it because they were able to neutralize the Intel ME and got Coreboot going, and now they're talking about getting rid of the binary blobs in it too. So I'm definitely following that project and may bite eventually. Planning on getting that along with some nice pfSense networking hardware when I do. Might try seeing if I could even set-up my own DNS server - though I do generally trust my VPN service's DNS, and I do know the direct IPs of most websites I often use in case of a failure, I still find myself afraid that DNS spoofing or poisoning could eventually happen so I think I'd like to set-up my own DNS too. Might look into that.
But I'll still need a seperate Windows computer for stuff like games and creative softwares (video editors, FL Studio, etc) even if I switch all communication and browsing over to a secure machine.
I should've noted when asking this question too, that when installing Windows (which you need to keep in mind is LTSB as well) I do quite a lot of modifications and use tools like Windows 10 Privacy, DisableWinTracking, BlackBird, Shut-Up 10, and Privacy Repairer, (all of which delete services and blocks things in the hosts file and firewall and set policies and mess in the registry etc) and rip out all kinds of Windows features I don't use (.NET Framework, IE, PowerShell 2.0, WMP, etc), and mess around in the services and Group Policy and stuff, and in the network adapters I disable everything but IPv4, and I introduce my own massive hosts file and blabity blabity blah. So yeah, help for me might have to be a bit specific to my setup due to all of that.
Anyway, yeah thanks for trying to help and all. I came here because I'm really just a kid, and even thought I generally know what I'm doing, there's a difference between people that know what they're doing and people that REALLY know what they're doing. The difference between the boys and the men, so to speak. I figured maybe someone here might be able to teach me a thing or two.
I am a bit confused. You started your first post with this:
For me at least, telling you are a geek indicates that you consider yourself having above average knowledge about computing. For instance, I often present myself as a geek meaning precisely that, that I know more than an average user. Although I am quite vain, that's not vanity as much as a simple provable fact.
Josey's reply contains the single most important piece of advice in this thread: a Macrium system image backup had got you back in business in a few minutes, maybe half an hour depending on the size of the image backup. The same with any other imaging application, Macrium is just one of many.
A geek would know that Macrium and all other imaging programs can be booted from their own rescue media, which then allows you to restore a system image. A geek would have known how to install an imaging application and use it to create rescue media for emergency situations like yours now, and how to create a system image.
Please do not read the above wrong, I am not criticizing you but just expressing my confusion. In any case, when you have clean installed and got Windows up and running again, do not forget to install an imaging application, create its rescue media and create regular system images.
My choice and what I recommend is Macrium Reflect, see the tutorial: Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect Windows 10 Backup Restore Tutorials
Kari
When you take off your tin foil hat maybe you should listen to people that are trying to help you. If you think this maybe you should use Some Linux Distro or simply read the newspaper. What Kari said goes double for me.Lately I've been looking into switching to a blobless system and stuff because I'm one of those people that are trying to protect himself from three-letter agencies. Purism has an interesting thing going for it because they were able to neutralize the Intel ME and got Coreboot going, and now they're talking about getting rid of the binary blobs in it too. So I'm definitely following that project and may bite eventually. Planning on getting that along with some nice pfSense networking hardware when I do. Might try seeing if I could even set-up my own DNS server - though I do generally trust my VPN service's DNS, and I do know the direct IPs of most websites I often use in case of a failure, I still find myself afraid that DNS spoofing or poisoning could eventually happen so I think I'd like to set-up my own DNS too. Might look into that.
I fail to see how it's relevant to my current situation though. It wouldn't be able to help me now, it'd be able to help prevent future issues by making backups. But it's not like I don't know that everyone's supposed to keep backups - I just don't because I don't have the storage space nor the money to buy more of it. Further I format my whole drive and start over every few months anyway because I am, as the next guy put it, "a tinfoil hat".
I don't know much about the company Macrium because I haven't done a lot of research on what a good backup software is because I know that I currently don't have the storage space for it. Further, I'd only want to keep an encrypted backup on an external drive as I'd fear any local backups being stolen (plus it should be seperate anyway, for data safety reasons too) and I don't have the hardware for that yet.
I understand that everyone should make backups. It's basic IT 101 stuff - always keep a backup. Unfortunately I have neither a job nor any money so I don't have the hardware to keep backups right now. All I have is a 16GB flash drive and a 256GB SSD, and I reformat it every few months anyhow. I just need to keep a backup of my user directories (documents etc) anyway, which is as easy as just copying them over to my flash drive. I don't need to save the programs because, to be blunt, they're all pirated anyway so I'll just reacquire and reinstall them all at no cost to me. The only thing that's REALLY important on my whole system is my KeePass database, and I keep many backups of it and several old tiny-capacity USBs I found lying around. Everything else can be deleted and replaced with no problems for me.
I'll start looking into the topic of "good backup software" once that becomes something I have the hardware for. Which may be soon. Again though, bluntly put, probably the reason I never feel terribly inclined to backup is because no actual money of mine has gone into the software on the machine anyway.
I can understand that you can't afford a drive to make backups on. What I don't understand is why you didn't make a backup of the Registry before you decided to start deleting things in the it. A Registry backup wouldn't have taken a lot of space.
I'll look into it all again sometime soon. If I'm gonna get backup drives I may as well get some storage with it too. Would like a place to store all my setup files and videos which can easily take hundreds of GB. Right now I have to keep anything I'm not immediately using deleted.
I do changes to the registry fairly often for various uses, and saving every time gets irritating I guess. I'm annoyed pretty easily by anything repetitive I guess. I hadn't had a problem doing it in years until now.
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