Window 7 Ultimate - What Window Update Patches Should I avoid?

[HatoriTakaya]

Updated: Most of the Clean Installation and re-installation of the system has been completed. Right now I'm already doing final tests to see if there's any errors that to squash that is hardware related. Any hardware testing programs or software tools you can inform me about would be appreciated.

Currently the tools to test the system with is as follows:

• Memtest86

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Summary

So I've pretty much given up and going to do a clean installation. What I do want to know is there any particular Window Update Patches I should not install on Window 7 Ultimate 64 Bit System. I remember there was a few mentioned in this forum that affects Visual Novels in particular but I can't recall them at the moment. Well that's all I can come up with and hope you guys can point them out for me. If you want to leave advice on doing a clean install or even on the matter of Partitions on HDD that I'm planning to perform. Please read further on the relevant section. If you want to give advice on other matters related to this opening post, go for it. Otherwise I'll be preparing for the most part before going ahead with it this week.

Symptoms and System Issues

So I didn't really want to take this path but I don't think I've seen how badly my computer has been functioning until recently. It basically can't complete any tasks that requires:

• Installations (100% rate)
• Uninstalls (100% rate)
• Load 'My Computer' Window and Status on the HDD and DVD Drives Completely (or Correctly). Progress bar never reaches to the end. (100% rate)
• Mount Any Image files (75% rate)
• All Mounting Software goes into a never ending loop of trying to start up (80% of time it does this)
• Task Manager actually Crashes (at the rate of 60% and going higher)
• Occasionally some Visual Novels fail to execute (25% rate)
• Occasionally ITH fails to hook properly (10% rate)
• System Restore has no effect (And I'm pretty sure I would rather just do a clean install if it's extreme)
• System comes out clean from Viruses, Malicious and other stuff that can be detected by your Anti-virus and anti-malware software. Avast, Spybot Search and Destroy, Malwarebytes are my key software to test is there's any undesirables.

Basic Run down on tasks that will completed in this System Clean Installation

1. Move all important files to a safe location
2. Move secondary files to relevant HDD
3. Find and prepare all my drivers, software, toolkit and notes that I took down 2 years ago
4. Ensure all steps 1 to 3 have been completed
5. Open up case and do some basic cleaning (it weighs about 15 KG plus. Or 33 Pounds and could possibly weigh more)
6. Ensure I Zero’d out the right HDD after redo my partitioning of my HDD (This particular one I'm unsure I would perform since it involves shrinking a partition that has data already on it and then resizing an existing core Partition (OS Files) on it. I have a feeling it will cause some data to be corrupted or deleted if I shrink a partition that has free space on it. Not sure since I haven't tested it.)
7. Perform clean installation of my OS
8. Install and update all core drivers and components after it’s completed
9. Install back JP language and set the system to Japanese again
10. Clone the drive to the spare one (if I’m not lazy)
11. If any of my HDD has been disconnected, reconnect them
12. Ensure all System Hardware are functioning as normal.
13. Check all my files are there (There’s a lot of them…)
14. Then test for errors on the system

I'm not sure if I missed anything that I've listed. But my anxiety comes from two points which are:

• Redoing the Partition with data still on it.
• The Required Amount should I Allocate the Core OS files to (Window Files. 100 GB Turned out to be not enough after 2 Years. Wondering how much more should I allocate on its own for it's partition.)

If you have any experience on that field and what will happen if I perform it with data on it. Kindly give spare some time and thought to give an appropriate answer to this situation.

 

[Icecold]

Unfortunately, I cannot give an answer to the question in the title. But there are some other things you might want to consider (might be a bit late).

Looking at the Help files in Disk Management it says:

"When you shrink a partition, any ordinary files are automatically relocated on the disk to create the new unallocated space. There is no need to reformat the disk to shrink the partition."

"If the partition is a raw partition (that is, one without a file system) that contains data (such as a database file), shrinking the partition may destroy the data."

... I'd backup the files just to be on the safe side.

---

If possible, check and test your RAM modules one at a time to see if there is any corruption e.g:

RAM module 1, program crashes/stalling still occurs
RAM module 2, no crashing or stalling occurs.

Alternatively if you really like looking at numbers, there are memory test programs like 'Memtest86'

Also check your harddrive (Chkdsk) = Computer > Right-click a drive > Properties > Tools > Error-checking. There are many diagnostic tools out there.

If there are no major memory/HDD issues detected, then it may just be a software issue.

On a clean install, I'd go with a dual-boot OS. (one updated main, one stock backup). Ideally install them on different drives. e.g:

HDD1 = Partition 1 - OS (Primary), Partition 2 - Temporary Media/Games etc.
HDD2 = Partition 1 = OS (Secondary 20GB~), Partition 2 - Media Backups.

Atleast this way you can still use your system to some extent if one OS becomes very unstable or a drive dies.

Download and run 'CCleaner' frequently on your system, it helps clean up most bloated temp/cache folders.

 

[HatoriTakaya]

@ [MENTION=38172]Icecold[/MENTION]: RE this post

That's okay. I didn't think there would be any easy answer to this to be honest and already completed most stages of my data two days ago. Regardless, it's good to learn things on the way that can be used on other systems.

In regards to

Unfortunately, I cannot give an answer to the question in the title. But there are some other things you might want to consider (might be a bit late).

Looking at the Help files in Disk Management it says:

"When you shrink a partition, any ordinary files are automatically relocated on the disk to create the new unallocated space. There is no need to reformat the disk to shrink the partition."

"If the partition is a raw partition (that is, one without a file system) that contains data (such as a database file), shrinking the partition may destroy the data."

... I'd backup the files just to be on the safe side.

At the time I wasn't able to even operate Command Prompt which officially led me to do a clean install. So basically the current OS System Set Up was going to eventually become completely corrupt. Well did it well for 1.5 years of almost non-stop 24/7 operations with only 2 upgrades that involves data storage.

As you know, it would be DiskPart Command Line in the CMD Prompt which brings up the CMD to activate the System Files Disk Partition. However it didn't run at all after 30 minutes of wait. Which basically gave an impression that clean installation is required. However I can't completely confirm that shrinking your partition will cause data loss but what I can say is to defragmentation your partition before doing it is a good idea since it will reduce the required spin of the needle on a HDD.

In my belief, it should cause some data loss but due to how its structured and data is written on the HDD, it would possibly do segamented reads and writes that can or may strain your HDD. From that it can possibly decrease HDD lifespan. However I'm not a HDD technician so I can't confirm. Plus it was never intended to be used in the way I set up the partitions on my HDD.

If possible, check and test your RAM modules one at a time to see if there is any corruption e.g:

RAM module 1, program crashes/stalling still occurs
RAM module 2, no crashing or stalling occurs.

Alternatively if you really like looking at numbers, there are memory test programs like 'Memtest86'

I wasn't able to get around to that test due to my DVD Drive that normally should read DVD couldn't. I wouldn't be able to operate the isolation test for RAM since I'm running a 64 Bit System that requires a minimum of 4 GB to run I think. I could be wrong. Putting aside, I could do the memtest86 around this week since it's a test to see if the RAM produces any errors. If there's errors, I'm probably going to have to consult with the store to have it replaced, if it's falls within Warranty.

Also check your harddrive (Chkdsk) = Computer > Right-click a drive > Properties > Tools > Error-checking. There are many diagnostic tools out there.

If there are no major memory/HDD issues detected, then it may just be a software issue.

Completed this test before I went ahead of the clean installation of the OS. There was no errors it detected at the time. In my belief, there was no errors it could possibly fix even if it detected it. There might of been a infection of some sort to resort all my installations and uninstall to fail. Note most installation and uninstalls uses .msi to complete both processes. I'm sure I'm wrong in this part but for the most part, I know system files have been infected or corrupted to malfunction.

On a clean install, I'd go with a dual-boot OS. (one updated main, one stock backup). Ideally install them on different drives. e.g:

HDD1 = Partition 1 - OS (Primary), Partition 2 - Temporary Media/Games etc.
HDD2 = Partition 1 = OS (Secondary 20GB~), Partition 2 - Media Backups.

At least this way you can still use your system to some extent if one OS becomes very unstable or a drive dies.

I've considered this at one point but due to Window 7 Updates reaching almost 50 GB to 70 GB on one drive, it would require me to find a dedicated drive to load it off. However, I have considered this idea a few times over and I still have my old setup of my previous cloned OS system before it went live in my System. I'm still writing up a new scope of operation on the next Clean Installation with it being mirrored as a back=up on another day when I can find the time.

In my current setup, due to not being able to shrink it before I did the clean install and now not being able to expand the OS partition unless I can find a way to do it in the booting stages of the system start up and not have the HDD mounted during that stage. Personally I would like to find a way to do that next time when I have the chance. I'm wondering if running off a DVD Ubuntu would like me the CMD operations. Otherwise I'm probably going to need to find something on the internet that allows me to run all CMD functions off a DVD later.

Download and run 'CCleaner' frequently on your system, it helps clean up most bloated temp/cache folders.

Already have that on my system for quite some time. Thanks for giving that advice. I like the other programs that priform also have for freeware.

 

[Icecold]

I havn't done defrag in years, last time I tried it was on 1TB drive it said it would take half a day to complete. There is software that can defrag drives on-the-fly, but they probably only work best when you use a new drive. I think defrag is more suitable for people running servers. Saying that however, I'm no IT expert.

On the Windows website they say W7 64-bit has a 2GB RAM requirement, so you can still do a physical RAM check. Also, you can get MemTest set up on a USB drive if you have one.

70GB for the OS seems excessive. There are many things that can eat up the space such as pagefile and hibernation file (common issue on SSDs). I also know with some non-local games, even after uninstalls, they leave data around.

 

[HatoriTakaya]

I havn't done defrag in years, last time I tried it was on 1TB drive it said it would take half a day to complete. There is software that can defrag drives on-the-fly, but they probably only work best when you use a new drive. I think defrag is more suitable for people running servers. Saying that however, I'm no IT expert.

On the Windows website they say W7 64-bit has a 2GB RAM requirement, so you can still do a physical RAM check. Also, you can get MemTest set up on a USB drive if you have one.

70GB for the OS seems excessive. There are many things that can eat up the space such as pagefile and hibernation file (common issue on SSDs). I also know with some non-local games, even after uninstalls, they leave data around.

I just defrag when I believe there's a lot of large files that uses a portion of the HDD that needs to be together so it doesn't add extra time to read and respond accordingly. I tend to only defrag the OS HDD partition however. Defrag is best done when you want the pin of the HDD to use the least amount of moving when reading and writing files. It only increases the lifespan of the HDD slightly I believe and does sometimes decrease the amount of time for something to happen on the system or server. With that said, it's also good to defrag before installing a program that won't be moved as much as well.

Well that's interesting considering that I would expect the 64 Bit structure to have more RAM requirements than that. Although I'll consider it next time when it happens. I'll probably get the MemortTest86 done later this week via DVD since it's functioning now. After the clean install.

Well it does look excessive when you're used to Window XP but pretty sure that the amount of patches I went through along with language files installed on the system does go beyond 1 GB for sure. However I'm not too sure amount the rest of the data so it'll be interesting how much they add up after I just do some basic checks on their size.

 

[Icecold]

I think doing a defrag for speed performance brings little benefit when done on just a small partition at the beginning of a drive. The OS and other programs usually get installed first, they are close to the header I guess so it won't be moving around much.

In the older days, drive capacity was smaller and the OS took a lot of space and would cover a larger area on a drive platter, so it made sense to keep the drives fully defragged. It does its job of organising data clusters and giving some stability.

If you just want to see better user-end performance, simply customising software and installing only what you need will let you boot faster and have less things hogging system resources. You can run msconfig and disable certain start-up programs or modify the registry etc.

 

[HatoriTakaya]

I think doing a defrag for speed performance brings little benefit when done on just a small partition at the beginning of a drive. The OS and other programs usually get installed first, they are close to the header I guess so it won't be moving around much.

In the older days, drive capacity was smaller and the OS took a lot of space and would cover a larger area on a drive platter, so it made sense to keep the drives fully defragged. It does its job of organising data clusters and giving some stability.

If you just want to see better user-end performance, simply customising software and installing only what you need will let you boot faster and have less things hogging system resources. You can run msconfig and disable certain start-up programs or modify the registry etc.

Yeah, I would imagine defragmentation was designed for that intended purpose overall. Personally I'll probably find it useful if I should to choose and resize the partition again to give OS partition more space to work with. Currently its at 100 GB and window files alone takes 30 GB. So I'm still looking into where the other 40 GB went to at this moment.

I've considered msconfig a few times since it does exactly what you said, though most things I would be disabling is things that I naturally don't want loading up. Thanks for reminding about that again since I completely forgotten its existence.

 

[Ignis]

On a system that you suspect may have been infected already, run Rkill before running any of your anti-malware utilities. Don't forget to disconnect yourself from the Internet, too. There are other tools often utilised in malware removal, such as GMER, although those are better utilised with caution and best entirely avoided if you're not sure what you're doing. It's also a good idea to get a preventive tool like Comodo Defense+ (contained within Comodo Firewall) to alert yourself if malware attempts to get driver-level access (i.e. bypassing your anti-malware utilities and getting higher authority than them to intercept programmes before they can be scanned).

Not less importantly, protect your browsing activity: on Firefox, you can use add-ons such as NoScript and RequestPolicy; I'm sure other browsers like Chrome have such add-ons of their own too. Finally, running a sandbox such as Sandboxie for suspicious programmes is always a good measure.

Also, is this a laptop or a desktop? If it's a laptop, make sure you clean its insides regularly. Stock up a few cans of compressed air and blow through its vents once a month or so. (Short of using compressed air, you can just blow out the dust manually. It'll help you gather experience in blowing too, if you catch my drift.)

My old laptop with a 1.8GHz Core2Duo ran Windows 7 Ultimate on 2GB of ram just fine. It should be more than enough provided you don't have excessive background tasks. I'd get at least 4GB just to be on the safe side, though, and 8GB if you plan on running modern PC games (not eroge). As for the disk, that greatly depends on what tasks you use your computer for―if you regularly use graphics-editing software like Photoshop or 3d modelling software like 3ds Max, you may need at least 50GB to get on the safe side just in case those programmes consume a lot of space for "scratch disk." This doesn't take into consideration games you install onto your system partition, of course.

Try running CrystalDiskInfo once you complete your reinstallation; the errors you described might've been caused by a drive failure. For other utilities, you can use something like Speccy to check details such as your hardware (CPU, GPU, disk, motherboard) temperature and disk SMART status. If you want to have some more insight into the services running on your system, try something like Svchost Analyzer so you can decide (with a bit of looking up, just don't rush) which services to disable and which ones to keep running.

 

[Will98]

Uninstall that random patch by Microsoft that was described to "fix" the daylight savings time for 2013.

That's spyware or something.

 

[HatoriTakaya]

On a system that you suspect may have been infected already, run Rkill before running any of your anti-malware utilities. Don't forget to disconnect yourself from the Internet, too. There are other tools often utilised in malware removal, such as GMER, although those are better utilised with caution and best entirely avoided if you're not sure what you're doing. It's also a good idea to get a preventive tool like Comodo Defense+ (contained within Comodo Firewall) to alert yourself if malware attempts to get driver-level access (i.e. bypassing your anti-malware utilities and getting higher authority than them to intercept programmes before they can be scanned).

Not less importantly, protect your browsing activity: on Firefox, you can use add-ons such as NoScript and RequestPolicy; I'm sure other browsers like Chrome have such add-ons of their own too. Finally, running a sandbox such as Sandboxie for suspicious programmes is always a good measure.

Also, is this a laptop or a desktop? If it's a laptop, make sure you clean its insides regularly. Stock up a few cans of compressed air and blow through its vents once a month or so. (Short of using compressed air, you can just blow out the dust manually. It'll help you gather experience in blowing too, if you catch my drift.)

My old laptop with a 1.8GHz Core2Duo ran Windows 7 Ultimate on 2GB of ram just fine. It should be more than enough provided you don't have excessive background tasks. I'd get at least 4GB just to be on the safe side, though, and 8GB if you plan on running modern PC games (not eroge). As for the disk, that greatly depends on what tasks you use your computer for―if you regularly use graphics-editing software like Photoshop or 3d modelling software like 3ds Max, you may need at least 50GB to get on the safe side just in case those programmes consume a lot of space for "scratch disk." This doesn't take into consideration games you install onto your system partition, of course.

Try running CrystalDiskInfo once you complete your reinstallation; the errors you described might've been caused by a drive failure. For other utilities, you can use something like Speccy to check details such as your hardware (CPU, GPU, disk, motherboard) temperature and disk SMART status. If you want to have some more insight into the services running on your system, try something like Svchost Analyzer so you can decide (with a bit of looking up, just don't rush) which services to disable and which ones to keep running.

Sounds like a good list of programs to use in a variety of situations. I didn't know about Rkill which was something completely new. As well several other programs that I haven't used or heard of. Crystal Disk is another one that I haven't personally used, may have the Japanese Voice over version for some reason though. Anyway, I'll have a look into each program and put that into my toolbox to use with details on it.

It's a Desktop and it's already due for me to do a Air Compressed Cleaning. So basically I'll be doing that at one point, though since I don't have a place to put it down without attracting some insects and stuff, it'll be done in a room with a window open and left to be air out for several hours at best I guess.

Uninstall that random patch by Microsoft that was described to "fix" the daylight savings time for 2013.

That's spyware or something.

I'll take note of that and actually find the KB number that was released for that year. Pretty sure I had to remove a Conduit Malware recently that got through somehow. Possibly from Daemon Tool Installation or a Patch perhaps. Not sure. But I've already removed most of it manually with a online step to step process to remove it. It's kind of awkward however for me to fall for it twice. orz I need to find another Disc Mounting Software that is not Daemon Tool if it's packaged with this Malware.