Norton Ghost

[tizzer]

Anybody out there had any dealings with norton ghost?

I have just reinstalled windows, updated fully, installed various utilities such as sygate and avg7 amongst others. As soon as everything was up to date I created a ghost image (to make formatting as simple as possible in the future), formatted the pc and restored the image to the hard drive.

Since the restore the pc has run like an absolute dog, it freezes when attempting to do two things at once and is generally slower than before. It never crashes but its just not right.

Is this something i should be expecting from the ghost image?

Should I remove some of the programs from the image and try again?

Its taken me ages to install all the updates (broadband tech with dial-up access! ) and I really dont wanna go thru it all again but the machine is just not worth using at the minute.

XP Pro, PentiumIV 2.8, 1024 DDR, 120 gig HD
Office XP Pro, Nero 6, Paintshop 8, Sygate, AVG7, Spybot, Adaware and other smaller utilities like DVD Decrypter etc

I did run ccleaner and didnt check the performance before I took the image and then formatted. Could it have caused the problem? Have I just answered my own thread? Is there a way back from it?

Any pointers would be great.

[NHH]

Hi Tizzer...

Have a look for what process may be causing the issue using the Process Explorer utility on the downloads page.

Tune XP is another program that may help. Use this to set Windows to clear the page file on shutdown, clear & optimize the prefetch files & defrag the boot files amongst other cool optimizations.

As you can imagine, XP locking up or running slow is unusual and is usually caused by a dominant process running on the system or a hardware / driver problem.
I've used Ghost quite a bit in the past and I've never had a problem like that caused by Ghost as all it is is a disc imaging and/or software build manipulation program.
Can't imagine that the problem would be caused by CCleaner either as all those kinda programs do is look for registry keys that point to non-existant paths or invalid values. The only problems you're likely to find that are caused by a registry cleaner is that certain filetype might not be associated to a program any more or a certain badly setup (or cracked) program or plugin doesn't work anymore.

Good Luck Anyways.

Vin

[tizzer]

Hi Vin, thanks for your suggestions.

Strangely enough it looks like the issue may be resolved without me doing much to it. I think I may have been a little hasty as the PC was transferring some much loved video clips from CD when it was almost grinding to a halt. My concern was brought about because it always did anything I asked of it with no lag at all previously, but maybe I was just pushing it too far.

I have installed and ran the process explorer (which I liked) but I couldnt quite work out the TweakFX program, I dont want to 'tweak' the wrong thing and I'm unclear as to what all the plugins relate to. I wouldnt usually bother posting this but there seems to be very little help available online - not in english anyway (try and google either tweakfx or tweakfx forums). How did you get started with it? Did you register all dll's offered and just use the default settings? Do you, in fact, tweak?

Ive also got something bugging me about my memory but I'll post in Hardware.

Thanks in advance Vin

ps. Hows life after the sweatshop? Give us a clue whereabouts your tunnel is, theres loads of us wanting to follow! ;D

[NHH]

Good to here your problem's sorted.....

I thought I'd already added 'Tune XP' to the downloads page but I hadn't. I test everything for a while before adding them...
Tune XP is now on the downloads page... really good program too.

Tweak FX is a program that tweaks hidden features in the Windows registry. The plugins are extra Windows tweaks that can be added to the program although I haven't been able to find any significant ones available.

As for getting out of TW, it was something I had to do before I went nuts and as I'm planning to move back to London at some time in the future...
I'm now sufficiently de-stressed after going to the Download Festival the day after I left which was awesome!

All the best to everyone there.