Point of Sale Issues
Over the past two months I have been helping a friend with a maddening issue on his Windows XP Point of Sale system. What was going on is that that software would randomly lock up just after scanning the bar code of an item. The software would eventually unlock after a couple of minutes, but since customers were waiting the best option was to reboot the system. Not an idea situation.
I know very little about Windows XP but offered to help. I ran Spinrite to check the hard drive (could have been a sticky sector on the drive, it wasn’t,) I ran ‘chkdsk’ (came up clean,) remove various bits of software from the machine (Verizon online backup is impossible to uninstall, in fact it should be categorized as a virus since uninstalling it just causes it to reinstall itself.)
Eventually I gave up and reinstalled everything from scratch. The vendor he got the machine from did not include backup CDs for most of the software so I had to track all that down, including some of the more esoteric drivers for the printer. I reinstalled Windows XP, Microsoft Office, the Point of Sale software, iTunes and Norton Antivirus 2009.
And the machine was still hanging, so we started to take off software one at a time and narrowed it down to Norton Antivirus 2009. The machine has been stable since.
The only thing I still need to put in place is a backup policy.
IM: fschiettecatte
Years ago I stopped using the big, heavyweight virus programs from Norton / Symantec and McAfee. They are worse than what they protect against in many cases. Even in the best of times they take up a lot of resources, have a lot of annoying prompts, and often lock up.
I switched to avast (http://www.avast.com/) years ago and have never looked back. I don’t even pay, I just use the free edition, and it’s more than good enough.
Yoav, thanks for that I will check it out. What I need now is a simple backup system, what I am leaning to is a xxclone which makes a mirror copy of your hard drive.