XP2 sure leaves a lot of mess all over the place. I guess those guys really don't care about bloat.
The Automatic Update gizmo had asked if I wanted to download it some time ago (on both machines). Clicked yes, and then waited… and waited. and waited. Several weeks in fact. Anyway, the download suddenly started on the newer machine at the weekend, and with much trepidation we hit the 'install' button. It took a while (even on a fast machine), but worked pretty smoothly. The basic configuration screen was simple enough. It can't manage my av software (F-Secure) so I put that on to the manual setting. Tweaked Automatic Updates just to inform (rather than download) and that was that. One thing though… I had a quick look inside the firewall defaults and it leaves 'Remote Access' available as a firewall exception. I can see that it might be useful for people wanting tech support, but it seems a fairly glaring hole to me. Turned that one off pdq.
And then on Monday, my PC (slower machine) chugged into action. Did the install last night and have been fairly impressed. Can't say I've noticed too much difference. I went through the process of switching of most of the Security Center stuff (I'll manage my own firewall/av/updates), and rebooted. Lo and behold (apart from an age on the first reboot) it seems to boot my machine more accurately! In other words the random missed progs (my Backweb interface not loading, that sort of thing) that occasionally afflict me seem to have gone away. Nice one.
Not so nice was the amount of space the whole process had taken up. I hadn't really noticed it on the 160Gig machine, but this one has only 20Gig, so space is a bit of a premium. It seemed the best part of 2 gigabytes had vanished 🙁 Frankly, that ain't on.
The System Restore had grown exponentially, a 400 Mb folder was lurking in the background. And so on. Not nice.
A bit of googling later, I came up with this thread on the Aumha Forums. Great instructions, easy to follow… and sure enough my PC has slimmed down to its old self. In fact I seem to have retrieved a bit more space than I expected.
Will have to get round to cleaning up the other PC. No rush… the remaining 150 gigabytes should be ok for a while. And I have a whole 10 still to play with 😉