Do you do "Regular Maintenance"?

[HumbleCoder]

I post on a couple of more general forums that have "tech help sections" that I generally like to look in. One thing I have noticed is the high correlation between people who have problems and those that claim you should do regular maintenance like weekly AV scans, defrags, chkdsk, CCleaner, registry cleaners, etc.

Personally I spend 50 - 70 hours a week behind a PC screen and don't do any of that stuff and have never had a problem. I actually think it's a load of nonsense.

What are your experiences?

 

[HumbleCoder]

Interesting, I don't see the need for AV scans because it's resident in memory and Windows has a scheduled task to defrag that runs every week. Every now and then I'll uninstall stuff I don't need but as a rule I don't install a lot.

I never bought into the CCleaner religion but must admit I ran it other day for the first time and it reclaimed 5GB of space. But TBH I find it annoying that by default it wants to clean out stuff like internet history and cache because I actually use them and like that to hang around. Even if it does run into the 100MBs hard drives are cheap and it's convenient.



I just don't see the need to set time aside and do this stuff.

 

[HumbleCoder]

Not sure what you mean by this.

AV is permanently in memory scanning. If you have to wait for signature updates then scan to catch a virus then your AV has failed and the damage is done, imo.

Moreover, strictly IMO, AV is a very flawed concept whether it be pattern matching or heuristics I think it's more piece of mind than actual protection. For example I work on a product that intercepts all registry and file read/writes and redirects to a cache that is then sent out over the network to another machine. It also decompiles segments of code on the fly to reorganise hooks to make sure we get in before Citirx, VM (basically inside any virtualised bubble). Yes the code is signed, but that doesn't mean anything. There is very few legitimate reasons any app would need to do this and it's behaviour could very well be seen as malicious. How many times do you think we've been flagged by AV? .....Never.

I really think it buys you nothing but a false sense of security.