Stop Doing This To Your Computer

in this video I'm going to tell you about five trends that I see people doing to their computers that I really wish would stop stay tuned [Music] I work on a lot of computers and often I work on computers after other technicians have worked on them when I do I see the programs they leave behind unfortunately these programs or practices are sometimes not very helpful and in some cases actually detrimental or even destructive to your systems performance and reliability there was a term that was created in the later half of the 19th century during what we know of as the old west called snake oil this was a derogatory term that describes tonics that were created that promise to cure all kinds of different kinds of ailments but you know what most of the time these tonics were essentially useless and didn't actually treat the ailments that they promised to believe it or not that's the origin of Coca-Cola it started out as a health tonic but today it just rots your teeth and makes you fat unfortunately though some of these snake oil tonics not only didn't help with the ailments they promised to help with but they could actually hurt hurt you or in some cases even kill you so what does that have to do with modern day computers well I'm glad you asked at least I'm imagining that you asked you very well may not have but let's just assume that you did today there's a lot of software that promises to help your computer's performance and reliability and really doesn't do what is claims that it does and in some cases could actually negatively impact your system that's what we're going to be talking about today but first we got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor today's video is brought to you by brilliant.org if you're watching my channel then chances are you like learning what better way to learn than for free if you go to brilliant.org cyber CPU you'll get 30 days free and the first 200 people will get 20 off their annual subscription brilliant is an excellent platform for learning a variety of subjects in an interactive way all their courses are extremely Visual and interactive and you know I don't know about you but I'm a visual learner and the way Brilliance courses are laid out make it really easy for visual Learners to be able to follow along brilliant has a ton of courses available on topics like mathematics science logic and computer technology all broken down into subcategories that can help you learn exactly what you want to learn so what are you waiting for check out brilliant.org today and start learning for free for 30 days just go to brilliant.org cyber CPU or click in the link in the description below and start your 30-day trial and like I said before the first 200 people get 20 off their premium subscription now on with the video the first thing that we're looking at today is security Suites these are antivirus programs that contain a lot more than just antivirus now before you ask I'm not saying that antivirus programs are snake oil any virus programs are an absolute necessity on modern day computers I'm talking specifically about security Suites these are programs that contain multiple different Security Programs all in one they have an antivirus a firewall an email spam filter a privacy protector whatever that is and many other programs are shoved into one package called a Security Suite the first computer antivirus was created in the late 80s and as malicious software became more and more common more and more antivirus companies jumped into the market with their own Solutions now this competition is great and it's tip and it typically leads to better and better software unfortunately that's not what happened with antiviruses at some point in time I'm not sure when it got harder and harder to invent a better wheel any virus companies really had no distinction between each other they all did one job detecting viruses once they all did that with a good degree of accuracy there really was no way to distinguish all of the different competitors so when you were standing in Staples looking at different antiviruses how do you choose which one to buy over any of the other ones and that's where security Suites came in since companies could not distinguish themselves through their antivirus programs they simply started adding features that they could use as bullet points on the box to try to get people to choose their software over the competitions and eventually this practice moved into the absurdity with the amount of features these companies were adding to their security packages now you may say that that's a good thing because more security is better right no in some cases it's not because many of these features that these companies were adding to their security Suites simply mimicked features that Windows already came with I mean Windows has had a firewall since Windows XP Service Pack 1 as a result of the code red virus what this actually caused is bloated software packages that would essentially leave some systems unusable with the amount of unnecessary Services running in the background I remember when this started becoming a big Trend people would install Norton Security Suite on their system and they would have to call me to remove it because it would make their system so unusable that they were unable to even go through with the standard uninstall process now if these software packages were so bad then how did they become so popular well you can actually blame that on box stores the software Publishers pay commission fees to big box stores to sell their products that's why you can almost always tell where a system was per purchased based on what Security Suite is installed on it so what I recommend is when you buy a computer the first thing you should do is uninstall the antivirus that comes with it Windows Defender is a free antivirus that comes built into windows and it's relatively lightweight and it has the same detection rates as all of the big competitors in the antivirus industry in fact one of the biggest complaints about Windows Defender is that sometimes it can have a fairly High false detection rate if it's between not detecting a virus or accidentally detecting something that isn't a virus I think I'll choose the later ultimately though I recommend against running security Suites because all they do is steal the performance from your system and cost you money that you don't need to spend Windows Defender is free and it works now the next snake oil that we're going to be talking about today are registry cleaners these come in many different forms at least there are many different companies making them this one isn't an issue with performance these programs can actually kill your operating system in fact they can cause so much damage that it can be irreversible and cause you to have to Simply reload Windows the Windows registry is a database of settings back in the old days a lot of this was handled by ini files these were plain text files that were used to store settings unfortunately the performance of a plain text file isn't the greatest and as Windows has grown with more and more complexity a better solution needed to be found and believe it or not Microsoft introduced the windows Regis history in Windows 3.1 however it wasn't widely used within Windows until Windows 95 and NT today the Windows registry isn't only used for Windows but also can be used by any software package you install unfortunately though not all software Publishers do a great job of being neat about how they write to the registry this can cause the registry to balloon out of control with random messy and unnecessary registry entries what's even worse is a lot of these software packages don't even do a very good job of cleaning up the registry entries when you uninstall the software this has led to a new software industry of registry cleaners that promise to go through the registry and eliminate unnecessary entries now you know what this sounds like a great idea because who doesn't want a clean registry right unfortunately no that's not always the case I like to compare registry cleaners with the game of Russian Roulette now this might be a little gaslighting here but hear me out for a second the game of Russian Roulette has no real benefit I mean winning the game doesn't make you better in any way unfortunately losing it has some really bad consequences some would argue Eternal consequences don't do it that's what I like to compare registry cleaners to this is because a system with the dirtiest and most bloated registry that you could possibly imagine compared to a system with a pristine perfect registry has very little difference in performance in fact the benefit of registry cleaners is honestly most of the time negligible however if that Registry Cleaner deletes the wrong registry entry it can be catastrophic it could lead to you having to reinstall Windows to fix it so for this reason I highly recommend against using registry cleaners they're just not worth it you're going to see virtually no improvement in performance and the side effects can be very very bad all right now the next snake oil that we're looking at today is aftermarket defraggers now this one here may just be a pet peeve of mine because I think these programs are completely worthless and unfortunately a lot of times worthless programs like this can be a vector for malware to get into your system now before you start typing in the comments I'm not saying all aftermarket defraggers include malware so don't anyone accuse me of making that claim I'm just saying that programs like this can and do in some cases include the whole free trial to McAfee or other BS bloatware to help subsidize the fact that most Publishers have to make this software free because it's that useless here's the problem there are no currently supported versions of Windows that should even be using defrag in the first place now before you start screaming in the comments let me explain myself magnetic drives write data to the is a platter of a drive based on sectors these sectors are orientated kind of like a record in fact not kind of anything it's exactly like a record you have tracks that start at the beginning of the drive and run all the way to the end of the platter now optimally you want to write that data in sectors that are right next to each other so if a file requires a hundred sectors those 100 sectors should be all in a row in order for them to be able to read efficiently unfortunately there's not always a hundred sectors available in a continuous Row for that reason sometimes the file has to be broken up into chunks and written to several blocks of sectors what this does is it makes the hard drive work harder to read the file because it has to continue moving to the next block of sectors in order to continue reading the file now what defrag does is it moves all of these files around by reading some of them off the drive and storing them in memory so it can condense all of these files together so that all of the sectors used by these files are continuous now this is great and it heavily improves the performance of a Spinning Disk but there's the problem the reason why I say there's currently no supported version of Windows that even needs to be defragged is because every supported version of Windows today should be using an SSD an ssds don't require defragging in fact it's actually harmful for an SSD to defrag it ssds work completely differently than magnetic hard drives they store data in Nan cells by giving some cells an electric charge and some cells none this is how an SSD is able to store ones and zeros however Nan cells have a finite life they can only be written to a certain number of times before they can no longer take a charge or at least keep a charge without leaking it this was originally the biggest drawback to using ssds ssds tended to have shorter lives than spinning discs in the beginning because of the constantly being written to the same Nan cell over and over again would eventually kill it and ultimately kill the drive so the way manufacturers solve this problem is through technology called wear leveling now I'm not going to go into a deep dive about how where leveling works we might save that for another video just know that it does work in fact it works very well and as this technology has advanced it has given ssds the same reliability as spinning discs essentially we're leveling fragments the hard drive intentionally it writes files over the entire Drive in order for the Nan cell to all wear out consecutively over the lifetime of the drive so you don't have a specific Nan cell being hammered constantly but instead have billions of Nan cells all sharing the load evenly now this doesn't affect the performance of an SSD because ssds don't function in the same way that magnetic drives do you can have a file spread across the entire Drive of your SSD and it can read that file with just as fast as if it was contained in a continuous line of sectors and for this reason you should not be defragging an SSD and even if you did the wear leveling on the SSD is all firmware based and so the defrag program wouldn't be able to achieve what it's trying to do anyway because the ssd's firmware is going to break the file up over the whole Drive regardless of how the program tells it to write it instead ssds are trimmed not defragged this is the process of clearing cells that had previously been written to but have been marked for deletion but just haven't been deleted yet but you know what the way an SSD handles this is a process that's really not for this video but for all sakes and purposes running an aftermarket defrag program is completely worthless on Modern Hardware and even if you have a spinning disc as a storage drive and you should be using it for a storage drive and not your boot Drive the windows built-in defrag in most cases works better than an aftermarket defrag program will that's because one of the benefits of defragging a hard drive is to move certain files to faster or slower sections of the drive based on that file's use I'm not going to go too much into the concept here but just understand that files written to the beginning of the drive can be read from the drive faster than files that are written to the end of the drive so windows will take this into account during defrag by moving files that are accessed more often to the beginning of the drive and moving file that are accessed less often to the end of the drive Windows has an advantage here over the aftermarket defrag programs because they they know which files you use the most those aftermarket defrag programs don't at least not to the degree that Windows does now the next snake oil program that we're going to talk about today might be a little controversial that's because this one comes with an exception and what I'm talking about here is driver updators now this might be controversial because I did a video on a driver updater that I recommended and still recommend however in general I think this entire industry is nothing but a cesspool of malware here's the thing I became a technician right after the.com collapse in 2000. back then if you needed a driver for a piece of Hardware you would simply search for the hardware ID on Google and find the driver unfortunately today if you try to search for Hardware IDs the majority of the Searchers results give you nothing but malware websites pushing driver updators I can't even count the amount of times I've gone to a customer's house to install a printer or some other device just to find that their attempts to do it themselves before calling me they downloaded a driver updater and of course it didn't work but in most cases it did install a bunch of crap on their system now my definition for malware might be a little liberal compared to how some people would Define it the Mal and malware simply stands for malicious and where is shorthand for software so malware simply means malicious software this could be viruses or it could be McAfee Security scan I include software that installs itself during the install of another program as kind of false intentions and therefore in my eyes malicious now you may disagree with me and if you do that's okay but still driver updater programs are used usually just crappy pieces of software that are fronts to promote or distribute commission based software what you think you're getting is a program that will keep all your drivers up to date but what you're actually getting is a program that does little to nothing if it even attempts to update your drivers at all and instead you get a bunch of toolbars and virus scanners that you didn't want in the first place and here's the thing for most systems I go by the philosophy if it ain't broke don't fix it it's not always necessary to keep your drivers updated to the latest versions I mean yes you could be leaving performance on the table in most systems the performance benefit to updating your drivers isn't worth the time needed to do it also in some cases the newest versions of drivers could contain bugs that could cause problems of their own now of course I'm talking about Grandma's computer that she uses to play games on Facebook of course if you're using a gaming system and you want absolute absolutely the best performance you can possibly imagine at all times then it's a good idea to keep your drivers up to date in fact I've even done videos in the past showing you how much performance you can get by simply keeping your GPU driver updated to the latest version however not all device drivers are the same and you're not going to really see an improved FPS in cyberpunk very much by keeping your Wi-Fi driver updated just saying however with all that said there is a driver updater program that I do recommend and I use it all the time myself and I'll talk about that a little later on in the video now the next snake oil topic isn't about a piece of software it's one is actually a practice that I occasionally see that people really need to stop doing this one is disabling Windows update I know I know all the arguments I can already see them being typed in the comments section saying that Windows update does nothing but install junk on your computer all it is is a way for Microsoft to put more bloat on your system unfortunately this is simply not true however I totally get why people believe that I mean Windows 10 and 11 have been a bloated mess so Microsoft has lost a lot of trust because of that loss of trust people have come to the conclusion that Windows update itself shouldn't be trusted either I get it I totally get it unfortunately you're wrong and because you're doing this you're leaving your system susceptible to countless security vulnerabilities now if you're doing this to your own system then you know what you do you but if you work as a technician and you're doing this to customer systems you really need to stop because all you're doing is leaving these systems susceptible to severe security vulnerabilities the primary purpose for Windows update is to install patches to components of the Windows operating system that have been discovered to be vulnerable to security issues sometimes these might be very benign and unexploited issues but other times they could be extremely severe zero day vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited I mean believe me it takes Microsoft a long time to fix security problems so by the time a security patch hits Windows update you've needed it for a while now my most disliked video that I've ever published is the video where I expressed the importance of people to stop using Windows 7. trust me the majority of the comments in that video are just angry people yelling at me that I'm fear-mongering they in fact some of them even call me a Microsoft grifter who is being paid by Microsoft to get people to update to the newest version of Windows comments like that only prove to me that these people haven't watched any other video on my channel because as you guys know I'm not always nice to Microsoft but either way Windows update I would have to put in at least the top 10 most important functions of Windows in many cases Windows update can be more important than your antivirus itself so if you've disabled Windows update or you're using a version of Windows that's no longer in support you need to fix that and I'm not saying this because I'm being paid by Microsoft or because I'm trying to fear Monger or something I'm saying that because keeping your software updated is genuinely important anyway that's all I'm going to say about that if you disagree with me I have no doubt I'll see your comments below so these right here are the five things that I see on a somewhat regular basis that people need to seriously stop doing to their computer now earlier in the video I promised you I would talk more about a driver updater that I recommend but rather than talking about it you should just watch the video I did on it you can find that video right here that program um really works well and it doesn't stay resident in memory and it has saved me a massive amount of time as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 86,925

Keywords: snake oil, stop doing this, 5 things not to do to your computer, registry cleaners, security suites, defragers, Driver updaters, Disable windows update, windows 10, computer tips, windows 11

Id: h4noDql3Y5I

Length: 22min 45sec (1365 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023