Check disk (solved)

[Lady]

Hello Boggin and everybody else,

How are you all doing? I hope you're well.  It's been a while since I was here. Very few IT problems off late, so wonderful. 

I was making my monthly System Image Backups yesterday and running chkdsk in the command prompt. As usual there were no issues but then I wondered if chkdsk /f would run differently, so this morning I tried it out on my laptop. I found the log, see attachment, and I read through it and noticed that it did some cleaning of unused entries. Does that mean that chkdsk /f does more than just chkdsk? If so, I will run that in future. I was running only chkdsk as that is faster. 

As always, grateful for your effort.

Lady

[Boggin]

Hi Lady - I'm still taking the meds and plodding on

Hope you are also well.

chkdsk without any parameters is a read-only mode and if the drive is being written to at the time it's done, then it can give anomalous results and may report problems when there aren't any.

A chkdsk /f doesn't usually take too long and is the min parameter you should use which will repair or tidy up.

Your chkdsk log looks fine.

[Lady]

Okay, I will use chkdsk /f from now on. I see the difference now.

I don't understand what you mean by "min" parameter. Could you rephrase?

You once told me that you always make sure that your programs are updated before you make a system image backup. Now most programs are set to automatically update by default (or by prompting us) but the other day I saw that my VLC media player needed an update. I don't suppose you go through all your programs to see if there's an update available. So do you use a program for that or how do you do that?

[Boggin]

min = minimum

Usually it's just like programs such as Adobe Flashplayer, Reader and Air, although I get auto prompts for those and I'll occasionally check Java for an update.

I have that disabled in browsers under Java Config/Security as it has had security issues in the past.

I also ensure Norton Security is up to date, run a scan and check to see if the HDD needs a defrag.

[Lady]

Thanks, Tom! So glad I know how to clean my desktop/laptop and do the SIB! 

[Boggin]

I forgot to add that I also run a sfc /scannow to ensure I'm not backing up a corrupt system.

[Lady]

I'm late in responding as the notification went to the spam file which I don't see in the Outlook email client.

sfc /scannow is definitely part of my monthly system image backup routine. Learned that from you. 

[Boggin]

Nice to know I haven't been wasting my time in giving advice