alan. I see no-ones talking to you so I'll just put my twopenneth in before the (very helpful) clever buggers appear. :-)
VCom Fix -It 7 Professional is about 29. I've used it for about 4 or 5 years. It gives you anti-virus protection (with free updates for a year), anti-spyware, disc cleaner, disc checker, etc etc.
It also defrags discs and registry's and fixes registry errors.
It gives you 3 levels of registry error fixing Green - safe. Orange - Your choice and Red option - Are you really sure? You can un-fix as well. (I always tick 'em all after a back up).
It's been pretty good for me but I don't know what the guys in here think about it.
Personal recommendation only. It does what it says on the tin!
http://www.v-com.com/

hewittalan, this Microsoft download will dramatically reduce the shutdown delay. It works by itself, just install it and forget about it. It doesn't work with Vista at present I think though, so remember if you upgrade.

User Profile Hive Cleanup

Personally I think these registry scanners are a con. If there were serious errors in the registry, your system wouldn't start at all. Not sure where you got the phrase "due to windows habit of collecting a shedfull of registry errors," but if it's from a site trying to sell you something I would discount it :-)

Apart from downloading the UPH cleaner, you should look at your memory usage (Task Manager/Performance tab bar graph) and see whether most/all of your memory is in use. Also look critically in your system tray and check you actually need everything running there.

Kayak. What I find strange about supposed registry errors (XP home) is that, using my Fix-It utility, it shows missing links for, for example, a deleted jpg image. Apparently this is an XP thing.

Never come across that Bolshi, but I'm still on Windows 2000 :-)

Thanks for the help guys.
I will beaver away this weekend and try and sort it out.
alan

K. I find that utilities give me the illusion of being in control of my PC a bit.

I suppose they're like women's boobs. Not much use, but fun to play around with.

Windows 2000 indeed!

:-))

women's boobs are like train sets.

They are meant for the kids, but the dads end up playing with them.

Haystack....LOL!

Kayak and Optimist,

I've done my NTFS convert and run the Pro Version of Diskeeper a few times.

I do find its reports a little odd. I'll post the chart of my disk C: and the two parts of the report. All I did after my most recent defrag was to browse a few sites using Opera and I seem to have generated 70 fragmented files.

Also all that red on the chart looks scarey to me and the report is giving me a Warnning that my drive is 'heavily fragmented'. Five minutes ago I was told I was healthy!

And what about all those 1,849 excess fragments? Should I be getting rid of these?

Optimist. I'd be interested to know how much red you see in your report of the drive.

These are the three screen shots:-



TP

Any thoughts on using MSN messenger. I've become El Presidente of my spanish owners community and want an easy way to communicate with all the owners. This has been suggested but I've zero experience here.
Also I think I can do live meetings online with the administator of the community? Is this better than say Skype?
TIA wise ones :-)

TP, there will be a button to tell you the names of the files that are fragmented. You can then see where the problem lies. It is normal for stuff to get fragmented just by rebooting, particularly Windows system files, but you might have an application that is particularly bad at it. Ensure that you do at least one defragmentation scheduled for reboot.

The moral of the story is that there is no point in getting hung up about fragmentation: there will always be some. Diskeeper has an option to keep files defragmented automatically if you pay for the higher versions, Shield or something, but I do think it is all much ado about nothing.

K>

" there will be a button to tell you the names of the files that are fragmented."

Yes, looked at it again and almost all the fragments are in hiberfil.sys.

It is marked Excluded and I think in the depths of the Help files there is a reference to not being able to defragment it.

EDIT. And now I see the reference. It is to do with the hibernation and cannot be cleaned up.


So, that points to the reason why I can remove all but the 1.714 fragments that this sys file contains.

TP

TP, try turning off Hibernate support (control panel/power options) then rebooting, you should be able to delete the hiberfil.sys file then, and then defragment and turn on hibernate support again if you want it. I would have thought that the file would then be allocated as one fragment. It is as big as the main memory you have since it serves to dump the main memory to disk on hibernation.

K.

Wow. What a change. In fact the sys file gets deleted as soon as you turn off hibernate.

I wonder why Diskeeper don't say you should turn it off in their Help instructions - and then turn it on again.

Look at the three pictures now:-



I certainly owe you a pint for this one.

Thanks a million.

TP

Happy it worked for you TP.

What probably happened with the hibernate file is that you added more main memory at a certain point and so Windows had to allocate more space in the file, which could not be contiguous with the original fragment.

TP

I'm glad that you are sorted out. As Kayak says, you should not worry too much about fragmentaton so long as yo have diskeeper to keep an eye on it, which it does very effectively.

As regards hiberfil.sys, if you nhave enabled hibernation, that file is only read when you restart from hibernateion, so if you enable it then fragmentation will only add a few seconds to the computer restart.

Thanks Optimist.

I guess I'm allergic to all that red - after years of using the inbuilt MS defrag software.

Yes, I do use hibernation quite a lot. But at least I now know how easy it is to clean it up.

Thanks again, chums.

Have a good (short) week.

TP

I'm not impressed with the Shuffle mode in my Windows Media Player.

I picked half a dozen tracks from half a dozen albums for my playlist last night and the Player was in Shuffle mode.

I put them in the playlist by using cut and paste, so each album was in a group in the list.

I seemed to get about three tracks from one album followed by three tracks from another. The Shuffle on the CD player in my car is much more random in its selection.

Am I missing something about the way the MS Player works?

Has anyone come across another Player that is an improvement?

TP

Hi guys

have bought an MP3 player and connected it via USB to the laptop. However, i dont get the "Add New Hardware Wizard" up to enable me to install the drivers. Is there a way to force up the wizard and/or install the drivers manually (and if so where do i put them?)

many thanks in advance

Fundy,

The last person you need help from is me, the master of the rubbish shuffle.

But have you tried that Control Panel Install new hardware jobbie.

And don't people tell us to disconnect USB devices in the Systems panel with Yellow Exclamation Marks?

Now, enter the experts..............

TP