To fellow Windows Millennium users - a very happy New Year. To all others, well, just delete the 'very'.
After a few weeks of "finicky" (thanks
bogle) behavior, my ME appears to have settled down again. I put it down, in the absence of any better ideas, to a variety of causes. Certainly there was neglect since I became absorbed by 'alien' systems suffering from prolonged neglect. I also, after weeks, nay months of problem-free usage, unchecked KB891711 under the 'Services' tab in Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel. It remains unchecked, but installed, since Windows Updates reveals nothing needed. Then there was the small matter of fever - mine - when I tend to ask more of WinME in a given time than normally would be the case. Applying the impatient spurs to this workhorse foal/filly of the 21st. Century is foolish and unkind. A guarantee of the finicky, the balks, whatever.
Do you use Delindex? Renaissance Man, who has little patience with fools or ignoramuses, produced this most versatile clean-up toy, primarily for WinME, or so I think because he implies that with minor editing it can be made to serve last century's best O/S! It is available still - here:
http://www.burzurq.com/forum/delindex.html
WinME loves it. If you prefer, as I do, to update manually and choose this option for Windows Updates (Control Panel>Automatic Updates) a line of code will have to be nullified otherwise the setting for 'Turn off automatic updating...' will revert to the automatic. This is the line in the delindex.bat Section 1
deltree /y c:\progra~1\window~2\>nul which when nullified reads
::deltree /y c:\progra~1\window~2\>nul
And if you have folders of images other than those in 'My Pictures' then, in order to control the Thumbs.db and its unrestricted growth, an additional line of code is needed. Here is an example (from Section 2):
deltree /y c:\mydocu~1\pictures\thumbs.db
I have long been intrigued by the sensational and specifically that which applies to security concerns for computers. Last October I decided to explore the risks involved. When I purchased WinME and all that essentially accompanied it (Sept.'00) I had no idea of the extent to which we would become bedeviled by these security concerns. I was however, persuaded by a salesperson that a very good investment would be a router. I bought one without having a clue as to what it was to protect me from.
Five years later I have a better idea. And it (the router) is still in-line between my computer and the viscous world beyond! But apart from the router and HijackThis I have no security. I was nervous in the beginning. Today I feel a certain freedom which has grown during the weeks that followed the decision to ditch all the familiar freewares associated with security. But of this more anon. Perhaps I shall ditch the router and HijackThis - Microsoft, so I understand, will no longer concern itself with the security of Windows Millennium as in June this year, thus relieving us of the need to diligently check for updates.
One final note. This freeware (long in its beta phase) offers some goodies as Tweaks:
http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm (and it is because of the tweaks that it gets a mention here, its limitations as a registry cleaner are pretty well documented in these forums). See the attached GIF as to how I use the Tweaks.
All the best.
And thanks to
bellgamin,
ramean and
anglin fool for the input.
And let us just ignore the scallywags and fools, since, if we engage them, we merely sink to their level.