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Clearing Resources in Win98

Originally posted in July, 2000

Probably the most frequent question I have coming across my screen as I sit in ExpertCity is “How do I stop getting illegal operations? What do they mean?”

An Ill-op isn’t something you’ve done wrong, and it’s certainly not illegal. No policemen are going to come to your house and take your computer away. It simply means that your computer’s resources were too low to continue doing whatever task it was trying to do at the moment, while at the same time running all of the other tasks on its plate.

Take a look at your system tray (the box in the lower right-hand corner by your clock). Is it full of icons? Everything that is in that box is a program that is running in the background while you work on your computer. You may not be using it at the moment; might not even use it at all for a few days. But still this program thinks that it needs to be running all of the time just in case you decide you need to use it. Having that icon there saves you about 4 seconds that it would otherwise take you to activate that program from the Start menu.

What does this tremendous (cough) time saver cost you? In terms of resources, quite a bit.

Your computer only has a finite amount of resources to work with. How much exactly is determined by a number of things:

The more RAM you have, the better. Some people will tell you that anything over 96 megs is wasted, as Windows doesn’t use it. While this may be true, (I can neither confirm nor deny it) more RAM certainly has never hurt anyone, and I personally have seen a significant increase in performance when boosting my RAM over 96 megs. Perhaps Windows doesn’t use it, but other programs do!

The trend for internet connections has moved greatly to high-speed, such as cable or DSL. As a result, webmasters are becoming less worried about the amount of graphics that they use in their webpage, and the file size of those graphics, since they can be downloaded up to 100 times faster than a dial-up connection. You’ve probably seen this trend emerging at all of your favorite web sites. They’re getting prettier, and taking longer to load. Well, all of those graphics are served up to you via your video card, so the more graphics you look at, the more you’re taxing the amount of RAM on that card. If you’ve got a small video card with 4 megs or less of “video memory”, you’ve probably noticed that after surfing for a while, you’ll scroll a webpage down and it will appear to “smear” vertically. That’s a sure sign that your video memory can’t take anymore, and it’s time to reboot. If you’re a power-surfer or work a lot with graphics, buy a video card with the most memory that you can afford. 16 megs is a good minimum for true power users.

Your swap file is a folder that resides on your hard drive. As your computer’s RAM fills up, Windows will compensate by ‘dumping’ things you’re not accessing at the moment into that file so that it can use your RAM for what you are currently working on. Microsoft would have you believe that it’s best to let Windows manage your swap file (aka ‘virtual memory’), but this simply isn’t true. It’s best to set the limits of your swap file yourself, and if possible, place it off of the C: drive (or partition) or at least out of the Windows folder. MaximumPC has written a fantastic tutorial on how to do this yourself. (Check the bottom of the page on the new window that pops up.)

Some hardware in your machine will use resources. This is unavoidable and unfortunately the only way to keep them from doing that is to remove the hardware. Usually the hardware is there because you need it to be so, so you’ll have to live with the consequences. Fortunately, most of the “big” resource eaters are being remade these days to have their own processor on the card, so they’re not using up as much as they used to. Deluxe sound cards, big video cards that perform many functions (like being tv tuners), and networking cards are guilty of grabbing a few percentage points of resources.

Before you begin, make sure you’re on a fresh, hard reboot. A hard (or “cold”) reboot is when you shut your machine down completely and restart it again using the power button. Simply choosing “Restart Windows” from the shutdown menu is what’s referred to as a soft boot, since it really only reboots the operating system and programs - the software.

 

Check your resources and find out what they are upon bootup. Do this by right-clicking on My Computer and choosing Properties, then hitting the Performance tab. Your System Resources should be over 90%. If they’re not, you’ve got a serious problem with Windows starting too many programs when it boots up and having too much pure, unadulterated junk on the drive. The farther over 90% it is the better, although you’ll never see a full 100%. The highest I’ve seen is 98%.

(Note: The following is for Win98. In Win95 you must take different steps and it’s a bit more complicated, but anything past step #1 you can do easily. With enough requests, I’ll post a clean-up routine for Win95.)

  1. Hit Start/Run and type “msconfig” (no quotes).

    Hit the Startup tab and uncheck everything that you do not want running when your computer boots up. The only things that are necessary to leave in are SystemTray and ScanRegistry, as Windows needs these to run. At any time you feel that you need something turned back on, you can simply come back to this msconfig/startup window and re-check that item.

    Unchecking these items will take their icon out of your system tray. If you need to turn one of these programs on, simply access the program by going through your Start/Programs menu, or make a shortcut to the program on your desktop. Unchecking these items does *not* remove or uninstall the programs from your computer in any way.

    When you are finished with the Startup tab, click on the AutoExec.bat and Win.ini tabs. Look for anything that says Run= or Load=. If these exist, simply type “REM” (no quotes) in front of the item. These are often loaded by games that run in DOS mode, but some other programs put these commands into the autoexec.bat and win.ini files.

    You’re finished with msconfig. Click Apply, and then click Ok.

    Your computer will tell you it needs to restart for the changes to take effect. Tell it ok and let it restart.

  2. When you reboot, you should notice that your computer gets to its desktop quicker. That’s because it doesn’t have a dozen programs to load on startup. Check your system resources again. They should be significantly better, especially if you had ten or more programs to uncheck.

     

  3. Now we’re going to empty out some unneeded files. Click Start/Find/Files or Folders.

    In the “Named” area, type “*.tmp” (without the quotes). Make sure the “Look In” drop-down box is set to all of the drives in your computer, and “include subfolders” is checked.

    Click Find Now!

    Highlight everything that turns up in the window and delete it. A fast way to do this is to click on the topmost file, and hold down the left shift key while you click on the very bottom file. They will all be highlighted and then you can just right-click and choose Delete.

    Do the same thing for “*.chk” files, and delete those.

    Close the Find window.

  4. Open your browser of choice and empty out the cache (temporary internet files). In IE this will be under Tools/Internet Options and in Netscape it will be under Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Cache (clear both memory and disk cache in NS).

    Close your browser.

  5. Open up your mail program and empty out your trash (deleted items) folder.

    Close your mail program.

  6. Go to your desktop and empty out your recycle bin.

    Almost done!

  7. Right-click on your desktop and choose Properties.

    Hit the Screen Saver tab.

    Set the screen saver to None. You can turn this back on when you are completely finished, but it needs to be turned off during ScanDisk and Defrag, which are coming up.

    Hit Apply and Ok.

  8. Hold down the Ctrl button and the Alt button and hit your Delete button (so in effect you are hitting all 3 keys at once). Be careful to do this only once! Twice will automatically restart your computer.

    Your task manager will appear. End task on everything that is currently running except for Systray and Explorer. You’ll need to Ctrl-Alt-Del again after ending every task.

     

  9. Now you’ve cleaned out your computer and turned off all programs that are running. It’s time to Scan your hard drive for any file errors and then Defrag the drive.

    Hit Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools.

    Choose Scandisk, set it to all drives, and let it start. There are options available to you in ScanDisk, take a moment to look at them to choose your personal settings. It’s fine to just leave it on the default settings.

    If you do not ScanDisk often or have never done so, this will take quite a while. Let it finish completely.

    When it is done, hit Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools again, and choose Defrag.

    Set it to your C: drive and start it. This will also take a long time, especially if you have a large hard drive or haven’t performed a defrag in a while. It might be best to do this just before going to bed and just let the computer run while you sleep.

    Take heart, though! The more frequently you S&D, the faster they will be.

  10. Hard boot your machine again, and take a look at your resources. How are they compared to the first time you checked them?

When you’re all finished, you’ll have a nice clean, smooth-running computer that will be much nicer to you on resources! Keep in mind though, that you should do this cleanup once a week or so in order to keep your computer in tip-top shape. Some of these steps should be done at least every other day, such as emptying your cache, recycle bin, and deleted mail.

Here’s some things to keep in mind:

Remember, your computer is like a car. It needs its oil changed and the tires rotated every now and again to keep running well. The cleaner your hard drive, the better your machine will run!

Written by Raven on October 3rd, 2006 with comments disabled.
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Clearing Resources in Win95

Originally posted in July, 2000

In my previous article, I explained how to clear resources (and reclaim some hard drive space) in Windows 98. I had a couple of requests for the same procedure in Windows 95. Basically the only thing that is different is the first step, as there is no msconfig utility in 95. You have to do it by hand, but it’s much easier than it sounds.

Right click on My Computer, choose Properties, and click the Performance tab. Make a note of your system resources. Close out that window.

  1. Right-click on the Taskbar, then click on Start Menu Programs, then click on Remove.

    Go down to where it says Start Up and click the “+” next to it.

    This will open up the Programs folder. Inside of that, find the folder labeled Startup or Start Up.

    Click the “+” next to it and open it up.

    Now for each program that is in that folder that you don’t want starting when your machine boots (you don’t need any of it to start but maybe you really like your Gator program), highlight the program by clicking on it once, and then click Remove.

    Click Ok.

  2. Now back on your desktop click Start/Run and type in “Regedit” (no quotes). Click Ok.

    You are now in the registry of your computer. This is where Windows holds information about every program (including the operating system) on your machine. Just in case you mess something up, it’s best to save a backup copy of the registry beforehand. We’ll do that now:

    • Click once on My Computer to highlight it.
    • Click on Registry.
    • Click Export Registry File.
    • Under “Save In” choose your Desktop, and for the File Name type “RegBackup” (no quotes).
    • Click Save.
    • You’ve now backed up your registry and if anything goes wrong, you can restore your registry to its original form simply by double-clicking on the RegBackup.reg file on your desktop.
  3. Click on Edit, then Find

    Type in “runservices” (no quotes), then click Find Next. (This might take a couple of minutes, be patient.)

    If you can’t find it no matter what you do, you can get there by opening these folders in this order:

    • Hkey local machine
    • software
    • microsoft
    • windows
    • current version
    • runservices

      (Note: The Current Version folder is also where you’ll find your Microsoft Windows product ID, in case you’ve lost your certificate. It’s listed there as ProdID.)

  4. This will bring up a menu tree in the left pane, and the Run Services Folder in the right pane. The only thing that has to be in this window is the Modem, if it’s there and you use it. Highlight, right click, and delete everything else.
  5. Now in the left window pane, go up 2-3 folders to the Run folder, and open this up.

    Delete everything the same way EXCEPT Systray.

  6. Close the registry editor. If prompted to save changes, click Yes.
  7. Click Start/Run, and type in “Sysedit” (no quotes).

    You will see cascading windows. You need to go to the WIN.INI file, usually the third one back. Clicking on it will bring it to the front so you can work with it. If you don’t see cascading windows, minimize the foremost window (not the Sysedit window itself) and you’ll be able to see the other files.

    If you see RUN= or LOAD= lines, type “REM” (no quotes) in front of them.

  8. Close out of the sysedit window (click the X in the upper right hand window.

    You’ll be asked if you want to save changes, click Yes.

  9. Shut down and restart your computer, and check your resources again. If you wish, you can now continue on from step 2 in the previous article, “Your Computer Has Performed An Illegal Operation…”

    So how did you do?

    Written by Raven on October 3rd, 2006 with comments disabled.
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Back It Up, Baby!

Originally posted in July, 2000

You turn on the radio on the way home from work and find out that a new virus has just swept across the country - and it’s main purpose is to erase your hard drive. You know that someone at home is using the computer right now and most likely, that virus is sitting in your email waiting to take its toll. What do you do?

Well, you can either panic and cause a ten-car pile up when you swerve across lanes while digging for your cellphone, or you can smile and say “Go ahead. Make my day. My machine needed a good wiping anyway, it was getting cluttered. So give it your best shot, virus boy!”

What’s the difference between the person scrambling to call home and the person smugly chuckling at the radio announcer?

Smug man backs up his data on a regular basis.

If you’re going to use a computer, you have to back up your data.

“But I don’t open any .exe files!”

It doesn’t matter. The new breed of viruses don’t come with .exe files. A brownout from the local power company can hose your machine. Your hard drive can decide to move on to greener pastures without you. I’ve even heard of one customer who ate next to his computer every night. He had a terrible ant problem. Eventually, the ants thought the inside of the computer case looked like a neat place to go hunting for dinner - and they ate through every cable in the system. You never know what might happen, so I’ll say it again. You have to back up your data.

What’s the best way to back up?

Writable CD Roms. They can handle an incredible amount of data and they’re pretty hard to destroy. My 2.5 yr old abuses his learning CDs in ways that make me cringe, and they still work fine.

Next would be the new “large floppies” - Zip drives, Jazz drives, Orb drives, etc. These big hard-cased floppies hold anywhere from 100 megs of data to 2 gigs. They’re bigger, so they’re harder to lose. You still have to be careful about putting them near magnets, though. (This includes your speakers! Don’t ever put any type of floppy on top of unshielded speakers!)

After large floppies comes small floppies. They don’t hold much, just 1.4 megs of data; but that’s plenty of room for a lot of pictures or small files. They do tend to get misplaced quite often, though.

Last, in my opinion, are tape drives. You can buy a tape drive that will back up an entire server. However, coming from the generation that thought the Walkman was the coolest thing on earth, I know how easily tape can go sour. I wouldn’t use a tape drive if it was my last resort. Then again - that’s just me. Let’s just say I’ve thrown out enough cassettes with their ribbon innards blowing in the breeze that I don’t trust the insides of a tape drive to be clean enough to keep that tape from stretching, ripping, or crinkling.

What do I back up?

Anything that you use on a daily basis. Period. This might include:

How do I back up?

Microsoft has an automatic backup utility - don’t use it. It’s too long, complicated, and unreliable to even go into. As usual, the best way to do it, is to do it by hand.

Remember - Copy, don’t Cut. You want to make a backup of the data, not move it all together. If you can’t find a program, do a Start/Find/Files or Folders for it.

For programs like ICQ, etc., you just need to access those programs’ folders on your hard drive and find out where the data is stored. In ICQ it will be a folder named DB, DB99, DB99b, 2000a, etc. You’re looking for a database folder that has your UIN (icq number) attached to different types of files: .dat, .idx, and .msg. Copy this entire folder onto your backup. If you need to reinstall ICQ after a glitch or a reformat, install the main program first, go through the registration, then turn ICQ off. Replace the database directory it’s made with your backup. Start ICQ back up again, and your contact list should be there.

Favorites/Bookmarks

Your IE Favorites are stored in a system folder within your Windows directory. Therefore, you can’t copy the folder itself. Make a new folder on your backup disk and name it something like Shortcuts. Then open the Favorites folder, copy everything that is inside of it, and paste into your new Shortcuts folder.

If you have IE 5 you can turn your Favorites list into an html page of links. File/Import-Export, then just follow the directions and export as a file and put it on your desktop or straight onto your backup disk.

For Netscape, find your Netscape folder. Then dig down through it until you find bookmarks.htm. Copy this file onto your backup. In Opera and other browsers it’s almost an identical process; sniff around a little and you’ll find your bookmarks file.

When you need to restore, simply replace the existing folder or file with your backup; or in the case of ‘export’, just ‘import’ that backed up file instead.

Mail

For Outlook and Outlook Express, you can do both in one fell swoop. C:\Windows\Application Data. Backup this entire folder and after reloading Windows, replace the entire folder.

Netscape - Identity/Preferences/Mail and Newsgroups/Mail Servers. At the bottom of this window you’ll see where Netscape keeps your mail. Go to that folder and copy the whole thing. To restore, simply replace the folder with your copy.

Eudora, Poco, and other email programs also let you specify where you keep your mail. Simply browse through the preferences until you find where that is, then go copy that folder and everything in it.

Address Books

For Outlook and Outlook Express, you most likely got your address book (or contact list) when you copied Application Data. But, just to be safe, or even to load it onto another machine… do a Find for “*.wab” (no quotes). Up will pop all of your address books for every identity on your computer. Make note of where they are, and copy them. After restoring, simply replace.

Again, with other programs like Netscape, Eudora, and Poco; it’s a matter of where you’ve specified to keep this data. Sniff through your program and find out, then copy it.

The My Documents Folder

My Documents, like Favorites, is a system folder. So you’ll need to copy the contents of the folder, not the folder itself. Have fun with it, name your backup folder something like My Junk.

Digital Photographs

This one is simple enough… find those pictures on your hard drive, copy them. Never trust your computer with something as precious as digital photographs that can’t be replaced. Always have a double somewhere. You do not want to lose that great pic of your first grandchild smiling just because you assumed your hard drive would always be there for you.

Installation Programs For Files You’ve Downloaded

Sure, you could always go download these again, but if you’re on a dial-up connection this will take a lot of unnecessary time. You should be saving all of your downloads to a specific folder anyway, so they’ll all be in the same place. If you do this, just copy that folder onto your backup. Ideas for this would be setup files for ICQ, RealPlayer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, WinAmp, Eudora, etc… anything you really use and don’t have on CD.

Anything Else That’s Important To You!

Obviously I can’t go through every program available in the world. Take the time to browse through your hard drive and look in each folder and see what programs are there. (You’ll find many still hanging around that you don’t even use anymore - don’t delete them! Uninstall them instead then delete their skeletons.) Look in those programs’ Help files to see if there is any info on how to back them up. If there isn’t, email the program’s manufacturer, ask friends that have those programs, or just back up the whole folder when in doubt and replace after installing the program when you restore.

Now that you’ve backed up your data, keep it in a safe place. These aren’t disks that you want your children getting a hold of, or that might be easily misplaced. A shoebox in the top of your closet is safe; just throwing the disk into a desk drawer is not. You might even want to put them into a fire safe with your important papers and files.

Either way, the only way to not worry about your data is to make sure you back it up frequently. You might even want to geek out completely and make a ghost copy of your hard drive, or have a second hard drive with the identical information… but that’s not necessary. Just use some common sense and never assume that what you have today will be there tomorrow, and you’ll be fine.

Written by Raven on October 3rd, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Windows.