Alan_B

No problem here - I am happy to pass on the baton p.s. I like the code.

That was not my experience in the past. Are you sure that CCleaner reformats, or is that just an assumption based upon the fact that the partition is still present but is now empty and ready for use ?

That should not happen unless someone deliberately changes Palemoon defaults - it should be in the profile. One possible change is to use RAM instead of a folder. I think that is achieved via "about:config". There are also tweaks via Palemoon-Portable.ini if you are using the portable variant. The source for Palemoon information is http://forum.palemoon.org/

I guess a 2.5" disk is designed with shock resistance to withstand a laptop being bounced around in the boot of a car, and has no trouble surviving in an external enclosure that suffers nothing worse than sitting a a desk that gets nudged with a vacuum cleaner. A 3.5" disk is designed for a static Tower computer - no safety margin there.

Different format ???? Change of :- Colour ? Font ? Size ? I suggest two screenshots showing before and after.

A quick fix is to use CCleaner | Options | Exclude There you can stipulate that this particular file be excluded from deletion. If this was my computer I would NOT be comfortable until I determined that this file was not malware. It has a legitimate purpose in the various system folders. When I search for CbsProvider.dll on the Internet I find results such as This suggests to me that for some reason the DISM image software may copy CbsProvider.dll from the system32 etc folder into a fancy multi-digit TEMP folder, and my guess is that once it has done its job then a clean-up operation should have deleted the copy. Personally I would not delete it in-case I broke something, unless on-line malware scanners issued a guilty verdict ( I have no authority to advise further on malware.)

Design Life and Actual Life can be different. Five metres from my home is a public footpath, under which is a nice new yellow plastic pipe that supplies gas for the entire housing estate. The estate was built about 30 years ago and instead of using cast iron pipes that were inclined to fracture, they used the latest and best and safest which was ductile iron pipes. Some time ago houses exploded (but not in my back yard) and it was discovered that these iron pipes were subject to corrosion in some soils, and the actual life could be far less than the predicted design life. That gas could leak and travel under ground for perhaps 50 metres before surfacing into a house. About 10 years ago there was a new decree (probably by Health and Safety Executive) that any such pipe had to be replaced by the latest and best plastic pipe. Two years ago was the first time I knew of the danger when I asked the man outside my house why he was replacing the metal gas pipe with plastic, and he showed me a 10 inch long "trophy" of 3 inch diameter pipe that he had taken from on old pipe in the next village. Five metres from my house was a 12 inch diameter that carried enough gas to barbecue all the homes in our road. The new plastic pipe has a good long design life That does not make me comfortable

I see no heinous crime when I asked you why you wish to use Normal deletion for most things. Your first post complained about the time wasted by securely deleting everything. You appear to have overlooked this capability of CCleaner :- You can Analyze and then select only one of the items and right click the CLEAN to delete that one item, hence if secure overwrite is enabled you can overwrite the recycle bin without dealing with browser caches etc. etc. I did not dismiss your suggestion out of hand.

Correction I was correct. Launching CMD.EXE and invoking DEFRAG is not a default Windows action, just as Launching CMD.EXE and invoking DISKPART and shrinking partition C:\ is not a default action.

This is a published document that refers to an overheating WD MyBook http://www.hdsentine...se_overheat.php Disclaimer :- I use the professional version of HDSentinel but a free Trial version is available. My motive is not to push the product but to show that 60 Celsius is far too high for the WD MyBook and many other products.

That seems unlikely because by default Windows 7 will not defrag any SSD - because SSD do NOT benefit from defrag like an HDD and SSD life is degraded by defrag.

How about your country zone ? I sent an email to a colleague on the other side of the office. I got a reply. His reply was dated 1 hour 59 minutes before my first email. We both had the correct data and time in the bottom right corner, but my country was set as U.K. and his country was in a time zone two hours away, so Microsoft Outlook applied a 2 hour offset to the time stamp of his reply.

I have 64 bit Windows 7 Ulimate + SP1 holding 4 instances of that file in System32, SysWow64, and WinSxs I would have thought that these were system files that CCleaner has no business removing, alternatively I guess that the O.P. has malware lurking in a temp/junk folder that is masquerading as cbsprovider.dll, in which case you need something other than CCleaner.

The journal editor might be concerned that even if 90% of External 3.5" drives failed for any causes other than high temperatures or being substandard, the readers of such an article might swamp the manufacturer with 50% of all failures, and not just the 10% that warrant replacement. If the manufacture has been coasting along with only 1% of the failures his costs would be vastly increased, and this might affect decisions upon which magazines should benefit from an advertising budget.

I have my doubts also and suspect it was a temporary illusion, which is why I suggested checking whether it still appeared in the new position after a full restart. I am sure that DF uses the approved defrag API's. Even if DF was not using the API's I doubt that Windows would allow anything to meddle with its essential system files such as Pagefile, Windows does not even allow me to read the Pagefile. I have just launched CMD.EXE with administrative privileges and even icacls is not allowed to tell me anything about Pagefile.sys Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601] Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:\Users\Alan>icacls E:\Pagefile.sys E:\Pagefile.sys: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. Successfully processed 0 files; Failed processing 1 files C:\Users\Alan>

As I previously stated :- and also Your experience indicates that when NOT in Boot-Defrag mode version 2.12 now considers Pagefile.sys as being just another non-special file which it is free to shuffle around. I do however wonder if Windows really does allow Defraggler to shift the Pagefile.sys whilst under a normally running Windows with UAC in effect. I have 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate + SP1 with UAC permanently disabled. I have just tried to open Pagefile.sys with a binary file comparator and it failed with the expected error message that the file was in use. I would expect Windows to absolutely prevent defragging or relocation of any file that was "In Use" - and Pagefile.sys should especially be protected. Is it possible that Defraggler was deceived and NOT showing the reality but only what it thought had happened. I have found that registry editors such as RegSeeker will search for keys and values that I stipulate, and allow me to delete those items and confirm that they have been deleted - even when "Permissions" have prevented that action. Before making a final judgement I suggest closing Defraggler, and then Launching again to Analyze and confirm whether Pagefile.sys has really moved. And then closing down the computer and restarting and then using Defraggler Analyze to again confirm that the relocation persisted through a total Reboot.

Many thanks for all those links. The last two are very much for me Regards Alan

The BIOS knows where and how to read the primary partition table, and having read it knows where to find up to either four primary partitions or three primary partitions plus an "extended partition table". At this stage it does NOT know where the logical partitions are, it will have to read the extended partition table to locate the logical partitions and that might need one more rotation at 5400 r.p.m. whilst Windows is booting up. Once Windows is running it should remember (from RAM) where the logical partitions are. My XP Laptop had a natural Windows default of 1 Primary and everything else was Logical. That was TRAGICAL. I created partitions for various purposes of adequate but NOT excessive size, If I need to run Chkdsk I would rather do so on a 50% full 10 GB partition than on a 98% empty 200 GB partition, and I would like to retain "Unallocated Space" on the physical drive so that a new purpose can be satisfied with a new partition without having to shrink existing and nearly empty partitions. THE TRAGEDY I had a new purpose - I needed to restore a partition image backup into "Unallocated Space", but Macrium said "no can do". Macrium support was outstanding, and quickly identified the problem and provided the solution. The problem was that the Extended Partition Table was corrupted and and confused over the end boundary of a partition V:\ immediately before that unallocated space, and there was in effect a cross-link between V:\ and W:\ on the other side of the space I wished to populate. I had to delete partition V:\ with all its contents so that the extended table would be corrected, then I was able to control my system again. If only I had been using Primary partitions there would have been no Extended Partition Table to cause grief and cross-links from one partition to another. If you only need four or less partitions on a drive then Primary only will avoid the (small) risk of an Extended Partition Table confusion. Summary. I have to dig deep to find a reason for using Primary instead of Logical.

Many thanks for your time and effort. You have given me immediate answers to things that puzzled me, but which I refrained from Googling because I get confused and misled because so many articles either give no date of creation, or if a date is given it might be a revision date, but refer to technology as if it was current and yet it might actually have been phased out more than 10 years ago. I am now ready for bed, but will use your links tomorrow. Thanks Alan

A probably simpler and more thorough solution is to first use Windows Explorer and select the partition you wish to recover from. This will cause the drive to "spin up" and when it has done so then Windows Explorer will show the contents and you can launch Recuva. This is more thorough in that even a "Green" drive that automatically shuts down to save power will respond. When you disable sleep and power options etc this only stops Windows from issuing "stand down" commands, but "Green" drives will still shut down regardless if they are being ignored.

Events Viewer has an export facility that should suit. Alternatively as a general purpose tool I strongly recommend SysExporter http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/sysexp.html This is able to capture almost anything. I have just launched Event Viewer and selected the Applications Tab for display and this has 3811 events. I launch SysExporter and it displays the same, and I can then select all items and export in various modes including text and Html I prefer "Copy Selected Items (Tab Delimited). You can append such text files to posts on this or other forums.

Thank you for the explanation. Until today I thought the only disadvantage of a 3.5" external drive was that it took too much power for a USB2 port, and so required a separate powered hub that should NOT be switched on at the same time as the P.C. ( I encountered a "race hazard" if the external drive was powering up at about the same time as Windows XP, which resulted in System Volume Information violating my requirements.) Supplementary questions about 2 platters with a total of 4 heads :- How many independent actuators ? i.e. Assuming access is required to 4 different files and they HAPPEN to be accessible to 4 different heads, will 4 independent actuators move them instantly or sequentially ? ( I vaguely remember reading terms such as "Elevator Control" on high throughput enterprise drives one or two decades ago) When a Partition is created on an empty drive, does it populate only one surface at a time until complete, or does it spread across all surfaces simultaneously ? Are the LBN file clusters in sequence on one surface, or stepped across from one surface to the next to maximise the rate at which the file as transferred ? Will partitions populate Regards Alan

That is strange - it is NOT hidden to me on 64 bit Windows 7. I have no trouble accessing C:\Users\Alan\AppData\Local\ which corresponds to %LocalAppData% in my profile. N.B This is NOT accessible to me :- C:\Users\Alan\AppData\Local\Application Data\ but that is not on the route to %LocalAppData%\Opera\Opera x64\icons

Perhaps the title needs changing. You give arguments against 3.5" drives, but say nothing about 5.25" drives (I remember how much better a 5.25" Floppy Disc was than the earlier 8" Floppies.) Please explain further. Your statements surprise me because your reality differs from my preconceptions (I admit I have never taken a HDD apart). I assume that you are referring to physical heads, and not the fiction shown by the "properties" of my 600 GB Western HDD WDC6401AALS-00L3B2 that it has 129 Heads accessing 4 off 512 byte Sectors per track on 2422991 Cylinders. I understood that an HDD might have one or more platters, with two heads per platter (one on each side). I assume that there are technological constraints upon how close together the tracks could be, and how close together the flux transitions may be, and consequently how many bytes may be held on a given surface area, and hence a Desktop 3.5" platter could hold about twice as much data as a Laptop 2.5" platter, so for a given capacity there might be twice as many surfaces and heads to fail on the Laptop 2.5" drive compared with the Desktop 3.5" drive. Those are my preconceptions but I am open to education Alan

Predictive Texting must have no end of fun with you