Andavari

I don't even feel one ounce of sorrow for them!

Your friend hit the nail on the head. In actuality not having Flash installed means you wouldn't be able to view flash enabled content.

Leave "system.dat" and "user.dat" alone they're the system registry for Win98SE.

Yesterday evening CNN (the channel) had a rather long dicussion about it, and even showed how it was effecting their computers.

Every antivirus product I've ever tested can detect the EICAR antivirus test virus. You should be more impressed or depressed with how NAV deals with real viruses that can harm your system. NAV may be the best for you, however many people on this forum avoid it like the plague, myself included.

I only wish they would have agreed on one DVD format instead of +/- which is the reason why I'm planning on getting a new DVD writter drive that supports the burning of both + and - versus just being stuck with + which is my current situation.

From my experience Sygate Personal Firewall is just as buggy as ZoneAlarm. However Sygate does have one of the best logs available in a free firewall, and the ability to create twenty of your own customized rules is an added bonus that I deeply miss after switching to ZoneAlarm.

There aren't too many programs with registry cleaners as powerful as the one Jouni has in JV16 PowerTools. The registry cleaner in CCleaner is among the safest if not the safest one I've ever used which makes it fool proof. The problem with powerful registry cleaners is the ability to cause severe problems such as having to reinstall programs, or worse making Windows unbootable.

They last time I fueled up my car with gas at BP (British Petroleum) from what I can remember it was around $2.40 USD for high octane premium unleaded (which my car must use) give or take a few cents, and costed me about $22.00 to go from a 1/4 tank to a full tank. Since I have a fuel efficient 4 cylinder motor in my car I don't have to visit the gas station that often, which is also helped by not taking any unnecessary joy rides.

I really don't know if those products would be the cause or not. It's difficult to say if it's their fault or some on-going hardware issue that Dell has. ---- When the problem resurfaced on my system after about one year after applying the BIOS update I ran the Windows File Checker which scans all protected system files and replaces incorrect versions with correct Microsoft versions. To use the Windows File Checker 1. Click Start->Run->Type in: sfc.exe /scannow 2. It won't give you any info after it finishes, therefore after it finishes restart your computer. There may be a brief moment during startup where a light blue screen appears which means it's replacing incorrect versions of system files with the correct Microsoft versions. Now rather this will break an installed software product or not I don't know! ---- I also tried this on my system, I'm uncertain if it actually fixed anything though. Update for Windows XP (KB887742) This update addresses an issue that could cause your system to stop responding if certain firewall or antivirus programs are installed: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/887742

The not properly shutting down problem is a known problem with Dell PC's running WinXP and has been since at least 2003. You can look for a flash BIOS update on the Dell website http://support.dell.com which did solve about 99% of my shutdown issues with my Dell PC. Note, from time to time even after a BIOS update it still may not shutdown properly, and may be caused by certain software, etc.

To help narrow it down it'd be very useful if you can supply information such as: - OS version - A list of the antivirus scanner, and utility programs you had the problem with

Nice to see some valid info, according to the 10 O'clock news where I live they stated it affected Win95 and above. People with some security knowledge should already know about closing port 445 since it has previously been susceptible to security threats.

Well I'm getting ripped off by my ISP InterLink which charges $19.95 per month for a freakin' dial-up. The only reason I still use it is because I don't have to install some crappy half-ass software just to connect to the web.

I don't know if it's safe to remove or not. The safest approach would be to right click it, select properties and compress the folder contents. Yesterday I followed and did was is detailed in this article: cleaning up after installing WinXP SP2.

It can be disabled by malware.

Cool tip! My factory specs say it's supposed to be 512kb, however after following your tip I found it was set at the Windows default 256kb.

5/12/2006 for me.

Are you saying when you click the button to fix the issue it causes your system to reboot?

Perhaps it's the problem. Anything listed by the Issues scanner is safe to remove, however if you wish you can create a backup when prompted.

That's why it's best left to Windows to manage.

That swapfile/pagefile RAM x 2.5 reference has been around for ages. The only problem with it is you can run into memory related problems such as a program can run out of memory with such a "tweak" when it used to run fine. I used to use that "tweak" on my Win98 system however after undoing it I noticed no performance difference. ----- Edit: There's also this, I only tested it on Windows 98 and I don't even recommend using it anymore: ConservativeSwapfileUsage: On systems with more than 128MB Ram (not equal to) can use this setting to tell Windows to use the Swap file less and use system memory (ram) more for file usage. Normally the Swap file grows and shrinks constantly by 10's of megabytes every second, minute, etc., when you use different programs thus creating a lot of disk fragmentation. If you use big graphic programs it can grow by 100's of megabytes. The ConservativeSwapfileUsage line "may" improve system performance, and "may" speed up your system. It really isn't known just how effective this is. It was thoroughly tested on a Win98 system for over one year. The only thing that can really be said about it is that it DOES turns off the usage of the Swap file, e.g.; your system will not use the Swap file at all, this can of course cause severe system stability problems since your system memory is the only means for memory and Windows won't have anywhere to Swap the memory to a file. Note: All I could tell this was doing was causing less disk thrashing. It also decreases the time it takes to defrag, hence defrag doesn't have to move hundreds of megabytes around the swapfile. Below is how the ConservativeSwapfileUsage should look in the system.ini file: [386Enh] ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1

I think ewido would probably be the solution, although it would need dedicated antivirus built-in as well as a firewall. Of course it would bloat the app, however I see it as being a prime candidate for such an evolution.

This will do it. It will delete the log file and then shutdown Windows. Note: Save any open documents you have before running it, since Windows will shutdown in three seconds after running the batch file. XCOPY /Y "%WINDIR%\INTERNET LOGS\tvDebug.1" "%WINDIR%\INTERNET LOGS\tvDebug.log"ATTRIB +A "%WINDIR%\INTERNET LOGS\tvDebug.log"shutdown -s -t 3 -c "System Shutdown"EXIT

I forgot I even posted that in that other thread. That other thread has much better instructions as well.