Derek891

1.) In response to both Genezus and Lyngypsy - If you ever encounter the situation where a drive wipe leaves you with little or no free disk space, follow the advice already given by Augeas - look for an extremely large file with a nonsensical filename at the root of C: drive - an example of what to look for is here: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2dl8xua&s=6#.Uvk1p-mPI5u You may find that you are unable to send it to the Recycle Bin due to it's size, in that case highlight the file and use "Shift+Delete" to delete it. 2.) In response to Lyngypsy - By chance, are you using Avast as your antivirus software? There was a thread on this forum not that long ago describing a conflict between CCleaner and Avast where the author described the same message you have, "Access is Denied". I don't use Avast myself, so I'm not sure exactly what must be done to resolve the problem, but the issue seemed to be Avast denying CCleaner permission to run. The thread is here: http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=39741&hl=%2Baccess+%2Bdenied 3.) In response to everyone - Why do people use 100% of their hard drive for Windows? You don't have to. If you want a drive wipe to be performed in a reasonable amount of time, then it follows you should make C: partition a reasonable size. If Windows occupies 30 to 60 GB on your drive, think about shrinking C: partition down to 100-200GB, or whatever you think is reasonable. If you do this, you need to do two things first: defragment C: partition to move the files closer to the beginning of the drive, and allocate a larger percentage of the drive for system restore points. (Example: 1% of 1000GB=10GB, whereas 10% of 100GB=10GB. Understand?) Then shrink C: partition. And to Genezus and Lyngypsy - Hello and welcome to the forum!

Have you noticed that the water in the john is spinning in the opposite direction since it's been fixed?

When you absolutely, positively, have to get that nasty old porn off your hard drive, you need a JBF 54/60 .... and a good pair of safety glasses: Seven passes through that machine should be more that adequate.

Hello Antag - I have found that if Windows is giving you a hard time over accessing or deleting a file, or a registry entry for that matter, there is usually a very good reason behind it. I would want to know exactly what that entry is associated with and what it's purpose is before doing anything. Having one extra registry entry will have no noticeable effect on your boot time. And if you feel you must delete it, please do yourself a favor, make a backup of the registry before attempting any surgical procedure.

Winapp2's new logo:

Here's a desktop with an attitude:

Hello rvhinton and welcome to the forum. I'm currently on a Toshiba laptop that has Windows 7 H.P. 64 bit SP1, I.E. v.11.0.2, Chrome v.32.0.1700.102m, and CCleaner v.4.10.4570(64 bit) installed. When I open CCleaner, there are 8 menu options available for cleaning Internet Explorer and 9 selections available for cleaning Chrome. Could you be more specific on what you believe is missing?

Hello @Andavari - Sorry to hear that Zorin isn't working out for you. How much system memory does your machine have? Keep in mind that when you're running live, Zorin is loaded into system memory. On a machine with 2GB of memory, just loading Zorin would use 75% of your memory, leaving about 500MB to run the live system. That's cutting it a little thin in my opinion. Try this: Start a live session and use Gparted to create a 2GB partition on your hard drive and format it for use as Linux Swap, then turn Swap On from Gparted. See if the live system still crashes at that point, see if you have any hardware compatibility problems, and test all the applications . Installing Zorin to the hard drive will free up all the memory in order to run the system, and you don't need a lot of space if all you want to do is test it. Try using 10-12GB for a root partition and make a swap partition equal to system memory, any less and you will not be able to suspend the system. Hello @login123 - Yes that is the disk utility. If you click the small wheel icon in the upper right, you can access more disk tools, including the S.M.A.R.T. analysis utility I mentioned previously. Just be careful - one of the utilities performs a read/write analysis of the drive - you don't want to be doing a write analysis on your Windows disk!

Hello Rod and welcome. I think the drive map is misleading to a lot of users. Each block on the map does not correspond to one sector on the drive. If that were the case, the drive map would have to display nearly 250 million blocks (at 4096 bits/sector) for a 1TB hard drive. (My right index finger hurts just thinking about scrolling that far!) The drive map must fit in a very limited space, so each block represents a very large number of sectors. Some have data, and some do not, so I imagine there's a threshold value involved, let's call it x. If a block has >x bits of data, it is marked as occupied, and a block having <x is marked as empty, even though some individual sectors within the block do contain data.

Hello login123 - It does not sound very encouraging. You're running Zorin live, right? And you mounted all the partitions on the drive before running the test? Your results might be skewed if you overlooked one small partition. If Windows is the OS that is native to the system in question, it would be worthwhile to install Acronis or some other utility to analyze the drive and give you a second opinion. If the numbers match, then I would say that S.M.A.R.T. is trying to tell you something important, or as you said, maybe the overhaul at HP involved remapping the drive. What's sort of odd with my Lenovo (circa 2008) is that the S.M.A.R.T. analysis lists every single item in the "type" column as either "pre-fail" or "old age". And yet, when you look at the raw data, the reallocated sector count, spinup retry count, calibration retry count, seek error rate, recalibration count, uncorrectable sector count, and write error rate are all equal to zero, and it gives the drive a clean bill of health overall. BTW - Glad you like Zorin OS 8. All it takes is a little time to figure out where to find things on the menu, after that, it's very easy to use.

Hello NZHawk and welcome to the forum. Be aware that there are some system files that cannot be defragmented while Windows is running. I suggest trying a boot time defrag, instructions are here: http://www.piriform.com/docs/defraggler/defraggler-settings/boot-time-defrag Choose to run it once, and after Windows restarts, try a second defrag and see if there are fewer fragmented files.

How curious. On the downloads page I noticed a version that is specifically designed for Intel Atom processors(i.e. netbooks). Is that new, or was it there previously and I wasn't paying attention?

If anyone is interested, Zorin OS8, which they advertise as "the gateway to Linux", was released yesterday. I installed it last night on my Lenovo T400 laptop and so far all is well, everything works. I thought I'd share a few screenshots displaying some of it's features. The desktop: http://postimg.org/image/tj0npq0dv/ The desktop changer: http://postimg.org/image/xpli51zzn/ (Windows 7, XP, or traditional GNOME) The browser manager: http://postimg.org/image/fo2d795yr/ (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or Midori) The control panel: http://postimg.org/image/j00o0jxpv/ The start menu: http://postimg.org/image/8bwx1pnqr/ The system tools menu: http://postimg.org/image/4r11ihj77/ For anyone thinking of migrating from Windows XP to Linux, I think it offers the least amount of anxiety, since most of it's menus and features try to mimic Windows. On top of that, Wine comes already installed if you want to run any of your XP based software. I'll continue testing it and exploring it's software repositories, but I'm pretty sure this will be the new OS for my HP Mini when the time comes. Here's the link to the home page: http://www.zorin-os.com/

Hello Margreet and welcome to the forum. I'm sorry to hear about your problems. I did several Google searches and may have found a solution for you. There were a number of people who claimed this worked for them. First, clear the cache in Firefox, the directions are here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-clear-firefox-cache#w_clear-the-cache Then close Firefox. Second, go to the Command Prompt on the applications screen. Then right click it, and select "Run as Administrator" on the bar at the bottom of the screen. Then enter "ipconfig /flushdns" (without the quotes, and with a space before the "/" symbol). This will clear the DNS cache. Then start Firefox and see if you can access Facebook and Twitter.

To follow up on post #2, I opened an elevated command prompt and entered "fsutil resource info c:\" and found the space used by Tops was 368MB. Then I entered "fsutil resource setautoreset true c:\" and exited. After a system restart, there was about 30 seconds of high disk activity. Then I entered the first command again and found the space used by Tops was 2MB. So this command does clean out the Tops data file, whether or not it is defragmented in the process is another issue.

Hello zze110 and welcome to the forum. One thing you might try is this: Start Defragger, hit the Analyze button, then click the View Files button. When the list of files appears, hit the button at the top of the Fragments column to sort the files with the most heavily fragmented at the top. Then one by one, starting at the top, tick on each file and defragment them individually. There was one occasion in the past where this helped me to clear a small group of files that were extremely fragmented* and holding up the normal process. *Between 600 to 1,200 fragments each!

@Alan_B - Several months ago I had a problem with a Linux ISO. I had verified the file after downloading it and all was well. Then I copied it from my hard drive to a USB stick. A couple of weeks later I transferred it back to my hard drive and used Linux Live USB Creator to make a bootable USB stick. After repeated attempts to boot ended in failure, I ran a md5checksum on the ISO on the hard drive, and found it did not match. Then I ran a md5checksum on the ISO that was stored on the USB stick and found that it was also a mismatch. So during the initial copy process, it was somehow corrupted. Now I check every ISO after download, before and after transferring it to any external medium, and always before burning to DVD. Thanks for mentioning Teracopy, I will have to try it out.

The last thing I read was that Microsoft was skipping the 8.2 version and going straight to the 9.0 release. Reported timelines vary, from a wildy optimistic April 2014 to a more likely January 2015. Maybe Sprinty could elaborate on exactly what he has and where he obtained it.

Silly me! If I had followed the link to the home page, the name J.C. Kessels is right there! You learn something new every day.

With all the media attention and public paranoia concerning NSA surveillance, I'm sure news like this, as trivial as it may seem, is not sitting too well with Google's board of directors nor it's users.

Hello Brad - Glad to see you made multiple copies and stored them in different places. As far as the one copy that you can't verify, just delete it and try copying it again. Sometimes if you are doing other things on your machine while a copy is in progress, it can get corrupted. I usually walk away from my computer when downloading or copying ISO files for this reason.

It reminds me of an old joke: What does Microsoft Windows have in common with Star Trek movies? Every other one is good, and the ones in between are stinkers.

O.K. Brad - I'm glad to hear the md5checksum matches, that means the ISO file was not corrupted during the download process. You should have no problems using it. And since the USB stick you created using Rufus boots, it should give you a clean install. As far as burning a DVD, you need a program to burn the image, just copying it will not work. I understand Imgburn has a good reputation, the link is here: http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=Download I suggest using Mirror #7 since it is a direct link to their website. If Imgburn gives you a choice of burning speeds, use the lowest speed possible, it takes longer but is the least likely to produce any errors. The difference between using Rufus to create a bootable image and burning an image to DVD is this: Rufus adds other files along with the ISO image when installing it to the USB stick to make it a bootable device. When you burn an image to DVD, these files are not needed, the image will boot on it's own. That's a major hurdle that's been cleared. You have a good image and the means to do a clean install of Windows 7. At this point you have all your files backed as well, so you can relax a little and use the internal drive until it dies. If you want to continue experimenting with either cloning or imaging using the second Toshiba as the target drive, that's up to you. I'm glad you made it this far, it's been a long road to get to this point.

Hello Sprinty and welcome to the forum. First, do not delete this file, it is a system file that stores file information such as timestamps, read/write permissions and so on. Deleting it could lead to filesystem chaos and a non-working computer. This is why Microsoft has made it a hidden file. Second, I believe this file cannot be defragmented while Windows is running. Have you tried doing a boot time defrag with Defraggler? The instructions are here: http://www.piriform.com/docs/defraggler/defraggler-settings/boot-time-defrag Third, I found this link after doing a Google search. It gives instructions how to clean this file during system reboot: http://mydefrag.com/FAQSpecialFiles-HowDoIDefragmentCExtendRmMetadataTxfLogTopsTDATA.html However, since this is third party information, and I have never tested it (nor do I care to), proceed at your own risk! Please do not hold me accountable for any bad results!

A curious thing occurred today. A large portion of China's internet traffic was re-directed to a small office building in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Since China is not very forthcoming with an explanation of what caused this, speculation abounds: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/22/that-time-the-chinese-internet-found-itself-at-a-tiny-house-in-cheyenne-wyoming/ Edit: Here's another link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/2014/01/22/414a4388-8395-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html Or two: http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/22/5335410/china-web-traffic-directed-wyoming-house-great-firewall