docramage

Thanks Andavari Philip

I try to load most applications on my C: drive, and most of my data (esp photos and music files - not downloaded, but sourced by me) on various non-primary drives. Such viruses etc as I have had over the years have been almost exclusively on my primary drive. Is this most people's experience? It's of practical interest because scanning for malware can take a very long time if I have terabytes of data to trawl through. I don't mind doing that routinely weekly, but when trying to track down a new squeaking critter it can waste a lot of time. Regards, Philip

Becuase there are some operations better performed from DOS without Windows in the background, I have tried looking at my hard drives after booting from an MSDOS system disc formatted from within XP. I get an A:> prompt - but no access to any hard drives. If I include an autoexec.bat file with a LASTDRIVE command, it makes no difference. I suspect the reason may be that I have configured my machine to use NTFS access for the hard drives. If this is the explanation, is there any way around it? Thanks Philip

I want to be a know-all and understand XPs registry - can you help me irritate my friends? CCleaner reports dozens of Missing Shared DLL's. What does that mean? How does it find these? It can't surely interrogate my applications for references to DLLs Perhaps the Registry includes lists of DLLs which each application might need? The common explanation "often left behind after software is uninstalled" is not very helpful when referring to something that's missing. CCleaner offers to "fix these issues" - but that can't surely mean it finds and replaces the DLL references, or indeed the DLLs themselves. Perhaps it means that it removes references within the Registry flagging a DLL that should be there is missing. But, if a DLL is reportedly missing - doesn't that imply that it SHOULD be present? If the reference to its absence is removed, what hope is there that an application requiring that DLL will ever find it. Or does it mean that the Registry itself is mistaken in flagging that a DLL is missing? Lastly: given that all these questions are disturbing my sleep - are there potentially nasty consequences of instructiing CCleaner to "fix" these issues? I'd be grateful if you have the time to answer any of this and satisfy my curiosity. I used to be a DOS expert, and as with my old motor cars, could expect to repair most things with a crowbar and hammer. Bill Gates has a lot to answer for. Philip