DennisD

We got a Sinclair Spectrum for my son sometime back in the stone age, and we lashed out and got the one with the HUGE memory. 48k.

Can't wait to see this, have been a Bruce Willis fan since for ever.

Leaving your downloaded stuff sounds like a good idea Robbie, but I think I prefer a clean slate if I've had a problem bad enough to warrant reinstalling. Probably an over-reaction, but we do whatever we feel more comfortable with I suppose. Anyway reinstalling all this stuff keeps me out of trouble, and it gets rid of a lot of software that's never used.

Hi Mike, It's a pleasure to have you come to the forum, and you've probably gathered that I'm a fan of Returnil, but not, unfortunately, a fan of all its features. I think the System Protection is pretty amazing, but I just did not feel comfortable with the Virtual Partition, in fact I didn't like it at all. I gave it a good try, and from a not too technical point of view, (which is the only one I'm qualified to give) the VP seemed to make my HD work as if it was severely fragmented, and an analysis by windows defragment tool gave the same visual information. An awful lot of noise and an awful lot of red. Unfortunately, that first impression was enough to put me off the VP permanently. And unfortunately again, you don't usually get a second chance to make a first impression I'm sure I've read somewhere that even a fresh install of Windows OS can be spread across the drive, and I was really concerned that the VP had been mounted on free space in and around the Operating System, as opposed to being on free space adjacent to it. If that was a completely inaccurate, or even stupid observation, I make no apologies, because not knowing any better, that was the fear I had. I have to be honest, and say I would rather physically partition my drive (which I did a couple of weeks ago), or buy a second drive, than mess about with a Virtual Partition. I hope my comments don't offend, as I think an honest description of a new users impressions are probably more use than no feedback at all. I look forward to seeing you on here again, and good luck. Dennis

I'm running a Compaq Presario (HP) and the HD has a recovery partition, about 6gb, which isn't actually hidden, but there are visual warnings to leave it well alone. There's also an application called recguard which runs on startup which hopefully does what it says, "Guard the Recovery Partition". There are two options with it, RECOVERY or DESTRUCTIVE RECOVERY. Both options remove all software you have installed yourself, although the first is supposed to keep all data files ie Pics, Music. If anyone else here has these features, believe me, on one occasion the non destructive recovery removed all the data files as well, but fortunately, I didn't trust it so I backed them up beforehand. Truth be told, this recovery partition is worth its weight in gold. Edit: Thanks fredvries, appreciate that.

That's the first thing that I liked about this programme, the simplicity of making one image out of many. There may be other programmes that do that, but I wasn't aware of them. I'm with you on Picasa. It's the only programme I've reinstalled for organising and viewing photographs. Coupled with Photofiltre and this programme, I've a pretty good setup. This is a new one on me. Didn't know you could do that. Give yourself a good pat on the back for that link. Thanks

Hard to believe, but these are for real. Check them out here:

What can I say Humpty. I've gotta bite my tongue sometimes to stop myself from telling people how to tie their shoelaces 30 different ways, now all these little gems to drop into conversations. Nice one.

That homepage was well worth a read. Definitely haven't tried this before.

It happened twice, but since actually doing that register/reboot, it's remained registered. Had a quick look at your link, and I wonder if those people have Returnil configured to be active on boot, which makes it a waste of time registering. I know that seems far too obvious, but sometimes the obvious is the thing we miss.

Hi chronos, I can't remember if I've tried this one or not, so gonna have a looksee. Thanks for the info, and I hope you don't mind me turning your URL into a link. Photoscape: You can do this by highlighting > right click > copy the URL, and then select the green + sign box above the posting window, and then right click > paste the URL into the window that appears. Not trying to be clever here, but it took me a while to suss these things out.

I wouldn't presume to give you advice on this one JD, but I've played around with it a bit, and my observations and final setup might interest you. 1: I found that if you don't actually register Returnil, (which is simply pressing registration and rebooting, no internet connection required) then in my case, it kept reverting to a trial version. 2: I steered well clear of the Virtual Partition feature after trying it. My drive started working overtime, and defrag analysis said my HD was seriously fragmented, although after removing and reinstalling Returnil to get rid of the VP, an analysis showed my drive to be OK. 3: Configured it to be inactive on startup, and disabled the Returnil entry in my startup sequence, as even though it boots inactive, it still runs in the background. Works fine, and I prefer it this way. Anyway, hope it works OK for you, and if I experience any problems using it, I'll post them.

JD, it was an oversight of mine not to extend my sympathies to you last week, because it is a pain having to reinstall a lot of stuff. Two things I'm thankful for are 1: Getting hold of Paragon Special Edition and actually getting my a**e into gear and partitioning my one drive, and 2: Keeping Installation Packages and all registration details of various free stuff such as Paragon. A couple of things I'm not happy about, are 1: Completely forgetting about my Bookmarks. A lot of bookmarks. And 2: Not making an Image of my System Partition. Something Paragon can do. The only positive thing, is that I've cleanly gotten rid of a lot of software I was keeping in case it came in handy. Stuff thats not going back on. I've got a shed in my yard full of stuff that might come in handy. Wasted space.

Apparently, some folk are having problems getting this version registered now. After doing format/reinstall of OS yesterday I thought I might have the same trouble, and I'm not entirely sure if my workaround was the reason it's up and running again, but for what it's worth... Before formatting yesterday, made a copy of the entire shadow folder in system32. This being the registered English version. Today, after reinstalling OS, I installed the chinese version of Powershadow again, and then replaced the entire folder in system32 with the one I copied yesterday. Working fine. Hope this helps.

Guilty as charged. And if there's a cat god up there somewhere, he certainly delivered his vengeance on me last night.

I think I'm resurrecting the dead with this topic, but if anyone is having any problems with DivX, you may have the same one I had. The web player downloaded with some of the recent bundles can give problems. Go to DivX labs, (if you haven't already done so), and get the Web Player 1.4.0. beta 2. Used it for a while, with no problems.

Thankfully, the North East of England has escaped most of the really bad flooding, but you guys who live further down the country, hope you're on high ground. We've had some lousy summers in this country, but I can't remember the M1 being closed, stacks of trains not running, people trapped in factories as well as homes and cars, and whole villages being evacuated in case a dam bursts. Hells teeth, what next?

A good post for cats would be an Outpost, somewhere on the far side of the moon maybe.

A little bit of info here which includes Safari. Link. Edit: More here: Scroll down the page.

Hey JD, and Fireryone. Gotta thank you again for those tips and links. But I have to tell you, some of those themes look absolutely amazing until you install them, then your eyes start to do funny things if you look at the screen too long. And I can't tell you my daughters comments when I left a particularly colorful one on for her to log onto. Great fun.

Well, I think I'll stick with an occasional JKDefrag defrag.

Humpty, did you find out why your 2gb of memory wasn't working? The reason I ask is because Crucial says that my two slots (only 512 in one of them at the moment) can take a gb each. But the info I get from my system is that it can only handle 1gb. I would probably be more than happy with 1gb, but how reliable is the Crucial scan?

Just realised what programme you mean. Do I detect just the faintest trace of sarcasm there? I can take it. If I'd had it running, absolutely. But at the time, I was off line working with some photographs, and as I mentioned in a previous novel, I use Returnil primarily for trying new software. Wouldn't have been much good saving photos into a copy of My Pictures in memory. What I do remember, is trying out Power Defragmenter, and then running an exe file called SIW, a system information thing. After that, I couldn't run or launch anything except IE. Not even Faststone Capture, but I did take a pic of the screen. This is the same window which appeared after clicking every shortcut. And after rebooting, this same window appeared for every file in my startup sequence. And the same window appeared in safe mode. A file download from C:/program files? Anyway, it's all sorted now, but it would be nice to know what happened.

Thankfully, I partitioned my drive a week or so ago, so all pics, music etc were all on the partition. Just lost a lot of installed software. No big loss. At the time, I wasn't on line. Double clicked Picaso as it happens and got, if I remember rightly, the download manager asking if I wanted to run or save the file. Bit puzzled by this, so just clicked cancel and tried again. Same result, so I clicked run. Same message kept popping up. Tried another shortcut, same thing. Now I've got butterflies. Every exe. file of every piece of software I had installed resulted in the same message box appearing. First obvious thing to do was reboot. Usually gets rid of small glitches. Wrong! As it was rebooting, the process kept stopping with the same message box for, I think, every entry in my startup. So no, I didn't have an AV running, but only because like everything else in my startup, it wouldn't run. Couldn't access most things in control panel, like "security centre", or "system restore", so I had no idea if I even had the firewall up. Don't know why, but Internet Explorer was the only thing I could run. Anyway, rebooted and started in safe mode. Exactly the same thing. Same message box. Managed to access System Restore by rebooting and hitting the F key. Chose a restore point and hit the button. Did it's thing and then restarted itself for a few seconds, and then nothing. Tried a couple of times same result. Sick by now, formatted. Thanks for the link Hazel, Returnil wasn't running at the time, and as mentioned above, tried safe mode. Off topic now, but I hear a voice screaming "you're teas getting cold" Back later.