"DONALD ANADELL" wrote in message news:eGfdBiyHAHA.264@cppssbbsa04... Hi Ralph Since you've decided to take the plunge, here are a few notes on how to regain some of your Resorces that you are bound to loose with the install. Optimizing Windows Millennium 10 modifications that I have made to Windows ME to gain SIGNIFICANT increase in speed, performance and security. I have tested these settings for over a month and haven't encountered any problems. After applying these tweaks and rebooting the free resources are 99%. Before you decide you actually want to give up these features for the extra speed you should read this page. http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/features/2000/sept00/09-05winme.asp Keep in mind that the developers and testers for these features never encountered a worm or trojan or they may have found that PC Health and Restore will reinstall a trojan because it wants to take you back to the previous state before your "cleaning" modifications were made. Their ideas are good but unfortunately they didn't take these problems into account. It's also obvious they use very fast computers and didn't notice the deterioration of speed (compared to 9x) with all these features turned on. 1. Disable System Restore. Open Control Panel -> System -> Performance Tab -> File System - > Troubleshooting area -> Disable System Restore (While you are in this window click on the Floppy Disk tab and uncheck the box so the system doesn't check for a NEW floppy drive every time it starts.) ~~ 2. Uninstall Pc Health. Start / Run "\windows\pchealth\support\pchsetup /uninstall" ~~ 3. Turn off Automatic Updating. (This will hog your modem for the 30 mins every day when you first go on line if you don't turn it off.) Start / Settings / Taskbar / Advanced then check Expand Control Panel and close and go to Start / Settings / Control Panel / Automatic Updates and turn OFF Automatic Updating ~~ 4. Use ram memory rather than the swap file. (The system needs OVER 64 megs of ram.) Start / Search / Files type and enter: "system.ini" then click on it and open it in Notepad and add this line after [386Enh] (without quotes) "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" ~~ 5. Set file system to cache about 20 times higher than its default setting. Copy and paste these lines to Notepad and name the file MaxCached.reg then click on MaxCached.reg from Windows Explorer and say Yes you want to add that information to your registry. (You must set Notepad to "all files" when you save it or it will save as text.) -------------------------------- copy below ---------------------------------- REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\FS Templates] @="Max Cache" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\FS Templates\Max Cache] @="Max Cache" "NameCache"=hex:00,18,00,00 "PathCache"=hex:80,00,00,00 ------------------------------- to above ------------------------------------ ~~ 6. Disable these settings in the start menu. Start / Run type and enter: "Msconfig" then click on Startup and UNCHECK PcHealth, StateMgr, SchedulingAgent and Taskmon Then allow the system to reboot so all these changes will take effect. ~~ 7. Run Windows Explorer and click on Tools / Folder Options / View and select "Show hidden files and folders" then browse the c: drive and delete the _Restore folder. Hold your shift key so it doesn't move it to the recycle bin while you press del. This folder can have hundreds of megs of temp files if you have been running ME for a while with the system Restore and PC Health on. If you get an error message saying there is a sharing violation you haven't successfully turned off Pc Health and Restore. The _Restore folder should NOT appears again in the future (unless you update a key Microsoft program like IE). ~~ 8. See if anything unnecessary is running all the time. Press CTRL + ALT + DEl at the same time, after you have first booted up and see what programs are loaded. You may find several programs running that don't need to run all the time. Most of them, if actually needed, can be loaded from the Start / Programs menu. ~~ 9. Don't let windows run HTA, SHS and VBS Script automatically. Those file associations allow viruses to infect your system. Open Windows Explorer and click Tools / Folder Options / File Types and delete HTA, SHS and VBSscript. It is very unlikely a normal PC user would need those file associations turned on. ~~ 10. Disable "Automatic check for Windows Explorer updates" From the IE "Tools" menu click on "Internet Options" then go to "Advanced" and uncheck the 4th box. EVERY week back up modified files, defrag the system and update the definitions and scan the whole system with your favorite anti-viral program. Run Ad-Aware to fight the spying that a least 100 programs are known to do. (I do this mainly to save the baud width wasted by the data and banner ads that are passing back and forth.) I also manually load ZoneAlarm Pro. from time to time to monitor all programs and report everything that tries to access the internet. I don't like programs "calling home" without my permission. Note: Win ME does not use c:\command.com or win.com. I have found that deleting these files - that are NECESSARY for Win 9x - does not make a difference for ME. New cool feature I found in Win ME: When in DOS mode you can recall the past commands you have run from the dos prompt by pressing the up arrow. Good luck Don