At 20:54 15-12-00 -0500, Carroll Grigsby wrote:

>snip
>01. Close down every program that is running in the background -- I do this
>by working through all of the icons in the lower right. That includes virus
>scanners and stuff like that. It's probably better to hit
>control-alt-delete, and kill every absolutely non-essential program, but I
>can never remember which one or two ditties I shouldn't kill.
snip

There are much faster and easier ways to do this. I recommend the free PCmag utility enditall, available from:
http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/swlib/hotfiles/info.html?fcode=0011NB&b=pcmx

From the readme file:
PLATFORMS:
Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0
DESCRIPTION:
EndItAll lets you terminate all non-essential programs for the purpose of
installing new software, running finicky games, or writing to CD-Rs that need a
big buffer. The essential system programs Explorer and Systray cannot be
terminated. EndItAll's main window presents a list of running processes. You can
protect any process in the list from termination.

I've been using this utility a lot without any problems whatsoever and it's spectacularly much faster than the repeated CAD's (something like 15 programs stopped in 15 seconds!). After this I only have to manually disable my screensaver and I'm proud to say that I only forget this about half the times.

HTH
Gunnar

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