On 10 Feb 2002, at 23:57, don penlington wrote:

> Windows 95B.
>
> In my win.ini file, there are a lot of entries in the "Compatability"
> section that I don't recognise, though there are a few entries with
> software names I recognise.
>
> Some that are meaningless to me are: BNotes, (I haven't noticed any
> Banknotes issuing forth), Charisma, Crosstie, Expastro, Excel (I don't have
> Excel), Faxview, Faxworks (I don't have a fax), Giftmake (I wish it would),
> Jeopardy (???)  Touchup, and various other exotic concoctions. I'd guess
> there's about 150 of these entries, nearly all meaningless.
>
> All are followed by a number of the form Ox......... are these memory
> addresses?
>
> If so, does this mean there's stuff being loaded into memory that I have no
> use for?
>
> Can or should I remove most of these entries that I don't recognise?  What
> perils may befall me if I do?  Would surplus entries here slow boot time?
>
> This section is followed by "Compatability32" with 11 entries.
>
> A little lower down there's "ModuleCompatability" with another
> similar-looking list of around 60 entries with more exotic names.

  Those weird hexadecimal values (0x...) are not addresses.  Each of
them is a binary value where each bit refers to some specific change
that was made to Windows' internal behaviour -- a bit set here tells
Windows that this (old) application cannot work with the new
behaviour and requires that a specific issue be handled the old way.

  The data listed represent the results of beta testing before the
release of this version of Windows, and were provided by Microsoft
with the installation of the OS.  No piece of software could have
guessed, at that point, which of these applications you might later
install on your PC, so most that are listed are unfamiliar to you.

> Further on there's an "Extensions" list showing most of the more common
> extensions ( .jpg, .txt, etc) pointing to their captive
> applications.  Seems to me this only duplicates what's already in the
> registry---are these entries needed in Win.ini as well?  Should I delete these?

  Windows 3.x recorded file associations in WIN.INI because there was
no registry yet.  You may still install and use 16-bit applications
which rely on this, and do not know about the registry, either
installing their associations here, or checking here for common
associations.
  So there is a *chance* that something could break if these entries
are not here.  The chance is much less now than it was in 1995, of
course, when it was decided to retain this file in Win95 because lots
of people still needed to run Win3.x applications....

David Gillett

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