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 PCSOFT's List Owner's: Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]> Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>