Laura wrote wrote: >Someone suggested the following action to aautomatically optimize my hard >drive but I don't know how to open/find RegEdit.<> If you don't know how to open Regedit, you won't know how to create the new entry, so best leave it alone. This hack won't optimize your hard drive. It may at best "optimize" the appearance of XP, but that depends what you mean by "optimize". This could mean appearance (ie all the eye candy that robs performance) or performance ( which robs you of all the nice eye candy). Some people prefer performance, some prefer appearance. Most steer a middle course. You can make all these performance settings manually without going into the registry, which is much safer than fooling around in the registry, the "brains" of the system. (Control Panel/System/Advanced/Performance/Settings). Also Desktop Properties/Appearance/Advanced/Item. The setting you propose is not a default setting as far as I can see, and is unlikely to do very much good. If you still wish to proceed----and there's no reason why not if you are adventurously inclined-----then you must first make a backup of the registry, or at least the portion you intend to change. Then, if you mess up, at least you can restore the registry. The proposed change would not be fatal. I'm not familiar with this registry edit, so can't predict precisely what it may do without further research. Don Penlington From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland. Computer tutorials, local scenery, and other things at my website: http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html PCSOFT maintains many useful files for download visit our download web page at: http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml