mungolina

Hi, thanks for the response - it is displaying Vista view option 'Medium icons'; I've tried changing this to small icons. Hhowever, I have just noted that it, when I had a prob. just now with it not responding when I Alt-tabbed from a game, it was showing itself with a Word document icon, also in Task Manager when I went to kill it... so it does look like there may be some sort of corruption issue? On re-opening it, it showed the Games icon (the cup) again. Note, a number of the games I play are old silly things, with low screen resolution, so I guess the desktop etc has to completely refresh when I switch like that. Maybe that is a prob for it. I have 3Gb RAM and I don't have any particular problems with boot up time, it is slowed down by the fact that MSN starts up automatically, but otherwise it's OK (oh, except I have Speech Recognition switched on and can't find out how to turn it off again, that is a recent prob. when I thought I'd give it a try, any hints how to turn off gratefully received!). I recently ran TuneUp Doctor, that helped me sort out a number of things, and I review all the running processes at frequent intervals, and try to ensure I don't have any virus/spyware issues, or any unwanted services... except this Speech Recognition thingy of course :)

Hi, I have found for some time that when I open Explorer, it is very slow to refresh; this is especially true of the pre-defined Games window. I have added many shortcuts into this window (I play lots of different games). It can take a minute or more to start displaying (that is, it shows as a transparent window frame for a minute), and once it starts to show its contents, it can take several minutes to start to show the icons. Often, the explorer bar (not sure that is what it is actually called... shows where you are...) will start to show green and the progess bar will gradually fill up, after the window has already been open for a minute or more. Sometimes it takes so long that I kill explorer, and it restarts, but this doesn't actually make opening the required window any better afterwards. Any thoughts, please, how to fix this?

Hi, thanks, I have removed it (although there are still some processes hanging around, I think they are the sort of processes that keep an eye for updates - I kill them) - I do use task manager to look at activity, and I regularly check to see if there are any suspicious processes (search for their names on the web etc.), also keep an eye on activity - but in this instance, RAM was not being hit that I could see, it was definitely hard disk activity, and this is something I've been wanting to try to see for ages. I have a feeling there is no answer, which is frustrating!

Hi, I turned off Kapersky a while back, and use only Microsoft Security Essentials (plus an occasional scan with Spybot); however, I didn't uninstall Kapersky. Today I got a message that Kapersky had just automatically updated itself to a new version, option to restart now/later; I chose later several times, and in between went and uninstalled Kapersky. The uninstall needed a reboot too, I chose later again. The next reminder from the Kapersky update forced an immediate reboot. Since the reboot, the hard disk has been driving away, looks like a scan has been going on, but it's not the MS product; I can't see what it might be (and it has stopped since I started typing - ran for about an hour though). How can one see what is hitting the hard disk? Thanks!

Hard disk activity *I'm sorry, I thought I posted this as a new thread, please ignore and I shall indeed do that!

Hi, I have found for some time that when I open Explorer, it is very slow to refresh; this is especially true of the pre-defined Games window. I have added many shortcuts into this window (I play lots of different games). It can take a minute or more to start displaying (shows as a transparent window frame), and once it starts, it can take several minutes to start to show the icons. Often, the explorer bar (not sure that is what it is actually called... shows where you are...) will start to show green and the progess bar will gradually fill up, after the window has already been open for a minute or more. Sometimes it takes so long that I kill explorer, and it restarts, but this doesn't actually make opening the required window any better afterwards. Any thoughts, please, how to fix this?