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Well my cat hate it (or at least feign total indifference).

They do however like my RSPB Wildbirds DVDROM, and bird videos !!!

They actually quite enjoyed Garfield The Movie too

I have just spent an hour cleaning my computer.

One of the joys of having cats is the volumes of fur that collect around the house (and my person).

I had noticed my CPU was running hotter than usual and figured it was time for a clean out. What I hadn't banked on was pratically an entire cat hiding inside!

If you are like me your computer looks a bit like a porcupine with bits of wire poking out all around, so the first thing I did was get some sticky labels and label all the cables so that the connectors all went back in the correct places - last time I took the system apart I forgot to do this and quite a few USB devices decided they needed new drivers. This time I was prepared!!!

'De-quilled' the box was taken to the kitchen and all external covers taken off result ...  not being able to breathe for the dust and volume of cat hair setting all over me, the worktop and the floor.

Every possible crack in the case, and vent hole was completely encrusted with grot. I started with the case parts and a sponge and got all that clean. Next step inside ...

All the drives were removed and dusted with kitchen towl. The front fan casing (I don't have a front fan) was removed and the furry creature in there removed. Then the front filter (yes there was a filter - not that you could se it!) dusted and blown through.

I then set about around the motherboard and plugin cards and the floor of the box with a vacuum cleaner. Yes I know they can produce static but I earthed myself and kept one hand on the components being sucked at.

The case fans and PSU fan were clogged up and they had to be removed to clean manually (guess who forgot to note which way round they fitted!). The CPU fan was also dusty but I was shocked at the amount of crud that had found its way in between the heatsking fins.

And so all sparkly and clean I put everything back together ... realising I hadn't labelled my 7.1 surround sound speaker cables - trial and error time at low volume!

Plug in switch on and look at the temperature (using SpeedFan). the CPU started to get warmer, warmer , warmer .... When it reached 65C I thought I had better have a look, slid of the case side and the CPU fan wasn't going around.

From past experience I new this sometimes happened if you over tighten the screws when refitting so I got out a screwdriver and loosened each screw a tiny amount. The fan started - but I caught it with the screwdriver tip. Next thing there were fan blades lying on the floor ...

As luck happens I had an old heatsink and fan for an ancient PIII so I canibalised that for the fan. It was a different size, but I have managed to rig it temporarily and seems to work OK.

Net result ...

• Clean computer 
• CPU running temperature down by 10-12C (even with a dodgy fan) 
• Knackered fan 
• Bill for new fan 
• Feeling stupid 

Oh well you live and learn.

Since I am ordering a fan, I have decided to splash out an extra £8 (about $12US) on a couple of silent case fans - so now I can have a front fan pumping air into the case and and new silent fan pumping air out of the back, plus a super high speed (but quiet) replacement fan for my CPU !!

[very, very strange!]

That's very, very strange! It's rated 4.6/5 on http://fileforum.betanews...il/RegSeeker/1035382760/1 for a reason.

I never had a problem, using the options you see below and, as you said, it automatically creates backups. I convinced hundreds of newbies (no kidding) to try it and only one had a problem. Turned out later his PC was totally malware-infested (plus he had nasty problems before), so I don't blame RegSeeker at all.

One of the problems is there cannot be a truly automatic way to clean the registry without some unknown effects.

Some software adds registry entries that appear to be wrong - these will be deleted by most registry cleaners on automatic, breaking in the application.

Some software adds dummy registry entries that appear to be obsolete - if deleted you will at best possibly lose your application settings and at worst stop the software working.

Every cleaner I have tried on automatic tries to fix missing files by searching your hard discs for them ... this can lead to all sorts of unexpected results - examples:

* one silly example is linking to missing "readme" files and help files.

* A brilliant example of this was when I double booted my system with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 a few years ago. The cleaner I was using (Norton Utilities IIRC) did a beautiful job of finding lots of missing files in my W2k system. Trouble was it linked all the missing files to W98 versions - took me ages to work out what the heck was going on.

* Another example is I have a piece of software which has a bug in the installer in that a file reference has a spelling mistake. I know this to be the case and edit the entry manually after the app is installed. Any cleaner would simply remove the "missing file entry" rendering the software completely unusable.

* Some of the most widely used software uses the registry in unorthodox ways ... MS Office is a prime example where it installs all sorts of links and dummies into the registry for addons and extras to latch onto when installed. You only find these problems when you try and use them - this may not be for weeks or months and the problem won't be associated with radical registry cleaning. I once had to do a complete format and reinstall of my system because of this as it broke MS Office 2000's installation functions - stopping me from installing, repairing or uninstalling Office at all.

NO registry cleaner is (or can be) perfect in automatic mode. You may not have experienced problems (in which case you are very lucky in my experience) or, more likely, you may have only experienced the problems some time later and lost the association with registry cleaning.

Granted having good backups (even just of the registry tweaks you have made) makes cleaning safer and reversible.

Any recommendations on what to use (preferably donationware and EASY to figure out how to use) for doing hard drive backup? I admit that I am guilty of never doing back ups in windows. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

See http://www.donationcoder....ve/BackUpGuide/index.html

A better link to Fred's article (avoids formatting problems in Firefox) is http://www.informationwee...jhtml?articleID=171203805

I must say I have abused my system with many registry cleaners over the years and have had many sad tales and total reinstalls as a result.

Golden rules I would use for registry cleaners are:

• Full system backup (preferably an easily restored image type) before using a cleaner - then when your system won't reboot you can get back to square one quickly.
• Only use a cleaner that has a built in backup and restore utility to manage changes made
• NEVER use automatic fixing - if you use Custom Fix settings and look at some of the suggestions for automatic fixing you will soon find out why

I really respect Fred Langa (if you haven't subscribed to his newsletter you should, www.langa.com) but Registry Cleaners are to be used with extreme caution.

Fred comes down in favour of one tool in the article (jv16 PowerTools) and this is a very good tool which as he points out has the merit of consistency. However even this one has its limitations - be prepared to spend a long time checking its Custom Fix options, especially if you haven't cleaned your system for a while and enjoy installing and unistalling programs a lot.

My bad instalation/uninstall habits meant when I ran jv16PT I have over 1400 High Risk registry errors. Closer inspection showed huge numbers of missing files (most of which turned out to be applications recording recently access files) - many of which did not need fixing, and some of the suggested fixes would silently have introduced very odd effects in my system.

Out of curiosity I backed up my system, and also did a quick full registry backup so thatI could just restore the registry if my system booted but exhibited odd behaviour. I then ran jv16PT and just hit fix. The first odd effect I noticed was that I could no longer click on URLs in programs and get them to open in a browser window !!!

FWIW use ... but with caution, and extremely conservatively!

too ...

Don't spoil my daydream please - it is an official forum statistic (so it must be true  )

Did you know that membership here is currently running at 11.5 chaps for every girl ...

Discuss ...  while I get ready for the party

The advantage of a read only forum is that you could give some regulars who would like to help out access to the forum to add/edit/update articles.

Just a thought - and it would involve any scripting!

Can I suggest a FAQ page would be useful. This could either be set up as a read only forum (easy to link to individual articles) or a separate webpage (with ..../FAQ.html#thisone type addressing).

As traffic grows on the site Mouser must be feeling time pressure to be responding to individuals as much as he does. For the more common problems forum regulars could point common problems in the right direction.

An FAQ button could be added to the Page top Menu bar/Forum menu bottons too.

This is a nice idea - how about blowing the selection up by a percentage and saving it in a clip folder so that it can be added/positioned according to user need?

The other thing that would be really nice is if the original picture canvas could be enlarged interactively by moving controls (rather than entering pixels in a dialogue). PhotoShop acheives this with the crop tool - you select the whole image with the crop tool and then drag the selection 'handles' away from the image to where you want them. The new space added is filled with the background colour.

This makes adjusting the area around the image really easy as you can make it far too big while you are working and then crop to the size you want when you finish.

Fine by me - thanks, at least this has clarified for my little brain how it is meant to work

Ah - got it finally, that works.

Perhaps PT should return processes back to the state they were in before they were managed when Ignored (so if it was originally High, and PT changes it to Low then Ignore should return it to High).

Don't know how easy or practical this is though.

That's the sort of thing I had in mind, but instead of the dials etc. you could have Mouser scratching his head in front of a screen ...

And lot's of people standing around shouting suggestions ...

Thanks - out of curiosity are other people experiencing this too - or is it just me?

I am just clicking on the rules column for existing processes and selecting Ignore and then OK (bottom right).

The rule is remembered after closing and reopening the config screen, but not applied.

The rule is applied after the tray icon is exited and restarted.

No it says it is running

I can change the habit of a life time and be helpful

Still having problems with the config screen not updating the currently processed rules.

If I load a program and PT reduces its priority when I open the config window - select Rule>Ignore and hit OK shouldn't the process be restored to its Normal level.

Even worse - if I disable PT from the tray icon the process is retored to normal level, but as soon as PT is re-enabled it is reduced again - ignoring the rule that was set up.

Is it just me with this prob?

You could enable 'Karma' .... maybe not ...

No privacy issue I can see. When the program starts it updates its database on your system and then compares your files to the downloaded list.

As far as I can tell no information is sent to their server.

Within the program you can submit applications for inclusion but the data being sent is displayed and you have the option of adding name and email address only if you want - otherwise as far as I can tell no other information is sent.

Basically it is like most of this sort of program the more people use it the better it will get. Hopefully at least DLLs will be added (currently it just looks at EXE files) and I would like to see ActiveX controls added since they seem to be the biggest spreaders of trouble under windows!

You can include minimised windows in the task list, nut not preview the window contents.

Yes, thanks Stefan. PSPad is certainly very nice. It is also worth downloading the TopStyle Lite plugin too. This allows you to edit CSS style sheets from within PSPad from the HTML menu.

I can't see me splashing out for TopStyle Pro (too expensive for me given the little I would use it) but the Lite version is excellent for editing CSS tags and classes.

Note if you are tempted by the Pro version it doesn't integrate with PSPad, only the Lite version. The Pro version does integrate with other tools though (such as FrontPage and DreamWeaver).

If you want just the Flash animation it is here http://mirrored.flabber.nl/winnoise/winnoise.swf (found with URLSnooper).

Just click on it to play it in your browser without any other distractions. You can also download it by using a download manager (such as GetRight) and just add the URL to the downloads list.

Still in the early stage but looks like a useful tool. Basically a constantly updated catalogue is being built of .exe files (I have suggested DLLs be added too) and each safe file is being "check-summed". This little utility scans your system for exe files and compares the checksums to ensure you have a pukka copy.

The database is already substantial but needs to grow (and be extended in scope) to be really useful but it looks like a really good start.

Note there appears to be a slight scripting bug in the initial release (just a script error when displaying the user interface) but it is being addressed and doesn't affect the functionality of the program.

Check here for details.