Thanks, Bob, it's still 'Greek' to me. "One could be better, but not necessarily, a big cache could be good but might not be......" DA I don't want to deal with the software problems. It's an office with printers, scanner, optical scanning, word processing and medical software. The medical software has been fixed (this month) to work on Vista. The fellow from the company said if we could get XP, get it. The other computers are all XP and they have to work together. They will share files and the same programs. I don't want to deal with getting the equipment to work or have to buy new hardware. If it were a machine for home use only, I might chance it, but for the office it just will create major headaches. As it is now, our year-old computer came with Office 07. The other machines have Office 03. They do not work well together no matter what balony MS states. When I try to move documents from one machine to another, it messes up the document even though they are saved as .doc. We can't afford to change everything or hire someone to try to get everything to work with each other. The other computers are not old. But they came with XP because MS took forever to release Vista. We needed new machines last year. This is why Dell and Toshiba still sell XP on their business machines. We aren't the only place facing these problems. Thanks for your help, Jane

Users have been using msconfig to control start ups for so long it's become common practice. It should be avoided. I use to use it and would advise the user to use it as well. A lot of web sites also say to use it. The System Configuration utility helps you find problems with your Windows configuration. It does not manage the programs that run when Windows starts. From Microsoft http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310560 Many people frequently use MSconfig as a long term solution to control startup processes and services. You will also see many websites condoning use of MSconfig and teaching you how to use it for controlling startups. This is a very bad idea for many reasons. 1.MSconfig was designed to be used only as a temporary debugging/troubleshooting tool. It was not meant to be used for long term solutions. 2.MSconfig does not show all startups anyway. 3.If you uninstall programs while they are being disabled with MSconfig, they will not be uninstall properly and you will have to resort to manual registry editing to properly get everything removed. MSconfig will leave orphan entries if/when installed software is uninstalled while under the control of MSconfig . When/if MSconfig is turned back to normal startup, it will give errors on boot due to those orphan entries. 4.MSconfig and Services: If you uninstall programs while you have some of the programs services being controlled with MSconfig, the programs will not be uninstall properly and you will have to resort to manual registry editing to get everything properly removed. When you uncheck a service in msconfig, you completely disable it. If you uncheck the wrong one, you may not be able to restart your computer. It is safer to control services by using Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services (this runs services.msc). 5.You can lock malware items into your registry that you may not see anymore until some point in time where you switch back to Normal Startup mode and now you can cause total reinfection of your PC with the malware. You need to remove the malware not mask it. From here http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=149804

OK we need to step back a little. You did not mention your operating system nor the program you use to create your back up image. If you have Vista or Windows 7 it comes with a back up utility. XP does not so you need a third party program such as Acronis True Image or similar. From what I can see you external drive came with no back up program installed on it. Using your HP recovery disks will return the computer to the state it was when you first opened the box and set your machine up. All data will be lost unless it is backed up. All bloatware will be installed again, exactly as it left the factory. Restoring an image created in Vista, Win7 or third party software however returns the computer to the exact state it was in when you created that particular image. Some (perhaps all) programs offer incremental backups, in other words they add stuff onto the previous back up. Personally I never allow that, I always create a new image then delete the older one. There is no specific reason for that, it is just one of my many quirks.

If you are taking photos specifically to show on Rose forums then why not set the camera to take 640 x 480 pictures? Remember to set it back to the higher quality after of course. However if you want the photos for other uses too then you can easily reduce them on your computer AFTER you have renamed them so the original is not lost to you. For example if you photo is called img_036.jpg you can add an 'a' making it img_036a.jpg, that way they are still together when you view the files in Windows Explorer. Forget the Canon software, I never take my camera software out of the packages as it usually so much bloatware. But that of course is a personal decision you must make. What Corel program is it Sammy? You should be able to open your chosen photo in Corel, click Image, click Resample and set the size to what you want. By default it retains the aspect ratio so if you choose 640 for the width it will set the height to 480 immediately for you .