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read formatted HTML version of this newsletter is available on line at The LangaList 2000-08-21 A Free Email
Newsletter from Fred
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Last issue's item on "Cleanup.Bat"
( http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2000/2000-08-17.htm#3
) is generating a ton of reader reaction. Take, for example, this letter from
reader "Jay" who gained an incredible 12 GB of free space from using
Cleanup.Bat! Fred, never
in my wildest dreams did I think a batch file like the Cleanup bat would do what
you say it will. My 3 month old 20 Gig drive originally had only 4.3 Gigs of
transferred data on it from my old drive. All but 4 Gigs remained now and it was
slowing down. I did searches and searches trying to find the offending programs
and files which were eating up the drive to no avail. I ran your batch file and
cleaned up my 12 Gigs of used garbage space of the formerly 16 Gigs. Amazing,
simply amazing. I have my new hard drive back! A 12 gig gain is pretty extreme;
most people gain less than that. But almost everyone will gain *some* free space
(more than most standard cleanup methods can provide) by running Cleanup.Bat,
and Jay's experience shows just how much is possible on the high side. If you haven't checked it out--- you
ought to! See http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2000/2000-08-17.htm#3 Click to
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Renowned columnist John Woram ( http://www.woram.com
) and several other readers noted something about Cleanup.Bat that I missed: Shelliconcache is normally set up by
Windows as a file that can't be deleted by the usual means, unless you go
through a process of flipping the file "attributes" first. When I
wrote Cleanup.Bat, I simply used DELTREE to delete Shelliconcache. Deltree is
normally a means of trimming directories. But, unlike ATTRIB, it can whack a
file *or* directory in one step, with no questions asked, and regardless of the
file attributes. So far so good. But then brain-freeze set in: I had
Cleanup.Bat manually recreate Shelliconcache. This is unnecessary--- Windows
will recreate a new Shelliconcache file when needed. There's no need to replace
the deleted file manually. I also had Cleanup.Bat use Deltree's symmetric
opposite command---"make directory"--- to replace the deleted item...
except that Shelliconcache is a file, not a directory. Duh. It's entirely my
error; my apologies. I should have just stopped at the point where
Shelliconcache was deleted. Fortunately, this buglet doesn't
appear to cause any trouble, but it's super-easy to fix simply by deleting the
"md c:\windows\ShellIconCache" line from the end of the batch file.
That's all it takes to thaw the results of my brain-freeze.. There are two ways: 1) Manual: Edit your copy of
Cleanup.Bat and delete the "md c:\windows\ShellIconCache" line from
the end of the file. The next time you run Cleanup.Bat, the extra and unneeded
directory will be wiped out... and not replaced. And that's just the way it
should be. or 2) Automatic: If you don't want
to edit the file, you can download a fresh, corrected copy of Cleanup.Bat (for
free) from http://www.langa.com/cleanup_bat.htm
: The copy there has already been updated and fixed for you! Click to
email this item to a friend I mentioned in the last issue that
I'm collecting batch files to present in a future article. Many readers have
sent in their batch files--- and some are pretty awesome! Some are tiny little
things that back up important system files in a flash; others are elaborate
creations that make a PC dance, since, make fresh coffee and give you a backrub.
Well, OK, not literally--- but you get the idea! <g> If you have a batch file you're
especially proud of and would like to share, please send me complete, annotated
(i.e. fully commented) copy of the file (please use plenty of REM statements!)
at batch@langa.com. I'll include the best
of the batch in a future article, and will give full credit to the author of
each batch file I include. If you send a file, please also
include a text description of what the batch file does and any caveats (eg does
it need to reside in a particular location, or require unusual external files?).
Please also tell me if you want me to include your email address or home page
address along with your batch file, if it's selected. Click to
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Jonathan Tennent expands on
information we presented a while back to show you many other files you can
delete: Hi Fred, I was glad to see your
article this week about cleaning up your hard drive. As a clean hard drive
freak, I've developed a list of my own. I run this saved search every week and
pick out the files that I don't want to delete (you have to be careful with the
.prv, .old, & bak files!) Find all files on drive C
named "*.tmp, *.~mp, *.gid, *.fts, *.chk, *.00*, *.---, *.$$$, *.*$, _*.*,
~*.*, *.~*, *.??_, *.??~, *.^*, *.syd, *.prv, *.old, *.bak, mscreate.dir" Plus deleting all the files
in the "C\WINDOWS\TEMP" directory. Also empty your browser's cache,
history list, and cookies. After all this, empty the Recycle Bin. Make sure that hidden files
are shown on your system (off by default in Windows) because you'll miss a lot
of this stuff otherwise. As always, a great newsletter! Thanks, Jonathan. It's good to to be
able to weed out the garbage files that can accumulate on a hard drive, and this
list of file types covers a lot of, er, crud. But it's important not to be
overzealous: If you don't know what a file does, then use caution in deleting
it. See the next item, for instance: Click to
email this item to a friend Last issue, we talked about some
ways to tell if mystery files on your hard drive are safe to delete (see http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2000/2000-08-17.htm#4
). Reader Marc Zaritsky (a software engineer at http://www.insystems.com
) has some other suggestions: Hi Fred: I see you're
keeping up the great work, I always enjoy reading your "The Langalist". Concerning the edition from
2000-08-17 and the question about "..how can you be absolutely sure a file
is OK to delete?". I thought it might interest you to know that there is a
possible additional way to tell if a file belongs to an application or if it's
merely extraneous. The two big players in the
*Install* game for Windows are Installshield and Wise. An application that was
packaged with their offerings will create a log which is used for the
uninstallation aspect of the program. For Installshield the file seems to be in
a proprietary format "*.isu", but Wise seems to use plain old ASCII
for their files - "*.log". So for a Wise installed app, if you look in
the "local" folder of an application you might find the log file
,which can be opened in notepad and read. Thanks, Marc. Installation and other
log files can indeed be helpful in figuring out exactly what a program added,
deleted or changed. Newbies might find log-reading more confusing than helpful,
though, so again, the general rule holds: If you don't know if something is safe
to delete or not, don't delete it unless you've made a backup copy, and/or have
used the empirical test described in http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2000/2000-08-17.htm#4 Click to
email this item to a friend Thanks to thousands of you, the
LangaList has become one of the ten most-recommended "Computing &
Internet" web sites, according to the folks at Recommend-It! (See http://www.recommend-it.com/RecCenter/10.html
.) It's a great feeling to know that this newsletter (and Langa.Com) is useful
enough for many, many of you to have suggested it to friends and colleagues. And, as a way of saying
"Thanks!" there are two prizes you can win simply for making a
recommendation. For example, if you use the Recommend-It service, you can win
$10,000 (full details also available via this link): http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm#1 Or, win a copy of "Poor
Richard's E-Mail Publishing: Creating Newsletters, Bulletins, Discussion Groups
and Other Powerful Communications Tools." This book has been described as
"An excellent, straightforward manual on email publishing, banner ads,
driving traffic and especially ethics." (Full details also available via
this link): http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm#2 Either way, thank you again, and
good luck! Click to
email this item to a friend We recently discussed free and
low-cost firewalls (see http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2000/2000-08-14.htm#9
). Well, the mail's still coming in: I have also been unhappy
with ICS [Win98SE's built-in Internet Connection Sharing]. I share a cable
connection on a SOHO network and use WinProxy.( http://www.winproxy.com
) I was thrilled with the last upgrade to the product that included a firewall
that made me invisible to the Internet at the Shield's Up site ( https://grc.com/
)---Jerry O'Connor Some firewalls--- such as Zonealarm
and Blackice Defender--- caused trouble for Windows 2000's SP1. Zonealarm
already released a patch ( http://www.zonelabs.com
), and now so has NetworkIce: Fred---NetworkIce released
an update to BlackIce Defender which fixes the Win2K SP1 problem that you were
mentioning. The current version is 2.1.cn and is available from http://www.networkice.com/html/blackice_defender_update.html
--- Greg McClure And here's an item I told you about
before, but which is so good it's worth another mention--- a tool that extends
the utility of firewalls by letting you back-trace hack attacks to their source: Hi Fred. I've been a
dedicated reader for some time love your newsletter so i thought I'd suggest
this site i stumbled on: http://www.pc-help.org/trace.htm
This fellow has a neat and free trace program that is as good if not better than
some of the ones you pay good dollars for . it works good enough for me to send
to the offending bastard's ISP info about their attempted intrusion on my
machine. NEOTRACE did not work as good check it out hope to read your response
sometime in the future. also ZONEALARM is a great fire wall. i use i MESH a
naptster type prog for MP3's and get hit all the time ZA stops all ( i think) so
now i fight back they know I'm watching them Thank You--- Robert Ethridge Finally, it's worth mentioning that
Zonealarm (mentioned above) has a new version: Zonealarm Pro ( http://www.zonelabs.com/
). It's worth a look! And thanks to all who wrote in! Click to
email this item to a friend Do you have a home page or website?
(It doesn't matter what size.) Please click over to http://www.langa.com/code.htm,
and maybe you can join the hundreds and hundreds of LangaList readers who have
"Loaded the Code!" (If you've already "Loaded The Code" and
are wondering if your site will appear here or on the Langa.Com web site, please
see http://www.langa.com/link.txt
) Speaking of which: Here's another
eclectic sample of reader sites--- some professional, some very personal: Click to
email this item to a friend --- ( Your
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I mentioned XXcopy--- a better
version of the DOS Xcopy--- a while back ( http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2000/2000-06-15.htm#5
) Now, there's a new version: We are pleased to announce
the release of XXCOPY ver 2.50.7. Finally, we have a unified
source code for both XXCOPY (32-bit) and XXCOPY16 (16-bit). Until now,
XXCOPY16's did not support many of the newly added nifty features such as /X
switch. The new XXCOPY16 program
has nearly all switches that were made for XXCOPY in recent months. The only
exceptions are those switches which has no meaning in the DOS environment. For
example, the /N, /NL, and /NS switches handle long filenames which are not
supported in DOS, therefore these switches are not present in the new XXCOPY16. Click to
email this item to a friend Having just spent a weekend with my
family's elder members, this item (from reader Jim Flanagan) struck home: Things My Mother Taught Me Click to
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