Another annoyance cured....
By Ray on July 13, 2008 - 5:15pm
Periodically, maybe too frequently, you may have programs hanging up or refusing to end promptly during a shutdown or reboot. You can find the cure here.
Please Note: If you go to the Elder Geek's first location in the Registry and it doesn't look right to you, (mine didn't have the expected data) you'll find what you're looking for by looking in HKey_Current_User\Control Panel\Desktop. Double-click on the word Desktop, and look in the right-hand pane for AutoEndTasks. On my machine, it's the third one on the list. Clicking on that brings up the window to modify the data setting. Change the zero to a one and exit the Registry and reboot. You're done.
And a short 'PS' - If you'd like a little freeware program that can easily move your address book list from your Outlook Express to your Thunderbird email programs, for example, then you can find it by clicking here and it works. It just doesn't work on those mail programs that are on line, like Gmail, unfortunately. But it does what it does very well, and you don't need a user's manual, because it has a Wizard to take you by the hand.
I was happily using Grisoft's AVG 7.5 until this past March, and then I got stupid and switched to their version 8.0. It's a complete re-design of the former great program, and a step backward in my opinion. Why? Because it assumes that we all have dual or quad core processors now, with capacity to burn, and won't notice if it happens to be a resource hog and constantly generates traffic over the Local Area Connection that wastes your bandwidth and slows down performance of other programs. For example, Firefox recently went to version 3, improving its performance, but this AVG 8 slowed that down to worse than its former version. My single-core Intel 2 Ghz Pentium 4 works just fine, and I'm not buying a new rig to run bloated resource hogs. So I removed the AVG 8.0 and found a very worthy replacement, from Comodo. Their Firewall Pro and A/V, both free, work very well, and pass the same tests as those paid ones do. In fact, this Comodo firewall is more configurable and better explained than the paid ones I've had. You can find it here if you'd like to check it out.
The A/V looks like this.
The Firewall looks like this.
Capture of the Task Manager during the daily full scan.