Dragan,

>I rebooted at least once a week because a few things would become too slow, or it would have these periods of paralysis, where it would cease all other activity and just meditate for a minute or two (ok maybe 20 seconds, but seemed as long), or would repaint the whole desktop for no obvious reason, drawing each icon from scratch. Eventually I'd notice some signs of, well, nearly malfunction. Then I'd reboot. The reboot went quick enough, but after it showed me the desktop, it wasn't finished - it took about three minutes more when explorer.exe would be quite busy (CPU at 70% or more at times) and that's AFTER all my startup apps load (not much - Thunderbird, Trillian, FooBar, TC, SqlMgr, Launchy - yep, one of them IS M$ :).

I believe that a LARGE part of that might be attributed to windoze update checking out ALL the updates living on your machine, if it is an active service after boot. On 2 quite old/slow machines I sometimes set both parts of it to manual, and booting is much faster. But when I want to update I have to set those dang services to automatic again... Catch22...

>We'll see - maybe I won't have to reboot weekly anymore. This thing somehow moves windows around a tad more smoothly and swiftly than explorer did. I'm getting an impression my machine is a bit faster. May be just an impression. Even so, a good one.

Still, (running W2K) I have 4 meg currently and maximum 7 meg for explorer - I will stay as long as possible on that old system. Has USB, has VFAT and NTFS5 and I don't need themes <g>.

regards

thomas