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Like most of the above comments I would destroy the drive.

If I were giving it away I would have them buy a new drive and re-install windows on it and then destroy the old drive… Small price to pay for a free computer.

Forget about all that drive wiping that may or may not work…

With all respect, that is somewhat of a luddite or “primitive” point of view, that you do not trust the technology which has been created and certified by specialists in the field. It’s worth considering that maybe this stuff actually works. Hard drives are probably the most expensive component in a 2nd hand PC esp. since the Thai floods wiped out the WD plant.

Quoting from the original article …

It’s been known for some time that even a multi-pass (so-called “government”) wipe of traditional magnetic drives leaves behind some data — information that might be recoverable by someone with enough access, time, and forensic technology to analyze the drive’s platters.

For example, powerful signal-processing software can unravel many layers of overwrites to reconstruct the original data. And specialized equipment can easily read between the tracks of a magnetic platter’s normal data-recording zones to recover information recorded in nearby magnetic-field spillover areas

… I’m sorry, but this has not been true for so many years. Once it was the case, when drives held only a small amount of data, and the magnetic areas were spaced at a manageable distance. However, hard drives these days have the magnetisation so close together that a single overwrite is enough to make it totally impractical to extract any data and no one would attempt it.

Edit: I see now that JonH above has said pretty much the same thing. Did not see that before; not trying to steal your thunder, buddy

Also, the complete lack of any mention of the hidden areas of the drive that manufacturers are now commonly including, is surprising.

Hi Paul

I’m assuming you now have two machines, the win 7 box setup in 2010 (A), and the brand new one (B). If that’s not right, ignore what follows !

Box A should still have the Outlook files on it.

Perhaps the file & Transfer wizard picked up the file that arrived in 2010, while you have been running from a separate file ever since.

I’m on 2007 Outlook but it should be much the same for 2010: Clck File – Data File Management in Outlook (A). If you can tell us what filenames you have in there for starters.

Have you spoken with a person as opposed to the automated telephone system?

At different times of the day you will get different teams, so if at first you don’t succeed, try at a different time. I’ve always found them most helpful.

My Outlook 2003 is configured not to use Word as the editor. Seems to work fine for me. Have you tried that?

As Roop says, add a second PST file. The usual arrangement is that the secondary PST is an Archive one. You can automate archiving so it happens automatically.

Backups: backing up the whole thing (to flash or another location) is tedious, time consuming and never done often enough, well it was before I stumbled upon MailStore Home. This is a terrific program I reckon. It saves copies of the emails to a backup location, and has quite a few really smart pieces of design in it.
* it recognises existing mail items already backed up and only backs up new mails.
* when a message is moved to a new folder it recognises that and probably just updates its index.
* it breaks the backup data into smaller pieces and when a piece is “full” it leaves it and starts a new file in the backup folder. The beauty of this is that if you are running any sort of incremental/synchronising backup, to flash, external drive or whatever, most of the files haven’t changed. It only has to copy the new file chunks. This is usually very quick.
* can tell it to ignore folders (Deleted Items etc by default)

So only the new items are copied. Compare this to backing up the raw PST where you must copy the entire thing every time.

Once an item is in the backup it stays there. If you delete from Outlook it remains in the backup. For your RSS feeds, you might want to set it to not include those – up to you.

Seagate and Western Digital are the two biggest players. I only use them these days.

As DrWho says, heat is the killer.

Download the excellent HDDSentinel program – you can run it for free for 30 days, and in my experience for much much longer (I paid for it in the end because it was so useful to me and as a programmer I appreciate the work that went into it) and keep an eye on the temperature.
Also it gives you visibility to the S.M.A.R.T. data that your hard drive has but you can’t normally see. Don’t get caught out by bad sectors.

Found it. This MS support page “The screen saver does not start after you install a wireless pointing device” at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913405

has several suggestions. For us the Optional Hardware Update “Microsoft HID Non-User Input Data Filter” was the solution. Installed that, rebooted and the screensaver kicks in and it goes to sleep all by itself.

I have a wireless mouse, and I noticed that my screensaver stopped activating when I installed the mouse. I haven’t unplugged the USB receiver to check, but I’d guess that the computer is still active, so the screensaver is never activated.

You can fix that with an update / download. I did it on the laptop that had a wireless mouse and it fixed it. In my case the wireless mouse also stopped the laptop going to sleep. Will try to remember where the web page was for you.

I don’t think that is the standard XP display, but I wouldn’t call it an on-screen display either.
Bruce

Yes I reckon you’re right, and that is in fact provided by the Intellitype driver. I use a Microsoft keyboard with volume buttons.

Do you mean this display?

30208-Volume1

Mine’s not an HP, so if this is what you mean, it’s not HP specific, it’s the standard XP display.

Aargghh, I figured it out. I looked through my changes log, and although I’d failed to note this one down, it gave me an idea. I went through the services to see if I’d stopped any recently in the never ending search for a faster boot time etc.

I restarted the two Distributed … thingies but no difference. Then, I restarted the F-PROT antivirus service; I only use it for on-demand anyway, so I’d stopped the service (set to Disabled) a little while back.

Turns out that’s what it was. The anti-virus must do something to the drive notifications; and without the service, they weren’t getting through. I’ll ask them on their forum.

Thanks to monroe for the rapid response and suggestion; it did enable me to move the two built-in card reader “drives” to letters out of the way down the alphabet, which will make it cleaner in future; so that was well worthwhile.

Thanks for the link rmonroe! I was really hopeful that would fix it.

Changing the drive letter updated it everywhere, but still it cannot be seen in Explorer unless i kill the process and restart it.

You can use the excellent SyncBack program from the http://www.2brightsparks.com people for this. This program really is an excellent backup tool. Even the free version supports FTP. Once it has uploaded your files, then the next time you run SyncBack, it will check and compare your local vs hosted files, and only transfer the changes. Amazing stuff. This program is super reliable and I have used it for quite some time.

Also, do you have enough working RAM? Lack of RAM can cause slowdowns. And MSE is a memory hog. To find out how much you are using, which is very easy, just run Task Manager (either Ctrl-Alt-Del, or Ctrl-Shift-Esc, or Start – Run – taskmgr)

Under the Performance tab, check two figures: Physical Memory Total (top right) amd Commit Charge Total (lower left).

The Physical needs to exceed the Commit by a reasonable working margin. If you can post your figures here, I’m sure someone will be able to comment.