[thelist] MS entourage - scared

Means, Eric D eric.d.means at boeing.com
Thu Apr 11 10:31:01 CDT 2002


:sigh:

First of all, "booting into DOS" is completely unnecessary.  It's quite easy
to see any and all hidden files on your system, using simple menu options.

First, open up a folder, any folder.  Click Tools, Folder Options, and
select the View tab.  Make sure "Show Hidden files and folders" is checked,
"Hide file extensions for known file types" is unchecked, and "Hide
protected operating system files" is checked.  Press OK.  You can now see
every file and folder on your computer.  If you don't believe me, consider
this: you can see even the most important files in the operating system, and
I personally have to wonder why MS would allow you to see (and delete) the
primary files required for the computer to even function, but would persist
in hiding an index of the websites you've visited from you.

As further proof, I have my computer set up to show all files, all
extensions, and all protected files, and a search for files named
"index.dat" turns up 2-3 files per user account.  One of these files is my
cookies index, and the other is IE's index of files in the cache.  If you
think a moment I'm sure you can understand why these files are necessary for
IE to effectively store cookies and cache files.  (As a side note, I'm
typing this on a Windows 2000 machine, but AFAIK it works identically on
Windows 95, 98, and Me, and I know it works on Windows XP.)  I can quite
happily delete these files by clicking on them and pressing my Delete key.
So all the paranoia and the DOS crap is quite unnecessary.

As for the Outlook assertions, Outlook keeps your e-mail messages in a sort
of database (so that finding and opening e-mails remains speedy even if you
have many of them).  Obviously, people delete old e-mail and receive new
e-mail on a constant basis.  Outlook does the best it can at fitting new
e-mails into the spaces left by old deleted e-mail, but can't always do so.
Compacting the Outlook database is quite similar to defragging your hard
drive, in fact; they are conceptually identical.  They also can take similar
amounts of time, since much of the data has to be moved around multiple
times.  In fact, the parallels between Outlook's database and filesystems
are distinct; when you delete a file from your computer, the computer just
"forgets" where that file was and marks that space as usable in the future,
it doesn't actually modify the data on your hard drive.  Why should it?
This way is faster and much more efficient.  Outlook does the same thing.

Finally, the "find fast" paranoia.  *Obviously* find fast indexes every file
on your hard drive.  How would you propose it speed up searches any other
way?  If you're really nervous about that (though I don't see why you would
be; *shouldn't* you already know everything that's on your computer?  It
never sends any of this information anywhere, so what's the problem?) you
can disable find fast.  Of course the author of that website boots into DOS
mode to do this as well, completely unnecessarily.  I've been disabling find
fast within Windows ever since my first Windows 95 machine, not because I'm
afraid of indexing, but because it can be a performance hog.  The simplest
way to do it (on any machine running any version of Windows except 2000) is
to do Start->Run, type in "msconfig" without the quotes, and hit OK.  In one
of the tabs (I don't recall which one) you can choose which programs run at
startup.  Disable findfast (may be called office assistant or some such, I
don't recall precisely) and you're good to go.  None of this wholesale tree
deleting in DOS.

Finally, and even if you choose to disregard everything else I've written,
*none of this information is ever sent anywhere*.  It's generated on your
computer and unless you explicitly copy it, it stays on your computer.  It
doesn't get sent to Microsoft, it doesn't get sent to the DOJ, it doesn't
get sent straight to Bill's secret lab in the Batcave.  This is quite easily
verifiable simply by running a personal firewall, denying internet access to
everything, and seeing what pops up.

<tip type="Quick Access to Commonly Used Folders" author="Eric Means">
If there's a specific folder on your computer that you find yourself using
all the time, and you'd like quick access to it, all of its subfolders, and
all the files in each folder, you can create a Quickbar for it.  This tip
definitely works in Windows 2000 Professional and in both versions of
Windows XP, and should work in either Windows 98 or Windows Me as long as
they have at least Internet Explorer 5 (4?) installed.
The easiest way to do this is to right-click on your taskbar, mouse over
Toolbars, and select New Toolbar...
Windows will prompt you to choose a folder (or type in an internet address).
Browse to the folder you want, then hit OK.  Move the new toolbar to
wherever you like; I usually shift mine all the way to the right.  Right
click the new quickbar and make sure "Show Text" is unchecked, but "Show
Title" is checked.  If you then resize that quickbar so that only the name
of the folder shows, you can click on the double arrow to browse through the
folder tree under that folder.  You can left- and right-click on files as
usual (these are not shortcuts, they're the actual files).  To open any
folder in the tree, double-click it and a new Explorer window will open.

You can create as many custom Quickbars as you like.
</tip>

-----Original Message-----
From: carole guevin [mailto:carole at soulmedia.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 7:57 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: RE: [thelist] MS entourage - scared


hi darren et all,

:http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com/content/ms-hidden-files.shtml

this is scary - do you per chance - know if there is a XP and IE6 related
link/url to the *how* to get rid of these files?  I can't help but think -
that we have these *Updates* warning to keep our puter huh... up to date...
if it's not a way ms is downloading these files to their own server for
further analysis...

carole
+ communication design + http://soulmedia.com
++ feed your eyes! ++ http://netdiver.net




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