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Deleting program remnants will prevent bootup message

By JOHN TORRO
Published December 13, 2004

I deleted WildTangent per your instructions. Now at bootup I always get the message that WildTangent can't be found. I just click OK and it goes away, but it is a nuisance. How can I permanently remove this?

If you've removed it from the Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel, try the following to find and delete any remnants using the following steps:

Open the registry editor (Click Start, Run, type regedit). Find the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. In the right pane, find and delete the following entries if they exist: wcmdmgr; wt gamechannel; and ddcm.

Close registry editor. Restart your computer. Open your Windows directory (c:\windows), delete the wt folder and the files in it. The usual caution applies: Make sure you back up the registry. If you don't feel comfortable editing the registry, don't.

Keep cookies from tracking your Net surfing

Every time I run Ad-aware or Spybot, they come up with a laundry list of items called Data Minor. It is some sort of tracking system. Is there any way to block this?

It is a type of cookie that is shared among two or more Web pages for the purpose of tracking a user's surfing history. It will not harm your PC, but it is an invasion of your privacy. Here is how you can prevent it from loading on your PC: From Internet Explorer, click Tools, Internet Options, Privacy tab and then the Advanced button. Select Override Cookie Handling and set First-party Cookies to Accept and set Third-party Cookies to Prompt. Enable "Always allow sessions cookies." Click OK and then OK again. Now, whenever you browse to a site that tries to set a third-party cookie (like Data Miner), you will be prompted to allow it or block it. You also can select to always block third-party cookies from that particular site so you won't constantly be asked. I do this and as a result wind up with almost no tracking cookies on my PCs.

Free up hard disc space before installing SP2

I want to install Windows XP Service Pack 2 from a disc I received from Microsoft. It requires 900 megabytes of hard drive space, but I have only 870 free. Is it possible to transfer programs such as Excel and Powerpoint, which I don't use, to a blank disc to gain necessary space? What other suggestions do you have?

Less than 1 gigabyte (1,000 MB) of disc space is a critically low amount. You can transfer files created by Excel and Powerpoint, but you won't be able to transfer the programs. For this, you would need to uninstall them and then reinstall them later. I would not recommend you update unless you can free up considerably more than the 900 MB that SP2 says it will need. Start by using the Disc Cleanup Tool: Right-click your C drive, select Properties and then the Disc Cleanup button. After it completes, click the More Options button and check the three areas there for further cleanup. Look into moving some of your data (photos and videos take up enormous amounts of space) to an external backup. The USB hard discs are coming down in price and are an excellent option for backing up or transferring data quickly and easily.

Delete multiple addresses attached to e-mails

I frequently receive e-mails in Outlook Express that have a huge list of addresses. If I print out the message, the whole first page is addresses. Is there any way to stop this?

There are probably several ways to do this: I would simply forward the e-mail to myself. When you receive and open it, you'll be able to delete the multiple addresses (which will show at the top of the body of the e-mail).

[Last modified December 10, 2004, 14:31:03]