Send to Folder The Send to folder resides in your windows folder. The shortcuts which are in your send to folder are what appears when you right click on something and select send to. One of the most usefull things to put in this folder is a short cut to itself, so you can easily add anything to it. Startup Folder The Startup folder is also a folder that resides in your windows folder. Any shortcuts placed inside this folder will be executed every time your computer starts. If there are programs you choose to run whenever you start your computer placing them here will save you a lot of time. IE 4&5 Taskbar Quicklaunch This folder is what adds icons to the taskbar when you have the desktop enhancements provided by IE 4 or 5, or Windows 98. It's located in your windows folder as well, but it's slightly hidden Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch. I guess they didn't want people casually adding things to the taskbar. But it's nice to be able to start your favorite programs with a single click on a taskbar button. I recommend adding a shortcut to this folder in your send to folder. Then you can effortlessly add programs to the quick launch section of your taskbar as needed. Deleting items from this quick launch area of your taskbar is as simple as right clicking on them and selecting delete from the popup menu. Screen Capture The print screen button is still on every windows keyboard. It's a legacy from the old 80 column dos days I suppose. Pressing it doesn't cause the current screen to be printed though. Although it's not useless. While pressing it appears to do nothing, in fact it copies a bitmap of the current screen to the clipboard ( without the image of the mouse cursor ). You can past this into your favorite image software or word processor to either manipulate and save, or print. Font Limit There are thousands a freeware fonts out there just waiting for you to download them. When I started getting interested in doing graphics for my web page I downloaded a lot of them. But eventually I started getting an error 'Font is damaged, contact vendor'. I verified on another system that the fonts were good. I Then loaded a font listing utility, which gave me a more informative error, it said font is damaged or a system resource problem. The windows help files are silent on the issue. However, there appears to be a limit of 1000 fonts. In the past I've heard people say not to install a lot of fonts because it slows your system down. I have a fast computer and wanted it all though, hehe. In looking into the matter further, it appears that windows scans your font directory everytime your computer boots and adds a list of your fonts to the registry. Since each fonts takes up a line in your registry, I guess that is why microsoft choose to limit the number of fonts. Registry Soapbox Personally, I don't like the idea of my systems complete functionality being dependant on one huge file that any program can alter or read. I know it's kind of 80ish but I wish more programs didn't use the Registry and used .ini's instead. I mean why does the Nato 2 mod for Rainbow Six need to be mucking arround in your registry. Just because the author thought he was being cute I guess. It may appear insignificant for one application to add stuff to the registry. But the accumulation of hundreds of programs could add thousands of lines to the registry. The system responsiveness is that much slower having to process more information each time it accesses the registry. This wasn't put in for the benefit of the user in my opinion, but rather an easy way for companies like microsoft to gather every important piece of information about your computer in an instant. The only possible benefit I can see is saving a bit of disk space; since the tiny .ini files wouldn't fill up a disk block by themselves and adding them together would save a few hundred k of disk space. But the risk of losing the whole system to a corrupted registry would far exceed the benefit of a few hundred k of disk space considering how cheap storage is today. Yesterday, I read that they apprehended a suspect in the creation of the Melissa virus. The article I read said they used product serial information as part of the method to identify the man. The article didn't specify what product. I suppose it could have been his compiler, or maybe the email software used to post the virus in various places. Serial numbers and the system registry provide little or no use to the consumer, but provide others the ability to attain information from you, to which they have no legal right. Just last year Blizzard was sued for illegally collecting user data, but how many companies do it and never get caught. Microsoft is the facilitator in this mess though, and I imagine they designed the Registry for thier own nefarious schemes. Zathoros' Other Pages