I’ve searched for a thread on this type of thing and haven’t found anything I can use. Therefore, I’m sure someone will come along with a thousand extant SDMB threads to help me out.
Anyway:
At home we have Windows ME for our operating system. I’d like to do a scan disk once in a while, 'cos that’s the kind of guy I am, but I keep hitting a snag. One or more of the running programs will write to the hard drive and therefore start the scan disk all over again. Aarrg.
So, I haven’t had any luck finding out how to shut down everything that’s running. At work I have End It All, but I just discovered from one of my searches that it is now a program one must purchase. While my charter membership at the SDMB should prove that I am willing to pay for things over the internet, I’d like to solve this problem on the cheap.
Anybody have an easy strategy for this that any bonehead can administer? If Windows ME has a way to do it internally, that’d be great. If you know of a nice little program that’ll do it, that’d be awfully nice, too.
Please note: Dumb it down! Way down! I promise that I will be asking things like, “What’s a ‘Sea Prompt’?” so don’t be shy about being really basic.
Boot the computer in safe mode. IIRC, on ME you do this by pressing left-shift as it boots (just keep tapping the key throughtout the boot process). This ensures only the absolute minimum of programs are running. Then run scandisk and defrag.
If you can find the older version of “End it all” download that. I think it was made by PC Magazine, or at least I downloaded it from their site. Once you’ve run end it all, use ctrl-alt-del to end all the programs (mainly the ones you set to protected in EIA) but Explorer (not IE explorer) and Systray.
Like Reeder says, you need to turn off your screensaver too, but ME (at least on this computer) has a nasty habit of showing a screensaver even when you set it to “none.” If this is the case on your computer too, and you get one of those “doom”-like screensavers when it’s set to none, there’s nothing much you can do about it but set the screensaver to come on in 59 minutes and make sure you wiggle the mouse before then. It’s even more fun if you’re trying to defrag the hard drive and the screensaver won’t turn off…every time it turns on, defrag and scandisk start over.