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   1. The files which store the Registry are called hives. 2. Folders (directories) are used on a file system to aid in organizing files. Keys are used to organize Registry Values. Nobody would call their Windows folder, their Windows Key. And it is just as incorrect to call the CLSID Key the CLSID Folder. Granted, the Registry Editor does use a folder icon to represent the Keys. But if I swap the dust jackets on my copies of Dune and Dune: House Harkonnen, one will still make me sick and the other will still be the greatest SF book ever written.

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   And what Jeff Levy's not telling you is that Apple also ran a test using Photoshop, which runs on Windows and Macs, and the G5 was still faster. Levy must have ment 'percent' not 'times' because "30 to 40 times" faster is ridiculous.
   As to his last comment: What makes software run? A computer. And if the computer is faster, what happens to the software? It runs faster.

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   There are two things that must be considered. The files for Windows 98. And the Win2K bootloader, which is what displays the menu asking which system you want to load.
   The first, and truly easiest, thing to do is to fix Win2K's boot menu. The boot menu is displayed by the program NTLDR, it gets the menu items from the boot.ini file. Boot.ini is just a plain text file, but before it can be changed you must change its attributes. So from a command prompt go to the root directory of the c: drive, then type (no quotes), "attrib -h -s -r boot.ini". Be sure to make a backup copy of the file before editing it. Now using notepad (or the like), open the file and remove the line which looks something like: C:\="Microsoft Windows 98", save the file and reboot. Now there is no longer a listing for Win98.
   The next problem is what to do with those now unused files. And this is where Levy made an even bigger mistake. You see, from what the caller said, Windows 98 was on the machine then Windows 2000 was installed. This would put Win98 on the C: drive and Win2K on the D: drive, assuming he used two partitions. Even when Windows 2000 is on another drive or partition, it must still keep several files on the c: drive, these are: ntldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini, and for some SCSI drives ntbootdd.sys. Thus, deleting the c: partition also deletes the files Windows 2000 needs to boot, including the code in the boot sector which is what loads NTLDR in the first place. So how do we safely delete Windows 98's files? Just delete its folder, and if you're sure that you, and Win2K, doesn't have anything stored on that partition (drive letter), then you can go ahead and delete (from within 2K) all the files/folders on the drive (except of course the boot files).
   Note: As Levy suggested, resizing the partition is an option. But A: It's not 100% safe. and B: The "one big" partition may end up with bigger file clusters (wasting space).

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   Instead of reinventing the wheel, please look at this Microsoft article which has all kinds of info about fixing Win2K boot (NTLDR) problems. But to summarize, enter the Recovery Console by first booting from the Win2K CD, then press R, press C, select an installation, hit Enter. Enter the Admin's password. Type map, and hit Enter, take note of what letter is assigned to the CD drive. Then, to copy the good file, type (without quotes): "copy X:\i386\ntldr c:\" with X being the CD drive letter.
   In closing, I will add that NTLDR is NOT short for Net Loader, the NT is just that, NT (see the Reply for June 21, 2003). The file (NTLDR) is responsible for the first stages of loading an NT based OS, or passing execution to another OS's bootloader.

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   HAL, for those who don't know, stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. Next, I'm not gonna say he's wrong, because VMS one letter over does become WNT. And while that's interesting, it hasn't anything to do with Windows NT's naming. The "NT" doesn't mean New (or Network) Technology, NT is a shortening of "N-Ten," the codename for the Intel i860 processor which Windows NT was originally written for. Here's an article which has a lot of info about the early days of NT.
   Note: The author of "2001: A Space Odyssey" (the book) is Arthur C. Clarke. In the book we learned what HAL stands for.

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   When command.com is all that's missing you'll be asked where it is, you won't get the above message. The "Missing..." error can be caused by an incorrect partition setup or a bad boot sector. Which leads us to the next thing Levy got wrong, Windows needs a lot more than three files, what Levy ment was DOS which does need three files io.sys, msdos.sys (both hidden) and command.com. But DOS, and any other operating system, also needs some special code (a program) in the boot sector. This code is what the BIOS looks for and loads, which is the first step to loading an OS. When this boot code can't be loaded, Missing Operating System can be one of the error messages.
   This boot sector code is NOT a file, but for DOS and non-NT Windows it can be fixed by using the program sys.com, and for NT based Windows (2K/XP) you can use the setup disc or setup floppies (fixboot can be used from the 2K/XP Recovery Console).

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   Stepper motors haven't been used in hard drives since the early 90's, and weren't used in drives with more than 100 MiB. Modern drives use a voice coil system to move the heads. Here's a picture of a stepper motor that I dug out of my collection. Next, consumer hard drives are not hermetically sealed (i.e. air tight), they have a "breather filter" so the air pressure can remain equalized. Here's another picture, this one is the top cover to a Seagate ST-251 which shows the breather filter, although modern drives don't have such noticeable filters. See the items for August 11 and December 29, 2002. This site has more about stepper motors and voice coils.
   I have a video of an old Seagate ST-257A, it had a bad case of Stiction which tore the read/write head from the armature. Here's an Mpeg or a Bink (exe), 448KiB and 440KiB (the Bink file looks better).

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   In a FAT file system there is only one root directory. In FAT32 there can be backup copies of the actual File Allocation Table, but it's a completely different thing.

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   Windows XP's Compatibility Mode does NOT support DOS, the available systems are: 95, 98 (ME), NT4 and 2K. That's not to say that Windows XP won't run DOS programs, however there can be a lot of problems. One potential source of problems is that NT (XP) doesn't run on a DOS subsystem like non-NT Windows do. DOS programs (under NT) run inside the the Virtual Dos Machine (ntvdm.exe). Another problem is that DOS programs (under NT) aren't allowed direct access to the hardware, which could prevent the program from using the sound card and other such hardware.
   In addition, Compatibility Mode doesn't just trick the program, in most case it also employs extra code to accommodate the programs and their incompatibilities.

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   The slowest Pentium 3 runs at 450 Mhz which is plenty fast to run Windows XP, I use a P3 500 (among others). One thing that Levy didn't ask about was how much RAM the machine had, which would impact loading times. However I think the problem is caused by something else. I would check what services are loading, the machine may be trying to enable a network interface or doing something else that's slowing the machine. I once had a WinXP machine slow to a crawl for the first 45 seconds after the desktop loaded. It was caused by XP trying to use DHCP to access my non-DHCP network.
   A couple places to look at would be the Startup tab in the program msconfig, and the Processes tab in the Task Manager.

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   The items asked to load at startup are not listed in a "startup file." They're in the Registry, the Startup folder on the Start menu, and the deprecated win.ini file. In Windows 98, and higher, items in the Startup folder can simply be dragged off the menu onto the desktop (or just deleted). For items in the Registry, there's more than a dozen places where something can be asked to run, so using a utility to make changes would be best.
   In fact, the copy of msconfig that comes with Windows XP can be used with 2000. It can be found on a couple of sites, or extracted from XP's Service Pack 1 (run the servpak with the -x switch, then after the files have been extracted, use extract.exe to extract msconfig.ex_ to msconfig.exe).
   Update: A good tool for configuring the startup processes is Autoruns.

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   Yes, Windows XP doesn't have a program named Scandisk. However it does include a program that does the same thing as Scandisk, it's called Check Disk (chkdsk). You use it by going into My Computer, right clicking a drive (and choosing Properties), clicking the Tools tab, then clicking the Check Now button. The interface is different than Scandisk, but it does the same thing (scanning for and fixing errors in the file system). Or on a command line you can run chkdsk.exe or chkntfs.exe (use the /? switch for help).

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   Here's what was happening, her machine did not have the Klez worm. But, when she would read her email, Norton would see that emails which she was receiving WERE infected, and so Norton was just doing its job to protect the system by wanting to quarantine those infected emails. When a file has been quarantined, it no longer poses a threat to the system. Here's a helpful article that deals with Norton's quarantining of email.

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   Windows XP wasn't the first to handle memory differently. WinXP is just NT 5.1, thus it uses the NT memory model which does not have the low resource problems of non-NT Windows.
   The percentage that is shown is that of the Resources (USER/GDI), NOT the available RAM. System Resources are used to store information about the running programs/windows (USER) and graphical elements (GDI). It isn't the memory "used to run programs."
   This site has some about information about System Resources.

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   It's the other way around, if you have a 1 Gig drive with a 10% Recycle Bin. It won't grow past 100 MiB, 10% of the drive's size, not its free space.

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   An IP address, does contain four sets (or octets) of numbers but each can only range from 0-255, quite different from "four characters long."

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   Well, Jeff Levy won't be counted amongst the few that know that the new millennium started, and the turn of the century took place, in 2001. NOT 2000.
   The reason? Because there was no year 0, it went 1 BC then 1 AD. So the first millennium started at 1, and ended at 1000. The NEXT millennium started at 1001, and ended one thousand years later in 2000.
   This page has more info.

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   The Last Known Good Configuration and System Restore, are two completely different things. System Restore tracks changes made to the Operating System's files and allows them to be undone. Whereas LKGC only restores one area of the registry: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet. Which is stored in the windows\system32\config\system file. Unfortunately for the caller, whatever damaged the system file must have also damaged his system.alt file (the backup copy).
   In the absence of a backup, Levy's first suggestion was right.
   Update: Thanks go to AxL, who has also suggested that the Registry files that are in the 'windows\repair' folder could be copied to the 'windows\system32\config' folder, after renaming the bad file(s). The files in the '\repair' folder are made after installing the system, so they can be quite old. But by using the Windows Backup tool, and backing up the "System State", the '\repair' directory's files will be updated.

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   While he said DLL, I'm sure he ment DSL, an honest mistake. Now, with a little bit of research he would know that some DSL providers do have you dial in. Those providers which use PPPoE require the user to login, either with a 3rd party client such as EnterNet (now defunct) or WinPoET, or by using a Protocol driver like RASPPPoE and just using Dial-Up Networking.
   As to the caller's problem, I had something similar. I used to use EnterNet to connect, and if it was still logged in when I shut it down, the machine would take several minutes to finally shutdown. That's why I switched from EnterNet to RASPPPoE.

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   DPI or Dots Per Inch, is the measurement used to describe the resolution of a scanner (or printer). The higher the DPI, the finer the detail and the better the picture quality. At the very least, Levy could have given the caller an explaination of what DPI are.

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   It's rare for an exported copy of the registry to even fit on a floppy disk. This MS page explains what the registry is, and has links to pages which tell how to properly backup AND restore the registry.

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   This is a good example of how to be wrong AND not make sense. Yes, Windows XP is very network oriented, but that hasn't got anything to do with drive letters. XP can be installed on any drive letter (except A and B), I've done installations on C, D, E and J drives.
   The only thing I think he could have been thinking of was mapping a network share, which is when you attach a local unused drive letter to a network share.

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   Nero can in fact burn a VCD. Note: The makers of Record Now Max just happen to be one of Jeff Levy's sponsors.
   Update (11-15-2003): Thanks to Ander, who was kind enough to inform me that the OEM version of Nero that's bundled with many CD-RW drives is limited by what video formats it will accept to make a VCD.

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   Unless the program has been specifically coded to process at a certain rate, the program will run as fast as the hardware will allow. Although some things, like RAM, and the Front Side Bus, may act as a bottle neck slowing a program's processing. Another thing that will slow a program, is the Operating System and other programs that may be running at the same time, thus causing the OS to switch between tasks.