Since Windows Millennium was released we've received email after email after email from our customers saying that since upgrading to Millennium, their computers are running slower and their hard disk keeps thrashing. The reason is very simple. Every file accessed, every documented opened, every file touched gets backed up to a hidden directory called C:\_RESTORE\TEMP. This is fine if you are dealing with letters to grandma that are a few kilobytes in size, but what about large bitmaps? Large disk image files used by emulation software? Large downloads from the Internet? Yup, they get duplicated too. Your hard disk just fills up, and fills up, and fills up, until it runs out of space! I've had this happen several times on my own computers after upgrading to Windows Millennium. I tried to disable the System Restore feature, by clicking on Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore, only to discover that System Restore can't be turned off there. Worse, according to Microsoft's own documentation, (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/winmesr.htm) the System Restore feature will keep backing up files until your hard disk fills up! The System Restore feature shuts itself off once your hard disk has less than 200 megabytes of disk space. However even this is not enough. In once instance, while running SoftMac 2000 with a 600 megabyte disk image file, the system managed to completely fill up the C: drive, causing Windows to no longer be able to grow the swap file. As a result, SoftMac ran out of memory, the Windows desktop ran out of memory and could not refresh the desktop properly, and the whole machine crashed and burned. We needed to reboot, at which point there were only a few megabytes of space left on what hours earlier had been a mostly empty 6 gigabyte hard disk! System Restore had copied gigabytes of useless duplicate files (including many copies of the 600 meg Macintosh disk image) to the hidden directory. How to shut off this ridiculous System Restore "feature"? Well, this was the kicker. You can't simply delete the backed up files because the entire _RESTORE directory is marked as "in use" and thus can't be deleted. And since Microsoft removed the "Exit to DOS" feature, one can't just exit Windows to a DOS prompt like before. While there is an obscure "Disable System Restore" option buried away in the System control panel applet, interestingly enough under the "Performance - File System - Troubleshooting" tab, that still doesn't help with all the wasted hard disk space. So here is my brute force solution to shut off and remove all traces of System Restore: * In Control Panels, Add/Remove Programs, create a Windows boot disk. It's really an MS-DOS boot disk. * Shut down Windows and reboot the PC from the floppy disk. * Type SMARTDRV 8192 to install an 8 megabyte disk cache (it will speed up the file deletion) * Go the C: prompt by typing C: * Type "C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\DELTREE C:\_RESTORE" to remove all the System Restore files. * Create a bogus file called _RESTORE by, for example, running EDIT and creating a blank text file. * Type "C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ATTRIB +r +s +h _RESTORE" to hide this file. This will prevent Windows from re-creating its hidden directory. * Now reboot the PC and watch Windows Millennium run much faster!