Copmom, very sorry about your loss. I'm a dog lover myself. Haven't kept one in a long time; I don't think single people should keep dogs unless they keep regular hours and I don't. Also, I'm in a no pets rental now, anyway. I've lost one in my life, though, so I know it hurts. And a torn muscle to boot! Morton Salt was apparently right. "When it rains, it pours". :(
Edit:
Terri, I apologize, I just don't know the right setting. When I save any download in IE7 I ALWAYS get a save window so I can select location and change the file name if I want to. Maybe somebody else can explain why you don't. Maybe it's the way you do it, though I'm not sure how. It might be because I'm not downloading anything from the game sites and their process may be overriding the game Window. But, like I say, I always get a save window.
I don't see anything wrong with dropping downloads to your desktop, though most experts recommend you do something with them, test then keep or delete, or store them soon. Since the desktop is always active, icon links are loaded into memory, so it adds a little to your RAM overhead. Anything that you can see, or even something hidden behind an open window, takes up memory. A slightly bigger impact is on your startup speed. Your computer has to load a link to every desktop item and then your video card has to create them. In addition, since they're all linked into RAM, your antivirus sometimes treats them like active processes and screens them to be sure they're safe. That's another reason they always warn you to be careful how much junk loads into memory at startup. Especially in a low RAM system like Terri's, that can take some significant boot time. (And in a low RAM system, even a little extra RAM usage can be significant.) Also, the more stuff on the desktop, the bigger a chance it will get corrupted, which means you'd have to restart the computer, or at least Windows Explorer.
The way to decide is to watch the time it takes to create your desktop. If everything pops up in a few seconds, it might not be something you want to worry about. But, if you have to watch your desktop labor to create each icon.... Of course, sometimes that's the sign of another problem, but cleaning out seldom used icons might, at least, can help. One quick way to test is to log into another account. You may not have a 2nd account in XP, you always do in Vista, but they're really easy to create.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/winxp/accounts.mspx
Icons that you store in one account shouldn't be on the desktop in the other, just program icons, so your new desktop should be a lot cleaner. Check to see if it boots up a lot faster and if it uses significantly less RAM. If it does, I'd clean the desktop. If you don't want to go through the hassle of selecting an account when you're booting up, you can delete the 2nd account, but I'd keep it. Your initial account can get corrupted and cause real problems, so I believe in having a backup account. That's something you can try, Lauri, to see if your damaged machine will boot faster. Probably wont, but it's an easy thing to try.
Again, Lauri, in your case, I'd try, in this order:
1. Get Returnil. If you don't use it now, you can use it later to test repair solutions, software, or to screen Windows Updates. In fact, I'd go to manual updating and, say, weekly, apply everything with Retrunil on to see if it breaks your machine.
2. Uninstall those updates, again.
3. Try Last Known Good Configuration. It's a shot in the dark, but it might work.
4. Try booting into Safe. It won't fix it, but it will give you useful info. on how bad the damage is.
5. Run your repair utilities - error checking (chkdsk) and SFC - System File Checker. Very good chance it will help, very unlikely it will hurt, and, if you're not sure, run them in Returnil.
6. B**ch at MS. (Last two are interchangeable. :) )
Good luck!
