I ran into something this weekend when working on a friends laptop that resulted from her removing an external hard drive with out properly using the safely remove icon, she told me she only did it 2 or 3 times normally she did use the icon. And once I looked up the error on google I found many many others that had the same thing happen to them and all of them also had an external hard drive they would attach, from all the info and reading I did that was the cause. What happens is you start to get an invalid drive error message, the one she was getting was invalid drive G:\, any time I tried to go to add remove programs I got that error so could not remove out dated programs, any time I tried to install things it gave that same error, so there was no way to try to update or clean out anything. Could not install or remove due to that error. After researching I found a way to go to the command prompt and type in a substitute code and that would let me remove or install programs however upon reboot it was right back, meaning anytime she needs to add or remove she will need to do that command prompt code first, and when I looked in My Computer it showed a G: drive it was an exact copy of the C: drive it was a ghost said it had the exact same volume etc. I tried every thing I found online to try to get it to go away including some registry edits but on hers the registry items were not changed so I could not edit it. So if you do use an external hard drive and you see that you can not safely remove I HIGHLY recommend just wait till you can shut down if that is how you have to do it because you really do not want to have to deal with that ghost drive mess. for those interested the exact error was Error 1327 Invalid Drive G:\ and to make matters worse on her pc everywhere it showed the G: drive it was grayed so there was no way to change that drive letter itself back to C. Really strange but by the google search not very rare.

Look it is some sort of hidden folder. THIS IS JUST INFORMATION DO NOT FOLLOW ANY INSTRUCTION HERE "You will not be able to see the Content.IE5 folder associated with your account in Windows Explorer. There are two ways to access the folder. 1. Open your TIF folder, (TIF TEMPORY INTERNET FILES) C:\Documents and Settings\YOURACCOUNT\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files. Next, click in the Address bar at the top of the window so that the address is highlighted. Hit the right arrow key to place the cursor at the end of the folder path. Type \Content.IE5 in the address bar and hit Enter. You should now see the contents of that folder. 2. Go to Start -> Run and enter the folder path to Content.IE5 in the Open box. Autocomplete should help you by presenting options you can select using the down arrow. Add a backslash after you select a folder. Don't worry about this folder I found this info from a google search..

I have the 1TB Western Digital My Book Essential which has the USB3 connection (compatible with USB2). I use EaseUS Todo free backup program. First I make a complete image of my internal HDD, and then I can schedule backups on whatever schedule I wish. I love this program for its ease of use after struggling with Acronis. I am very pleased also with the WD external drive. They do stand behind their warranties and replaced an internal HDD that failed, without question. All hard drives are subject to failure, so I think you're okay as long as you stick with a name brand.

After you have been surfing the web for awhile, a lot of temporary files gets stored on disk. Some of these are used to quickly display the contents of re-occuring frames on a page. You can clean up your hard drives with a built-in utiltiy in Windows. Double-click "My Computer" (or single click depending on your settings). My Computer> right click on a hard drive> properties> Disk Cleanup. The system will compute the amount of space used by temporary files and display the results. Highlight (click on the selection box) the files you'd like to remove, then click "ok" or "apply" whichever is applicable. The two biggest space hogs are: Temporary Internet Files Temporary Files These can be safely removed, however, there may be minor information 'remembered' in these files. The next time an old site is re-visited, it may take a little more time to load the page because it is starting with a clean slate. As you brouse, new files get written to the temporary space on your disk. Another file that can grow to large size is the browsing "history" file. This is the file where the URLs( addresses of sites visited) are kept. There are user settings to control the size of this file. To access in Win XP: Control Panel > Internet Options > General Tab > On the general tab, find "Browsing History" and click on "settings". Near the bottom of the "settings" panel, find "no. of days" to keep history. A common setting is 20 days. Set this to whatever you like. Addresses (URLs) older than the setting will be dropped off the list. These are the addresses that appear in the drop-down list when you click on the down caret next to the address box at the top of your browser.