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In my Win7 Ultimate explorer I have only Favorites and Desktop on the left hand side in explorer, no Recent Places.

I agree with you, Doc.

Normally I would always include a floppy drive (I, too, have several spare) but my my latest Mobo, an ASUS P8Z68, has no connector for it, plus my new case, a Corsair 300, has no external facing 3.5 drive bays, hence the need for an external floppy.

It’s not a problem having to use USB2, a floppy hardly needs a speedy interface!

I also think BATchers comments are right. I got an external USB3 hard drive socket and it took several tries before I got suitable drivers (from MS) that worked.

Thanks, guys.

Interesting, both your (different) solutions led to the same place!

Java will be in Control Panel if it’s installed.

In the end I used a spare HDD i had and copied an image of my Win7 system to it, including the downloaded folder for W8.
What a waste of time, when I ran the update it said do you want to keep your old system details, which I declined, andit then loaded W8 OK.
I’d have been better off taking Teds advice and downl;oading the basic iso.

You live and learn.

I use Revo Uninstaller Pro and its first step is to use the apps built-in uninstaller.
It then moves to a second step where it scans for any left over files, folders or registry entries.

If an app is well written with a good uninstaller this step often returns the message ‘No items found’, and the job is done.

If, as often happens, there are residual items found, these are all listed and you have to choose what to delete.
I have found these lists to be useful and very rarely do I need to remove any items from them.

I subscribe to the regular imaging regime, which makes system restore totally unnecessary, and I set Revo to not make registry saves.

I can honestly say I’ve never had a problem.

(with uninstalling, I should say!)

Just a thought, but are you using windows ‘Safe to Remove Hardware’ icon in the system tray when you unplug the drive.

Failing to do so can introduce peculiar problems that are hard to trace back.

Why is that, Clint?

I use ccleaner, including the extended items added by Ccenhancer.
This has options for cleanups which include Microsoft files such as those in winsxs which are unneccesary.

The only caveat is that you can’t then uninstall service packs or updates, depending on what you’ve deleted.

It seems safer to me to use this approach rather than chance messing about directly with the directories themselves.

I find it hard to believe that no one has one of these boards!

I forgot to mention, there is a downside!

When MS updates are out I have to go through the process seperately for each OS, and virus prog updates are similarly a chore.

Unless anyone knows how to store MSE virus files so they can be accessed on a seperate partition.

A1ex (living in hope)

I had a similar problem.

It annoyed me so much I uninstalled MSE and went back to Avast, which has recently been updated.

I boot one of XP, Vista or W7 using Easy BCD, and do the same as RetiredGeek. I have seperate partitions/hard drives on which are the data files for Outlook, Roboform, Clipmate and several other progs.

Accessing them on any of the operating systems gives me exactly the same data, ie true interchangeability.

The only slight downside is that I get recycle bins for each system on all partitions, which worries me slightly, but hasn’t caused a problem so far.
Also, I don’t use system restore, if I did I expect there could be interaction problems, particularly because XP doesn’t include it.

PS, I also agree with Ted, it all adds to the enjoyment, you just have to forget those moments of despair when things don’t work

Scanning is very much down to the hardware, and it’s relatively easy to produce good image scans these days.

OCR is another matter. MS provides some tools, but there are free appsthat can do the job, as well as the web sites already quoted.

It’s a repair disk, Fred. It can’t be read by the laptops DVD, and I struggled with Isobuster on my desktop to copy the contents, following which I had the full set in a folder.

I have now managed to create a new bootable dvd using Nero, just had to get the sectors etc right and set ‘no emulation’.
However, the files are still corrupted and can’t be read, so I have reloaded a fresh Vista install and will forget Toshiba altogether.

Thanks all for the suggestions, I find this forum the most helpful I have ever been on – and that’s quite a few!