Tips & Tricks-September 2001

The tip I have this month is really two tips, one about a problem and one about a tool for solving the problem.

At work, I had several systems start to act really strange a couple of weeks ago, with multiple lock-ups and crashes for no apparent reason. Obviously the first suspect was a virus. All the systems had McAfee VirusScan software running and were being updated regularly via a weekly download of the virus definition files. All of the problems occurred within a few days after the download around the beginning of August. Various clues pointed toward the anti-virus software, so I finally called McAfee and was informed that the scan engine we were using was not compatible with the current definition files and that we needed to update the scan engine. There was nothing on their web site about the symptoms by the way.

I was directed to www.nai.com and located the necessary updates for our systems under Anti-Virus updates. I installed the updates and all the problems disappeared with no apparent ill effect on any of the systems.

In the course of dealing with this I had to disable the VirusScan software in order to be able to boot and use the computer. The problem was that when I attempted to disable it using the VirusScan software, error messages popped up, the computer froze and I had to re-boot. I started the system in safe mode (Hit the F8 key or Ctrl key as you start the system and select safe mode from the menu). After I got it running, I used a utility called System Configuration Utility, or “msconfig.exe,” to keep the virus software from starting again.

Go to Run on the Start menu and type “msconfig.exe,” to start the utility. You can select items in your config.sys file, autoexec.bat, win.ini and system.ini files to run or not run when you boot up, but even better, you can select or deselect items that load into your system tray. What good is this?

If you look at your system tray on the bottom right (on most computers) of your taskbar, you will see some icons for a number of different programs. Usually, if you hold the cursor over the icon, it tells what the icon is for and if you right-click, you will see a menu. Msconfig lets you select which of these to run. Some of these items are set up in the registry and are difficult to find if you want to turn them off. With msconfig, you can turn them off by un-checking a box without having to search through the registry to find them. According to Bob O’Donnell, the only thing you can’t turn off is “System Tray” itself.

You can also select which processes to run on startup. For example, if you don’t want the config.sys file to load, you can un-check the box. You can also start the system in an interactive mode that lets you select the device drivers you want to load as the system boots. You can select lines in your config.sys and autoexec.bat files and uncheck them (the equivalent of putting “rem” in from of the line in the file). You can do the same with the ini files. These are all things you can do manually, but msconfig.exe makes it much easier to do without making mistakes.

Even if you don’t need to troubleshoot your system, use msconfig to look at what’s loading when your system starts up.