Re: Help with deletion of files in XP at bootup

programmernovice@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Hi, I recently arrived at Windows XP after many years of Win98. In
Win98 I was able to insert 4 statements into Autoexec.bat file to
erase Cookies, Temp, History, and Temp. Internet Files from my drive
at bootup. XP has no such .bat file. I read here that it is
possible to accomplish the same in XP with something called a "batch
file",


Just to clarify, autoxec.bat *is* a batch file. If differs from other batch
files (all of which are identified as batch files by the extension .bat)
only by running automatically at startup (in Windows 98).

The others are OK if you want to delete them automatically, but deleting the
contents of the temp folder from autoexec.bat was a very bad thing to do in
Windows 98, and doing anything similar remains a bad thing to do in Windows
XP. That's because there are some program installations which work in two
steps. The first step concludes by writing temporary files and rebooting.
The second step starts automatically after rebooting and needs to find those
files there (and then deletes them when it's done). If they aren't there,
the installation will fail.

If you want to delete the other files automatically from a batch file, just
create a text file with Notepad, containing the same statements you used to
put into autoexec.bat, and save it with whatever name you want and the
extension .bat. In notepad, put the name.bat in quotation marks so Notepad
won't append an extra .txt. Either put that file into F:\Documents and
Settings\Your Use Name\Start Menu\Programs\Startup or put a shortcut to it
there. That will have it execute at startup.

--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup


or by modifying registry, etc. As I am totally new to this, I
would greatly appreciate a detailed description of how to set it up,
the proper commands to enter, the way to create or modify the
required executable files, etc.

An example of the commands in Win98 Autoexec file:
c:\windows\command\deltree /y c:\windows\cookies

That would eliminate the "cookies" file. This worked perfectly every
time, and Windows just re-created the deleted files.

All help greatly appreciated.


.

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