Windows 'My Network Places' slow?

If you find that your 'My Network Places' window under Windows XP (and possibly other versions too) takes ages to load, its because every time you mount a network share, Explorer adds a shortcut to this window. If they are shares that aren't normally mounted (such as servers only accessible over VPN after login) this can drastically slow the construction of this window. According to the following MS Help page, you can add a new registry entry that prevents this:

The Explorer.exe process stops responding when you use network shortcuts in Windows XP

Technorati tags: Windows network shares shortcuts registry

I recently bought the 500Gb Premium version from the Western Digital MyBook series of external hard disk specifically to backup my various machines using Retrospect 7. It seemed to be very flakey, however, taking ages to get going, or simply not working at all. Apparently the problem is common and may be down to Windows System Restore. You can turn this on or off on a per-drive basis:

Right-click on My Computer and choose Properties
Click the System Restore tab
Click once on the target drive and click the Settings... button
Check the box marked Turn off System Restore on this drive

Technorati tags: Western Digital MyBook external hard disk Windows System Restore Retrospect