Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
Wednesday, 10/4/00
Turn off that bloody throbber! Here’s a tip that would have made it into Optimizing Windows, had I known about it at the time. You know that annoying Windows-logo throbber that shows up in Explorer windows that blinks during disk access, bugging you and stealing precious CPU cycles? You can turn it off or on with a Registry hack. It’s too messy to describe here, but you can download a pair of regfiles from http://www.pla-netx.com/linebackn/evil/ThrobOff.zip if you want it.
The throbber is useful in IE to let you know that Web page is indeed loading, but when you’re hunting through your own hard drive, what’s the point?
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.