Dave, your approach will let him delete files currently on his computer. I'm trying to help him find out why he can't delete them, so he can solve the problem, instead of switching to safe mode, command prompt.

As an alternative to safe mode, command prompt, you can:

1. Open task manager (ctrl+alt+del).

2. Click file > new task(run).

3. Type "cmd" into the dialog that pops up, and hit enter. A new commandline dialog box will open.

4. Click on Processes. Click on each process listed with your user name, other than the "cmd.exe", "taskmgr.exe", starting at the top of the list, and click the "End Process" button. The last one you click should be "explore.exe". When you end the latter process, your desktop will disappear, and all you will see is the task manager and the command line box.

5. In the command line box, navigate to the TIFF files and delete them. (Assuming you don't know how to do this, I'll explain. Skip this if you understand how to navigate from a command line.)

a. The command line shows your current directory (which should be your user directory) in the prompt. In my case, this is "C:\Documents and Settings\Mike" followed by the ">".

b. From any given directory, you can display a list of all the files with the command "dir", which will give you 1 line per file and scroll through the entire directory. You can also display a list of all files with a given type of name by using * for the part that will vary, so by entering "dir *.tif" you will display a list of all the files with a .tif extension.

c. Using the /X option in the dir command will show you the short name as well as the long name of files that don't conform to the DOS naming scheme (8x dot 3x, where x is a character, digit, underscore, or hyphen, more or less). The /X goes on the end of the command line, after any file names. This may be helpful below.

c. Among the subdirectories of your user directory are Desktop and My Documents. To get to your desktop, use the "cd" (change directory) command by entering "cd desktop". To get to the My Documents directory, you would have to put quotes around My Documents, because it doesn't conform to the DOS naming scheme, as in "cd "my documents"". If you list the directories with the /X option, as in "dir /x" (lower case is ok), you will find that "MYDOCU~1" is the short name for "My Documents". So to change to that directory without having to use the quotes around the long name, you could instead enter "cd mydocu~1".

d. To go up a directory (from desktop to your user directory, for example), enter "cd ..". To go to the top of the hierarchy for the current disk drive, enter "cd \". To change to a different drive, enter "d:" (where d is the drive letter; no "cd"), then use the cd command as needed.

e. To delete one or two specific files in a directory, you can delete them individually by entering "del xxx.tif", "del xxx*.tif", etc. (where xxx.tif or xxx[something].tif is the name of a file). If you need to delete a fair number of tiff files, you can enter "del *.tif /P", and you will be prompted for whether to delete each .tif file.

f. This assumes none of the files are read-only, hidden, or system files. If so, you will need more complex commands.

6. When finished deleting files, click on "Shutdown > Restart" in the task manager and your computer will reboot back to its normal self.

mark_coote

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