Unwanted Desktop Icons & Boot Windows

[JoesMorgue]

A couple questions about my desktop.

My Winders side has a recovery partition on its harddrive, the first thing I do when I boot is delete it. Can I keep it from showing upon the next boot?

My machine has a built in USB card reader. If I have a card in, not only does it show on the desktop (thats fine) it opens a window about moving the pics off of it at boot (this bothers me.) How can I stop it?

[Taisto]

Here`s a nice guide for you how to prevent partition from mounting at startup :

http://www.infinitemac.com/archive/index.php/t-801.html

And about the window and moving the pics, you probably mean the ImageCapture app. Am i right ? If so, just open preferences of that app, and there`s part what to do on connect - just select "Do Nothing" option, and you`re free from it :)

[naquaada]

There's a much easier method for this: Download Path Finder (http://www.cocoatech.com/), start it and rename the partition Recovery with it. Add a dot '.' before the name, so that it will be '.Recovery'. If you log out and in again the partition is disappeared from the desktop.

Why is this so? MacOS X or other Unix based systems hide files beginning with a dot. But it also doesn't allow the user to do it, so you have to use Path Finder for it which allows more modifications on the system like the normal Finder. This is also a method to hide Windows harddisks from the Mac Desktop, add in Windows a dot before the name. You'll still be able to access the dotted :-) partitions in the sidebar of each Finder window.

By the way, if your internet is working now, try Flock (http://www.flock.com/) as web browser. It's a not very known browser, but a great one. It's based on Firefox 3 and has special features for Yahoo users, including a media search bar, Yahoo webmail account, Blog Editor, Flickr Photo uploader and much more. It was the first browser I liked from the beginning, and I tried a lot of them.