Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

Hard disk defragmentation is debated often, why I don’t know. It’s like an old Catholic joke about Ash Wednesday - “Might not do any good, won’t do any harm”.

The truth is, though, it’s the hard drive that keeps Intel from making Microsoft look good with blazing speed. Jumping around the drive to get all parts of the monstrous files created by inefficient programmers takes take. It wastes our time.

Defragmenting your hard drive with Windows defragment utility is good; using a third party is probably better, but make sure it uses the Windows API so you are protected from data loss if the process is interrupted.

Sysinternals and its key programmer Mark Russinovich are well known in my trade. Sysinternals was the developer of many valuable Windows tools, some paid, but many absolutely free.Sysinternals was bought by Microsoft but they haven’t ruined it all yet. Microsoft’s website is still a source for some of these great utilities. PageDefrag is one of them. Defragmentation programs cannot defrag a file that is locked by Windows; the page file and registry files are key examples.PageDefrag installs a driver that suspends the boot process after you run PageDefrag and then reboot. During this time before Windows locks the files, PageDefrag defragments these files that otherwise can’t be touched.

Another cool tool is Contig which lets you specify an individual file to defrag.

Find out more about PageDefrag here. Contig here.

If you have a large monitor, perhaps 20″ or larger; or if you have a super high resolution laptop screen, then perhaps you have encountered the small text that a high resolution screen can leave you with.

The Tip of the Week from Bill Myers Online offered a solution.

Bill’s idea is this:

You can right click on your computer desktop, select properties, select ‘appearance’, and change the ‘text size’ from ‘normal’ to ‘large fonts’. Then click ‘apply’.

Doing this will instantly increase the size of text in Windows displays - and you’ll finally be able to realize how great your large screen monitor really is.

While this probably works fine for Bill with the applications he uses, let me warn you of what you are likely to encounter. Applications that are not 100% Windows aware & compatible, which is about 99.9% of the applications out there, will have trouble rendering the larger text properly in menus, dialog boxes and button text. In fact, you may find the buttons now have inadequate text on them to know what they do.

If you use strictly Microsoft applications and other high end graphics applications, this may not be a problem. But with my clients I have seen this problem in spades.

My solution? Simple. Set the resolution to something you can work with. With older or cheap laptops, this isn’t as easy. Or with el cheapo flat panels, either. Flat panels and laptop screens sometimes have limited resolutions that look good enough to use; or that work out with their widescreen format.

For instance; I use a pair of Samsung 204B 20″ monitors. I could set the resolution to 1600 x 1200 and put all kinds of stuff on the screen. I couldn’t read any of it without squinting or using binoculars, but I could sure get a bunch of stuff on the screen.

Instead, I set the resolution to 1280 x 1024; a nice compromise that lets me utilize the larger screen real estate, yet renders text large enough to read.

A friend called the other day with a Windows XP computer that all of a sudden wouldn’t load Windows. Apparently it was reporting that a couple of key files were missing.

He booted from the CD into the recovery console (must not have had it loaded, I always load on any installs I do). But he could not get the files to copy.

I suggested trying a different CD drive, as often that seems to fix the problem (what do you expect for under $40 these days?). That fixed that problem.

Next issue: why did this happen in the first place? Well, when he told me that he could boot with a Windows 98 floppy and read the files I knew his drive was formatted as FAT32 and not NTFS. NTFS is a more secure file system, but it also has error checking built in that makes it less likely to fail in the first place.

To convert your drive to NTFS:

• Backup your PC
• Verify your backup - This conversion is NOT prone to problems; but what if the power goes out, or someone kicks the plug accidentally?
• At a command prompt, type (without the quotes) “convert [drive letter]: /fs:ntfs” which will likely be “convert c: /fs:ntfs”

Now, in all fairness, this could lead to a small performance penalty. This is due to cluster sizes with NTFS, potential fragmentation and some overhead for the file system; but, trust me, it’s well worth it.

Anymore, I almost always download video that I want to see. I got frustrated with too many videos starting and stopping, or maybe worse, stopping right before the end - with no way to restart at the point I left off!

So I did a little research some time ago and found out that most videos worth watching can be downloaded to my hard drive. I then make sure the video is complete (as near as I can tell) before wasting my time watching it.

It also avoids embarrassment. Ever gathered 4 or 5 people around your computer screen to watch something cool, then 5 or 10 minutes later the last holdout finally gives up on you and walks away as you’re trying for the umpteenth time to get the video to play?

Once, downloaded, you can then replay at your leisure as well - or save it for later. Heck you can even put it on a flash drive and send it with someone else or take it to another location yourself.

Downloading the video is pretty easy, there’s even a Firefox plugin that makes it a snap.

And the list of sites you can download video from is expanding all the time. YouTube, Google, Metacafe, Dailymotion, MySpace, Revver…and the list goes on and on.

For complete details and instructions, see Video Download on my website.

I answered a question on a newsgroup today that I thought might have general interest.

The poster asked about benefits to having multiple hard drives and multiple partitions. Again, my answer is for PC workstations, not servers.

Using multiple partitions is sometimes advantageous for organizing data. In the past there was efficiency (smaller data chunks used) in smaller partitions. Nobody worries about that anymore. Drives are huge and cheap and efficiency is a lost art in the computing world, unfortunately.

Recently, most seem to recommend just one big partition. For the most part, I agree. If the drive is sufficiently larger than I think is needed I will sometimes leave some unallocated space in case I want a 2nd OS or an Acronis Secure Zone at a later date.

Frustratingly, if a 2nd partition is available to the OS (and the Acronis Secure Zone is NOT), sometimes Microsoft will dump a big temporary file there or Outlook’s MSO cache without even asking. Which means of course that malware can also access it.

This is an important point because the poster is using a 2nd drive and/or partition to backup to. He wants to be able to fall back to a “known good configuration”.

This is why it’s nice that a USB drive that can be unplugged - even carried to another location for portable need or backup security.
A drive image backed up to 2nd drive or USB drive and restore CD might give you more security and flexibility than just another location on your PC. Drive images are compressed to save space, meaning you can have many image copies from various dates.

You’ve heard me bang the drum on Acronis True Image. Here are links to some other comments regarding backing up to a USB hard drive.

Yahoo! tech had an article today about speeding Windows XP shutdown. See http://tech.yahoo.com/gd/how-do-i-speed-xp-s-shutdown-/200654.

In that article, the author suggested that XP can run reliably for days or even weeks without being rebooted, so why not hibernate instead - it doesn’t take as long.

Why indeed? Well, for starters because my experience is that Windows XP is more likely to have trouble entering or exiting hibernation mode than it is shutting down.

And, since my generic advice to ALL Windows users is to reboot once per day, whether by powering on in the morning and off at night; or, reboot when leaving for lunch; then why would I recommend hibernating instead?

The author also postulates that sometimes shutdown problems can be caused by a buggy device driver. He recommends getting updated drivers. Fine advice, except, the chances that the new driver is less buggy than the old driver is FAR less than 100%. Although don’t take this as a recommendation not to update - just that if it works, don’t fix it.

In fact, for one reason or another, some clients have found that unless they do reboot at lunch time, the afternoon can get quite frustrating. Chances are that is the fault of some application they use and not Windows itself, but nonetheless they use that application because they need it. We cannot force software vendors to fix their problematic software even though it is in their own self interest to do so.

So my recommendation stands. If XP won’t shut down properly, troubleshoot. Don’t choose hibernation instead. If it won’t shut down then chances are you have other problems, some of which may be alleviated by a daily reboot.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/935448/

Use the above link if you get:

Illegal System DLL Relocation

The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory

Apparently, a recent Windows XP security update was buggy (no, really?). So QuickBooks and a host of other programs are crashing now. Are we having fun yet?

Even though I have done a lot of programming in my day, I just can’t comprehend how there can be so many bugs still left in a 6 year old operating system like Windows XP that will allow a hacker to take complete control of your PC.

Shucks, when the owner of the PC tries to take complete control, Windows usually crashes!

Maybe you’ll like this video “honoring” Bill Gates accomplishments:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/5NoGbLI3ePA]

Yesterday I was duty bound to try to get USB devices, a USB Flash Drive and, if successful with that, a USB printer, to work on Windows 98SE (second edition - the good one!).

First, I tried an older Kingston 512MB drive. I downloaded the driver from Kingston’s website, installed it, rebooted and inserted the USB Flash Drive. I was prompted with the add new hardware wizard which ultimately told me that an adequate driver could not be found. Been there before.

With USB and Windows 98, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Next, I tried a newer Sandisk Micro Cruzer 1GB. Downloaded the driver from the website, then determined that this was a U3 device which is NOT supported under Windows 98.

Since this PC did not have an internet connection, NIC installed, or WinZip, I was transferring the required files with 2 floppies from another computer.

After neither worked, I figured enough time wasted. I told my friend I would be happy to upgrade the box to Windows XP (PIII 800, 256MB) and in the meantime I had taken the hard drive out and slaved it in another machine to backup the data for him.

It had been a while since I had the displeasure of messing around with USB and Windows 98. At this point I can confidently say - Just Say NO!

P.S. - I love USB Flash Drives. Read more here.

Today I had some people really excited. It wasn’t the new Dell Laptop (see my Laptop Buying Guide), but the Samsung 940n that I set up as a 2nd monitor and configured for nVidia’s Dualview option.

With Dualview, the second monitor is an extension of the desktop. Just grab a (non maximized) window’s title bar and drag it over to the second screen. Then maximize it there if you want, or not. You can even tell nVidia to remember which screen a program was on last and open it there next.

You just can’t imagine what it’s like until you’ve tried it. I set it up for one user today and had 2 others immediately begging for it.

LCD monitors are getting cheap. I bought this one on buy.com
- under $200 after rebate and free shipping.

Try it, you’ll like it.

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Before you choose your dedicated servers over any website hosting company just to be able to put up your web design, make sure if your favorite search engine actually likes that or not.