Losing his cables

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:13

Jon Honeyball changes allegiance by cashing in the beloved PC for a Mac! No, he hasn't lost his mind - only his cable. He also attempts to get some order out of Windows 2000

A related problem is the way in which Windows 2000 opens windows. If you have a stack of windows already open on your Desktop and you fire up a new program, it should come up in the foreground; in other words, right at the front of the stack. But again, this often isn't the case and it appears at some seemingly random point in the Z order stack. I usually have to hunt down the button for the new app in the taskbar, then click it once to minimise it and click once more to bring it back onto the screen, at which point it's correctly in the foreground. Just a little bug, I know, but when you have to work day-in, day-out on a computer such an error can cause me to shout with anger. I hope it gets fixed quickly.

O&O defragger

I keep trying to get excited about NTFS defragger tools and mostly end up failing miserably. I'm still wholly unconvinced that they make any real-world difference that matters (or that's cost effective). I've even filled in the cost justification form at the Executive Software Web site, maker of Diskeeper, and the company had to admit that it could offer no benefit to me in cost terms. Without digging too deeply into the Excel payback model the site provides, suffice to say that it would take 250 weeks for me to see a return on the investment. That doesn't stop me running Diskeeper though. I wouldn't pay money for the software, but it does the job and fortunately my servers can run the review copy, so I'm not out of pocket. It does a perfectly acceptable job and seems to do what it says it will do, though it definitely has a hard time if the available free space on a disk drops below 20 per cent.

All this being so, I was quite interested when some friends commented favourably on the O&O defragmentation tool. I'd looked at this when it first appeared, but the freeware 2000 version looked worthy of five minutes of my time. This is a free download and, like the free version of Diskeeper, it runs as a MMC (Microsoft Management Console) application and doesn't support defragmentation of multiple volumes at the same time. I was certainly impressed by the speed at which it operated, as it seems much snappier in operation than Diskeeper. I also like the ability to click on a data block and see which files are held in there - this is a worthwhile feature in itself. I tried O&O on a heavily-fragmented and full disk partition, and it pummelled it into the defragmented state quite quickly (and I know that Diskeeper had problems with the same volume).

Which does the better job? To be honest, I don't know and I'm actually not that bothered. Given that both companies give away a freeware version (the Diskeeper one is now in the shrinkwrap of Windows 2000), I'm tempted to suggest that one of these is all you need. I know that's not much good for the revenue stream of the companies concerned, but a payback time of five years on my network isn't the sort of thing I like to hear as a business cost justification. I should point out that maybe my network is odd, as it has a lot of servers and very few users, but that might be the same for you too. And still the very best defragmentation tool I've found is to reformat the disk and restore the data onto it.

Undelete

If you're worried about what happens when you delete data from your hard disk, you can, of course, just trundle over to the wastebasket and pull the files out back into your normal workspace, though I'm continually amazed by how many people don't realise that you can do this. Naturally, if you empty the wastebasket those files are gone, and you can't undelete them. This is true on a FAT16 drive, though if you're feeling very brave, you can use a low-level disk-hacking tool to reset the deleted flags on those files and magically make them reappear. This only works on the assumption that no chunks of the file have been overwritten in the meantime.

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