The bane of the NT administrator's existence banished. I had a problem last week with a user who was complaining about lockups. I went and looked at the system, and it turned out not to be lockups at all--the system was running out of CPU cycles, so it appeared to lock up, but if you let it sit long enough, it would recover. The system had so many user-installed toys, such as Webshots and Weatherbug and RealAudio and RealJukebox, that it didn't have enough punch left to do real work. I disabled the toys, to many objections, and told the user to call me if the system had any more problems. I told her that yeah, the way I set up computers is drab and boring and utilitarian, but they work.

It's a beautiful day in the virushood, it's a beautiful day for a virus, would you be my, could you be my...

I knuckled down yesterday at work and started building a new laptop image for some deployed users. What they're using now isn't stable and it isn't fast, and much of the software is dated. So rather than patch yet again, we're starting over. I built a 98 install, leaving out anything I could (such as Drive Converter, since we're already using FAT32 over my protests, and Disk Compression, which isn't compatible with FAT32 and I just know it's only a matter of time before some end user decides he's too short on disk space and runs it only to be greeted by a PC that won't boot).

Building a Windows 95 box? Why? You nuts?

Tiny utilities. While I was debating whether to go buy a copy of Extreme Power Tools, I thought I remembered seeing a couple of programs similar to what they offer. So I went hunting and found other stuff, of course.

People tend to get annoyed if you just link to their files, so I linked to the pages that contain links to the files. Some of these pages get pretty heavy, so use your browser's search function if you have trouble locating the file. Also, there are a few files on one of these pages that can be misused, such as buffer exploits and a program to reveal hidden passwords in dialog boxes. Whether they were intended to be misused, or to demonstrate Windows' inherent insecurity, I'm not sure. That said, there are some other utilities on these pages that didn't seem too useful to me, but they may be useful to you. I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so here are a couple of dozen free utilities, linked using proper netiquette.

The listed file sizes are the size of the executable, not the download. The downloads are larger because they include additional files, usually source code.

Files from http://titiasm.cjb.net :

Memory Info. Want to know how much memory your system is using? Here ya go. This is faster than running Norton SysInfo or Microsoft System Monitor. 5.5K.

EdPad. Assembly language NotePad clone. Unfortunately it lacks search/replace. See TheGun for a closer NotePad replacement. 16K.

Resolver. A tiny utility to match Website URLs to IP addresses, and vice-versa. 4.5K.

Files from http://spiff.tripnet.se/~iczelion/source.html :

MP3play. A minimalist MP3 player. Also capable of playing WAV. MID, RMI, AIF, AU, and SND files. Supports playlists. Hint: Right-click in the program window to access its features. 10K.

Also includes miniMP3, a 3.5K player that just plays a single file you specify.

WordEdit. An RTF word processor/help file editor in assembler. Aside from being able to read Word 6 documents, it would make a fabulous WordPad replacement. Includes multiple-level undo and redo, font and color support. Major features missing from a full-blown word processor: spelling/grammar and print preview. Delete the included file splash.dll to eliminate the splash screen and long boot delay. 112K.

FileMan. A graphical two-pane file manager, like Norton Commander. 87K.

Clipboard. Intended mostly as a demo program, but it's useful beyond its original design. Intended use: Put it in your SendTo folder and you can send file paths to the clipboard from a right-click on the file. Nice. But additionally, having a large object on the clipboard can slow down your system. Some programs ask when you exit if you want to clear it. Others don't. This program pastes the command-line parameter you feed it to the clipboard, so a shortcut to this program that passes a single-character argument effectively clears your clipboard. Neat, huh? 2.5K.

EWCalc. A scientific calculator. Additionally, it'll do decimal/hex/octal/binary conversion. 30.5K.

PlayCD. A simple CD player. 7.5K.

QuickBar. A lean replacement for the MS Office toolbar. 20K.

HTTP Downloader. Feed it an url, and it downloads a file through HTTP, like Unix wget. 20.5K.

TheGun. A slightly enhanced replacement for Notepad. Edits large files, includes Ctrl-A hotkey for select all, and includes search/replace. Source not included. 6K.

QuickEdit. A more full-featured editor, includes HTML-to-text conversion and strips carriage returns. Download includes TheGun and a quick-and-dirty textfile viewer. Source not included. 27K.

Files from http://www.rbthomas.freeserve.co.uk/:

Screen savers. I hate screen savers, as everyone knows. Normally I use blank screen. This package includes a 6.5K 32-bit assembly language replacement for blank screen. (Microsoft's blanker is 16-bit!) The others in the package prove that even when written in assembly, graphics-heavy screen savers eat up far too much CPU time.

RWave. Records and plays back WAV files. A suitable replacement for Sound Recorder. 5.5K.

Timer. This program isn't a substitute for a common utility, but it's useful for me. I've never gotten around to getting a timer for my kitchen. Now I can let my computer do the job. If your apartment's as small as mine, or if you have a computer in your kitchen (why? Never mind. I don't want to know.) yours can too. 31.5K.

More for less, but who wants it? And David Huff reports the P4 prices will plummet today. I thought I mentioned that, but maybe not. The 1.7 GHz model will launch at the insane price of $350 (Intel had planned to launch it at $700 or so). Margins? We don't need no stinkin' margins! Intel's definitely running scared.

Enough of that. Time to take a hint from Frank. What else is there in life? I realized one night last week that I hadn't gone record shopping in a long time, so I hit the local used shop. The pickings were a bit more sparse than usual, but I'd written down a couple of longshots to look for and I found them, along with a couple of surprises. First I found Starfish, by The Church, which features the track "Under the Milky Way," a mainstay of '80s radio and compilations. That's probably the standout track, but for a band usually considered a one-hit wonder, it's a really good album.

The other big surprise was Look Sharp!, which was Joe Jackson's 1979 debut. I was surprised to find it's mostly a guitar-bass-drum album. Jackson's a piano player--and a darn good one. Jackson's piano appears, but he's rarely playing the lead instrument. The tracks that everyone remembers ("Is She Really Going Out With Him?" and the title track) are definitely the best parts of this album, but it was a strong effort. I can see where his following came from. But it was weird hearing him do what amounts to punk rock with a dose of literacy.

The first longshot was an album I've been looking for used for years: Doolittle by The Pixies. The Pixies are very much an acquired taste, but I acquired it. How to describe them? Dark, usually. Weird, always. This was generally regarded as their best album.

And the last longshot was Oyster by Heather Nova. Who? Yeah, I know. I once saw her mentioned in the same context as Aimee Mann and Dot Allison, so I kept an eye out. I think the comparison to those two is a bit shallow. Yes, the three of them are all blonde, female, and write their own songs, and both Nova and Allison play guitar (so does Mann, but she's mostly a bass player). I recognized "Walk This World" as a song that got a fair bit of airtime on alternative radio about five years ago. Like Allison, her lyrics can get a bit suggestive sometimes, though there are plenty of people who get more so. Compared to Madonna, they're both tame. But comparing them to an MTV-manufactured pop star is heresy, so I'll stop now. The variety of styles Nova dabbles in on the album surprised me. Some tracks are dreamy and atmospheric reminiscent of Allison's band One Dove, but right in the middle of the album is some pure hard rock in the form of a song called "Maybe an Angel." Somehow that song avoids being over the top like a lot of hard rock does, and it's far and away the best song on the album. And I've thought about those Allison-Mann-Nova comparisons. She's dreamy and atmospheric like Allison, and often introspective like Mann, so maybe that's the basis. At any rate, I'll be keeping an eye on her, and not just because she has a really cool name.

An administrator's take on bloatware. When I finally got around to making my rounds over Sunday dinner, I found a link to a programmer's take on bloatware  on Frank McPherson's site.

I have to admit, Joel Spolsky does a pretty nice job of making bloatware sound like much of a problem.

Except for one thing: Mr. Spolsky lives in a developer's world, where the job is to crank out code. I have to live in a world where people don't care about software, they've just gotta get the pamphlets mailed, the questions answered, the books written, the meetings planned, and the money raised. In this world, software upgrades are a distraction and need to be unobtrusive.

Excel 5.0 and Word 6.0 were hogs in their day. Today they seem positively svelte. Their descendants have bloated to 10 times the size, and what have they added? I'm not qualified to talk about Excel. I use Excel to calculate the prices of computer components and project savings. I could do the same thing with the original DOS version of VisiCalc.

I believe I'm very qualified to talk about Word though. I wrote a 292-page book in Word 97, along with another 300 pages' worth of manuscript you'll never see (you can thank O'Reilly and Associates for that, but no, I'm not interested in talking about it), and numerous magazine and newspaper articles. So I've spent a lot of time in Word. And what does Word 2000 add that Word 6.0 didn't have?

Lots of crashes, for one. A facility to download clipart more easily. And font menus that display the font names in the fonts themselves, so you can instantly see what a font looks like. Type-as-you-go spelling and grammar checking that you should turn off anyway.

Word 97 had a slightly smaller number of crashes, type-as-you-go checking and the clipart facility. All it lacked is the fancy font menu, but I had a freeware add-in for that.

That's not worth a tenfold increase in disk space. It's not worth the larger number of crashes. Frankly it's not even worth the upgrade price. It's a colossal waste of money, unless you absolutely must use the new file formats. I'd be a whole lot better off spending that money on more RAM or a faster hard drive, or banking it for my next motherboard/CPU upgrade.

But beyond that, there's a hidden cost behind the cost of the software and the cost of the hardware it takes to run it (admittedly miniscule; Office 2000 runs just fine on a Celeron-533, and you can pick up a closeout motherboard and a Celeron-533 for a hundred bucks, while a 20-gig IDE hard drive costs $99).

I'm currently faced with the task of rolling this behemoth out to 1,000 PCs. It sucks. First of all, we're looking at shoving about 600 gigabytes of data down an already-congested 10-megabit LAN to install this sorry excuse for crap. So much for doing that over lunch break. Second, assuming a 10-megabit LAN with no traffic using the no-questions-asked install (the one thing I like about Office 2000), you're looking at half an hour to install it on a reasonably modern PC. Five hundred hours of my labor, at time and a half since it can't happen during the normal workday, and I still have my regular duties to do anyway? Hang on while I do some quick math. Hey, I'm starting to like the sound of this now. That'd make a nice downpayment on a house. Or I could pay cash for a midrange car. Or I could dump it into a nice safe investment and have a great start on paying for college for my firstborn, 18 years after whenever s/he comes along. But something tells me my employer really isn't going to like the sound of this.

But that's not the only hidden expense. Installing Office 2000 with the same level of functionality my users are used to having with Office 97 will require about 500 megs' worth of free space, preferably on drive C. But Microsoft, being a bunch of morons (or having absolutely no grip on reality, I'm not sure which), decided it'd be cool to install NT 4.0 on a FAT partition, then convert it to NTFS if you specified NTFS in the first place. Trust me, give a computer user two gigs on drive C and six months, and they'll fill it to bursting. The vast majority of my users don't have enough free space to install Office 97. Sure, they can clean up the mess. But that'll take most of them at least an hour or so to do, and that's time they could be spending doing real work. The value of an employee's time is usually much more than their hourly salary, so we'll just call that another 20 grand flushed down the toilet. Thanks bunches, Gates and Ballmer. Maybe this is part of the reason why that ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," has come down on you.

Want another hidden expense? I know you do. This has less to do with bloatware and more to do with poorly written installation routines, but when you take a PC with zero fragmentation, then install Office 2000, Diskeeper Light will report an unacceptable level of fragmentation when you're done. And, admittedly, the systems do feel slower afterward. Fortunately, users can defragment their own systems. At half an hour per PC, assume another 10 grand gone. Make it five. A lot of users can do other things while they're doing that, but a lot of them will sit there and watch it defrag.

Microsoft, may you live in exceedingly interesting times.

Sure, a corporate-wide rollout of Office 2000 eats up a measly $5,000 worth of disk space that would otherwise probably go to Backstreet Boys MP3s users shouldn't be keeping on their computers anyway (yes, I've found Backstreet Boys MP3s on our network--honest!) and we've already paid for the software. But the hidden costs are obnoxious. And in St. Louis, where you can't get good IT help for love or money because there's such a shortage, if my colleagues and I decide we like having lives and don't want the overtime, my employer is screwed. Maybe we can find some high school and college students to do this for $8 an hour, but that'll be a tough sell to some people. Our security manager may have problems with us giving a handful of part-timers administrative rights to all the workstations on our LAN. As he should.

Don't let anyone fool you. When you're trying to manage a network of 1,000 users whose primary job function is something other than technology, disk space costs a lot more than $0.00071 per megabyte.

Things that make you go... D'OH! I spent, as I've said a number of times before, the better part of a weekend trying to figure out how to run Windows from a ramdisk. I figured I couldn't have been the first to do such a thing, but I couldn't find any reference online to anyone who had. After a weekend of turning some hair gray, I got it working on my own.

Then I set out to compress my ramdisk. Disk compression makes sense when disk space is expensive, and RAM is comparatively expensive, and even if disk compression slows it down by 100%, compressed RAM is still many orders of magnitude faster than a metal disk. I couldn't get it working. I didn't say it was impossible, because I'll never write anything off as impossible, but I said I couldn't get it working. I figured that'd be the last I'd hear of it.

Then over the weekend, Tony Brewer, a reader of the Optimizing Windows, wrote in, quoted that paragraph verbatim and casually said, "It's most definitely possible." I was flabbergasted. Had he done it? I wrote back and asked if he'd done it and if he'd be willing to share the secret.

Indeed he had, and he was kind enough to share the secret. It turns out I was very, very close to getting it working. But close is only good enough in nuclear war, not computers.

Here's what he had to say:

Dave,

There is an elegant and simple method for running Win9x on a compressed RAM disk. Assuming that Win9x is already installed on C: and using the same drive letters as in Chapter 11 of your book:

Run DriveSpace in Windows to create an empty compressed drive E: of the desired size using free space on C:, re-boot, then install Win9x to E:windows (with the swap file on C:). Edit c:msdos.sys, c:config.sys and c:autoexec.bat as follows:

c:msdos.sys
------------------
[Paths]
WinDir=e:windows
WinBootDir=e:windows
HostWinBootDrv=c
...

c:config.sys
-----------------
device=c:windowshimem.sys
device=c:windowsemm386.exe    ;or use umbpci.sys
dos=high,umb
devicehigh=c:windowsifshlp.sys
devicehigh=c:windowssetver.exe
...

c:autoexec.bat
---------------------
...
path=e:windows;e:windowscommand;e:windowssystem
set temp=c: temp
set tmp=c:temp
....

After re-booting, Win9x should run on the compressed drive E:, hosted by physical disk C:. To have a compressed RAM disk, the host must be an uncompressed RAM disk, D: for example. In c:d??space.ini (c:dblspace.ini or c:drvspace.ini, probably the former), change the ActivateDrive setting to read:

ActivateDrive=E,D1

This tells the DriveSpace driver to mount the compressed volume file (CVF) d??space.001 as drive E: with host drive D:. (Mounting is not automatic as it was with host drive C:, because RAM disk D: does not exist when io.sys loads the DriveSpace driver, dblspace.bin or drvspace.bin.)

Edit c:autoexec.bat so that it contains the following:

...
path=c:windows;c:windowscommand;c:windowssystem
REM Create RAM disk
xmsdsk {desired size of RAM disk in kilobytes} d: /t /y
REM Copy CVF to RAM disk
attrib c:drvspace.001 -s -h -r
copy c:drvspace.001 d:
attrib c:drvspace.001 +s +h +r
attrib d:drvspace.001 +s +h +r
REM Mount CVF using scandisk /mount
scandisk /mount d:drvspace.001
REM E: is now compressed RAM disk
path=e:windows;e:windowscommand;e:windowssystem
set temp=c:temp
set tmp=c:temp
...

After re-booting, Win9x should run on the compressed RAM disk! :o)

(On a networked PC, there is no need for a hard disk as the CVF can be copied from a server. Diskless Win9x using a compressed RAM disk works very well.)

The above method is an adaptation of one by Andre Moreira. http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/~andre/extern/nc98.htm

Regards,

Tony Brewer
tonybrewer@bigDELETEfoot.com

With some thought, I may be able to simplify it a little, but not by much. The obvious simplification would be to use the free-for-private-use xxcopy to copy drvspace.001 in a single step, saving all those attrib lines in autoexec.bat.

This shows a lot of promise. Memory's so cheap right now that it's feasible to get 384 megs, leave yourself with 64 or even 128 megs of working memory, and still have a decent-sized ramdisk. Windows 95 will install to as little as 17 MB, if you know the secrets. Windows 98 is considerably larger but it's still possible to stuff Win98 and a couple of apps into a compressed 256 MB disk, and it's super fast. Even with disk compression, access to a compressed ramdrive is nearly instant. I did get compressed ramdrives working inside Windows (I just couldn't boot from them) and even on my Pentium-90 a compressed ramdisk was fast. So if you want maximum speed, this is the way. And I'm wondering what this would do for a laptop's battery life...

I'm really eager to give this a test drive.

I sure didn't see much that I liked yesterday. What kind of stuff did I used to write here? Oh yeah. Stuff like this.

How to slow down Windows. Yes, sometimes you want to do this, like when an old game runs too fast. You can do this with a simple free utility called Turbo . You tell it you want to run your computer at, say, 50% speed, so it works by creating a single high-priority process that uses half your CPU time. Tell it you want quarter-speed, and it chews up 75 percent of your CPU time. It works a little better on NT than on 9x, because NT's timing is more precise, but it definitely slows the system down.

There are programs that just slow down one particular process, but most of those are shareware programs costing $25 or more. Turbo slows down the entire system, but its brute-force approach mostly works and you can't beat the price.

An invaluable network utility for laptops. If you have a laptop and you connect to multiple networks (say a LAN at home and at the office, or if you're like me and have more than one office), you need Netswitcher ( www.netswitcher.com ). It's an $8 shareware utility. Definitely worth the money. And the author stands behind it. I had a problem getting the program to run under one particular circumstance, so I e-mailed tech support. The author responded and asked if he could call me. So we talked on the phone for a few minutes while we determined the problem, then he compiled a special build to work around our problem. Amazing, especially in this day and age when most companies won't even pick up the phone. You might not get quite that level of support, but you probably won't need it either because the program's solid.

Check this one out. You'll be glad you did.

And that's more than I can say for most of what I read yesterday. Let's get to that.

SCSI vs. IDE (THG) http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/01q1/010129/index.html

I had high hopes for this one, as SCSI-vs.-IDE is an even more incendiary issue than Windows-vs.-Linux or Macintosh-vs.-the-world, and unlike those, this debate should be fairly easy to settle. Unfortunately the review relied solely on benchmarks, and from raw benchmarks, you'll come to the conclusion that there's never any reason to buy SCSI drives when in reality the older IBM SCSI drive in the roundup will outperform the IDE drive for many everyday tasks even though it benchmarks poorly.

I've never met anyone who used a modern SCSI drive in a multitasking environment and then went back to IDE. Never ever. There's more to this issue than sheer benchmarks.

Upgrading a Mac CPU (Byte) http://www.byte.com/feature/BYT20010124S0001

How the mighty have fallen. This piece would have never seen the light of day in the old print magazine.

First of all, Newer Technology has been in serious trouble for months. Newer dissolved before Christmas, and all of its engineering staff was hired by competitor Sonnet earlier this month. This is evidently news to the author, who says Newer "seems to have" ceased operations in December but their online store is still operational. No it isn't. And Newer's demise caused a huge splash in the Mac community when it happened.

Second of all, replacing a Mac CPU doesn't always make sense. Upgrading a G3 probably does, but you've still got an old memory bus, old memory, and an old hard drive tied to a new CPU. You pay a fraction of the cost of a new computer, but you get a fraction of the performance too.

Plus, upgrading CPUs in some Macs is an absolute nightmare. I spent one of the worst weeks of my life trying to get a Sonnet G3 upgrade working in a Power Mac 7500. The only thing consistent about it was its lack of stability. Sometimes it booted and ran at the old speed. Sometimes it ran at G3 speed. Sometimes it was somewhere in between (presumably the L2 cache wasn't getting enabled). It never ran very long. Sonnet technical support verified with me after checking a few things that the upgrade would never work right in that particular model. The local Mac dealer gave us a refund and vowed after our experience that he would never sell another CPU upgrade again. The author mentions it's hard to buy these things at locally owned dealers, but never says why.

Some wisdom in choosing your upgrade would have been nice. You'd better at least double your CPU power, or you won't notice much difference. Some wisdom about what to upgrade would be nice too. How many people just blindly throw money at CPU upgrades when they'd be better served by a faster disk or more memory?

At least the advice on working inside the Mac once he popped the hood was solid.

Abit KT7 review (Ars Technica) http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q1/abitkt7r/abitkt7r-1.html

This review seems a bit late, as the KT7 has been on the market a long time and the hot chipset of today is the KT133A, not the KT133 featured on the Abit KT7. The reviewer caught a number of caveats with the board, which someone building a system around this board will be very happy to know. Benchmarking is incomplete, due to their inability to run Content Creation on it. So benchmarks are limited to Sandra and Quake 3, which are of limited use.

Benchmarking against the Asus CUSL2 board isn't very useful; it would be nice to see scores against a one or two competing Socket A boards for comparison.

But the graphs start properly at 0 and the reviewer discloses his testbed, which is good. You can't take those things for granted. He also discussed stability, which is a rare thing.

Really, this review wasn't enraging, unlike most of the stuff I read yesterday (some of which was so bad it's not worth even talking about). It just left me wondering what the point was, since the product's remaining shelf life can probably be measured in weeks.

Another example of how Microsoft just doesn't get it. This one courtesy of The Register. If you buy a PC without an operating system (so as to load an alternative on it, such as Linux, xBSD, OS/2, BeOS, or something else that "nobody wants to run anyway"), you're a thief. Story here.

Which reminds me, I really do need to get an OS/2 box running again, and get serious about BeOS while I'm at it...

Windows Me can't handle more than a half-gig of RAM. This also from The Reg. Story here. The vcache workaround is legit; no one has ever demonstrated to me the benefit of using more than 4 megs for a Win9x disk cache anyway.

Afternoon: Short shrift thoughts on WinMe. I've got it running on a Celeron-400. I installed a 15GB Quantum Fireball lct I bought some time back and never used for anything, so as to preserve my existing Win98 setup. I see little difference between WinME and 98SE, with a few exceptions:

Improved Defrag. Defrag's speed now rivals that of a third-party package. It still won't give the results that a well-tuned Norton SpeedDisk will, but at least the days of 18-hour defrags are over.

Improved boot times. When I saw people bragging that WinME made their systems boot in a minute and a half, I was hardly impressed. I can get even Win95 to boot many systems in under 30 seconds. WinME booted this C400 in 15 seconds. I did the boot speed tricks out of Optimizing Windows, and got the boot time down to 14 seconds. So Microsoft has obviously streamlined the boot process considerably. The old tricks still work, but don't give much improvement. But what would you rather do, pay $50 or $90 for a faster boot time, or spend 5 minutes streamlining your MSDOS.SYS file?

Stability. WinME is a bit more solid on this C400 than vanilla Win98 was. I'm currently serenading my neighbors with an MP3 tune from A Flock of Seagulls (I'm sure they appreciate it) while I'm on the Web. That was a great way to make the system bluescreen before. Of course, that could just be due to a fresh installation as well. That 98 installation is about 14 months old, so it's due for a scrubdown.

Speaking of sound... I bought the SB Live! card in this machine mostly for its voice recognition abilities, but the sound quality coming out of this thing is far greater than any other sound card I've seen. If you're in the market for a sound card, give Creative's SoundBlaster Live! series a long, hard look. Now that their main competition is buried I don't know how long they'll keep making good stuff, but this card is something else.

Morning: I finally did it. I did what I recommend no one do. I bought a copy of Windows ME last night. I'm making a bit of a living writing about 9x, so I had no choice. I'm writing a Windows optimization series for Computer Shopper UK, and I have to cover ME because that's what an increasing number of people have.

I could review it here but I doubt I'll bother. I can't imagine anyone would be interested. The best advice for any Microsoft 9x product is to not buy it unless you buy a new PC that comes with it. That was true for four years, and with ME's lack of backward compatibility with DOS, it's probably even more true.

My new project is starting to rival the ramdisk project in difficulty. Windows ME appears to be faster and more stable than its predecessors but I don't like the installation program. It seems to take liberties I wish it wouldn't with the existing Windows directories it finds. Why do I care about that? You'll find out if I'm successful -- I don't want to get anyone's hopes up yet. Plus a little air of mystery is always a good thing.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: "Dustin D. Cook" <dcook32p@nospam.htcomp.net>
Subject: Memory Brands