Windows

Another site listing spyware-free software

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Generally speaking, I tell people not to install free software on a computer anymore unless it’s licensed under the GNU GPL or another similar open-source license, because open-source software is the only type of software that has any high degree of likelihood of not containing adware or spyware or other malware.

The problem with that advice is that the people who know what it means probably already follow it, and if you follow this Farquhar’s Law (there are many) to the letter, you miss out on gems like Irfanview.I’ve recommended the Tinyapps.org web site for a long, long time, but some jewels like Mozilla are much too big to qualify for that list.

Enter Cleansoftware.org.

While neither list is likely to have every safe, free application available, checking those sites for software that does what you want gives a broader range of choice than simply making a blanket statement like “Don’t install anything that isn’t Free (as in speech) Software,” or “Don’t install anything that isn’t GPL.”

If you want software that you can copy and redistribute and, if you wish, modify, with little or no restriction, then of course your best bet is to check out Freshmeat.net and look for software with a license that’s OSL approved.

Contrary to what it may seem, strings-free freeware isn’t a totally lost art. You just have to look a little harder these days, that’s all.

Fixing a computer that shows the wrong partition size after resizing

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting, Windows , ,

So, I’ve got these Windows 2000 boxes that didn’t have enough space, so I resized some partitions. No error messages, no problems. I reboot, and the drives still show their old size, even though in Disk Administrator they show the right size.

What gives? Microsoft acknowledges this issue in Windows XP, but hasn’t released a fix yet. But these aren’t XP, they’re 2000.

I’ve got a crazy solution.

If you have a copy of Ghost by Symantec, take a Ghost image of the partition that’s sized wrong. Then, immediately after creating the image, write the image back to the partition you just Ghosted.

Makes no sense, right? Well, but Ghost doesn’t do a bit-by-bit copy. It makes sure it gets good copies of your files, but it saves an interpretation of the partition, rather than the partition itself. So when it writes it back, minor errors that were there before get wiped out.

Now, why there can’t be a disk utility that does this same thing to a partition without the imaging runaround, I don’t know.

I just know I’ve brought a lot of computers with weird disk problems back to life over the years by making Ghost images of them and then writing the image back. This one today is just the latest in that long line.

Ways to keep your NT/2K/XP system defragmented

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Defragmenting on a regular basis isn’t the only thing to overall system performance, but it’s a major factor. Fortunately there are some free tools that do a good job of it. Unfortunately they don’t come with Windows.

Here’s how to automatically defragment your system and your registry.

You can defragment the registry using PageDefrag, a utility by Mark Russinovich of WinNT Magazine fame. I’ve been known to set it to defragment the registry and page file at boot time; after the first time it doesn’t add much to the boot time at all. And XP can still get itself defragmented and booted faster than NT4 usually could manage to boot.

I talked a few weeks ago about DIRMS, a command-line defragmenter. I still like it. I recommend that you schedule a defrag at sometime you won’t be using the computer, like 4 AM. It’s easy to do with any version of Windows using the AT command.

at 4:00 /every:Monday dirms c -q

The AT command requires the scheduler service to be running. It does not require Internet Explorer 4.0 or newer to be installed, so it’ll run on NT4 boxes that only have the default IE 2.0 installed. If you want to run on additional days, separate it with a comma.

Now if DIRMS would just sort files by access date when it defragments, it would be the ultimate defragmenter.

Update: I don’t like DIRMS anymore. It failed me once big-time, and then I found something better.

Fixing Windows font sizing. Sort of.

Dave Farquhar Windows

So, I’ve got this nifty new laptop. It’s fast and reliable and it’s got a huge 15-inch screen.

The screen’s native resolution is 1400×1050. So the huge screen is full of tiny text.No problem, right? Right-click on the desktop, hit properties, go to appearance, go to font size, select extra large, and go to town, right?

Not quite. When I did that, I got big, gorgeous fonts some of the time and little teeny fonts other times and lots of apps, even those from the Vole itself, can’t handle the font size change without going all goofy.

A better solution is hidden more deeply. Right-click on the desktop and select properties. But go to settings, advanced, and under general, you’ll find a DPI setting. Since the default is 96 DPI and this screen’s resolution is about 50% larger than I would like, I switched to a custom setting and scaled to 150%, which gives 144 DPI.

Many CSS-heavy web pages still display goofy, including this one, so I end up hitting CTRL-+ and CTRL– to adjust the sizes of pages to make them readable, but apps like Outlook (yes, I’m one of those poor souls stuck in an MS Exchange environment) that don’t respond well to the large fonts setting work much better when you change the DPI.

So now I can take advantage of the high resolution display to actually make the computer display look better, rather than merely cramming lots more stuff in the same space as before.

Squeezing some life out of an aging Windows 2000 PC

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

I can safely say I really did write the book on Windows optimization (Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia, O’Reilly, 1999, ISBN 1565926773) but that was five years ago and covered Windows 95 and 98.

Windows 2000 and XP are a different animal, and are as similar to the obscure OS/2 operating system from IBM as they are to Windows 95/98.

Here’s what I did when my work computer slowed to the point that I could no longer do much work.Clear some disk space. This is a biggie. NTFS, Windows’ file system, really doesn’t like it if the amount of free space on a disk drops below 15 percent. That’s stupid, but it’s reality, and since I don’t have Mr. Gates’ phone number I can’t do much but live with it. I went to Start, Search, picked Files and Folders, typed *.* in the name field and Drive C in the Look in: field, then hit Search Now. When it finished, I clicked on the field that says Size, and scrolled all the way down. I found lots of big files I didn’t need. I found a mystery file that was 600 megs in size. A Google search revealed that some obscure application I had used once had created that file. That was nice of it. After five minutes’ work, I had freed almost a gigabyte of disk space.

Uninstall old printer drivers. I had a bunch of printer drivers installed for printers I don’t use anymore. They were taking up disk space and memory. I only have 192 megs of RAM and most of it was in use by the time the computer booted, before I’d even loaded any programs. That’s no good. So I removed the drivers for my girlfriend’s Epson color printer (in the Add/Remove Programs control panel) and then I went into Printers and deleted the network printers of old clients and other printers I can’t remember ever using (in most cases you can just delete the printer and it will offer to remove the drivers).

Stop unnecessary services. If you right-click on My Computer and hit Manage, then double-click on Services and Applications and then on Services, you’ll find all sorts of stuff that Windows runs just in case you need it. Most of it is necessary, but for me, several were just chewing up more RAM than I could afford.

Computer Browser. This service, despite what you hear elsewhere, has nothing to do with web browsing, My Network Places, or anything else useful. All it does is permit your computer to participate in browser elections. What are those? It’s a long story, but the gist of it is that on a Windows network, one computer gets to keep the list of computers on the network, and every time you turn a computer on, the computers running the Computer Browser service fight over who gets to keep that list. Sound useless? Unless you’re in an office network with a file server and a very small number of computers, it’s very useless. Most of the time it’s just chewing up between 2 and 8 megabytes of your precious RAM. Forget that.

HID Input Service. I plugged a USB mouse into this computer once and it loaded this. Next thing I knew, my available memory had dropped by 6 megabytes. Six megabytes! For a stupid mouse? I use a USB mouse occasionally, but not every day, and certainly not often enough to be able to afford dedicating 6 megs to something that sits there waiting for me to plug one in. I’d leave it if I had 512 megs of RAM but I didn’t, so I disabled it.

Automatic Updates and Background Intelligent Transfer Service. I keep Automatic Updates turned off because it doesn’t work with our firewall, but whether the option is turned on or off, these services are loaded and chewing up memory. So I disabled these services. I have mixed feelings on Automatic Update. If you can’t remember to visit the Windows Update site once a month, you should leave it turned on. But since it won’t work for me anyway, I have to leave it turned off, so I might as well recover the memory.

Remote Registry Service. This allows a network administrator to connect to your computer and make changes. In a home environment you won’t use this. At work you’ll probably get your hand slapped if you disable it. It uses about a meg.

By trimming some of this dead wood, I was able to gain almost 32 megs of RAM.

Uninstall programs you’re not using anymore. I had several programs that I hadn’t used since Clinton was president that were taking up space on my drive, and some of them had been so nice as to install services that were running all the time and chomping some of my very scarce system RAM. Clearing those out gained me a couple hundred megs’ worth of disk space and nearly 20 megs of RAM.

Clear the browser cache. Internet Explorer keeps pieces of web sites on disk in case you ever visit them again, because it’s much faster than downloading them again. The problem is it does a terrible job of cleaning these up, so the result is you have, in all likelihood, tens of thousands of tiny files, if not hundreds of thousands, that you’ll never use again. Right-click your IE icon on the desktop, hit properties, and click Delete Files. You’ll save yourself some disk space, but more importantly, you’ll make this next step a lot faster and more effective.

Defrag. I used to be really good about defragmenting my drives but it looks like I’ve been lax lately because my C drive was in bad, bad shape. Go to Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools and pick Disk Defragmenter. Run it once a month.

My drive, as it turned out, was hopelessly fragmented. The system was much peppier after I ran it.

I hope these steps will be helpful. It’s not as good as getting a new computer, but it’s much easier to live with now. If your system is bogged down, and like mine, it’s an old laptop that uses scarce and expensive memory and is out of slots anyway, this will make it easier to live with.

Looks like Windows XP SP2 is gonna break stuff

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

I’m sure you’ve read already that Service Pack 2 for Windows XP is going to break some software in the name of enhanced security. And I’m sure you’ve read lots of howls of protest. And maybe some smug snide asides too.

What I’m sure you haven’t read is what to do about those compatibility issues.

Keep reading.First and foremost, you should keep your main Windows installation up to date. For everyday functions like word processing and e-mail, Windows XP SP2 should do just fine. It’s the old stuff that’s likely to break. And the old stuff is likely to be the stuff you only use occasionally.

So here’s what you do. Dual-boot Windows XP SP2 with an older version. That older version could be Windows XP SP1, or it could be something older.

How? The easiest way is to use a bootloader like XOSL. There might be others out there, but XOSL is proven, and it’s great. People have used it to install literally dozens of OSs on one computer.

If you’ve got software that hasn’t run right since you upgraded to XP, this is your chance to correct it too. With XOSL, lots of versions of Windows can coexist. You can even install Windows 3.1 if you can manage to locate drivers for your new hardware. (Though I can’t imagine why…. Windows 3.1 was so bad it drove me to run OS/2 for three years.)

After you get your old versions of Windows installed, boot into them and install your old software that doesn’t like XP SP2. Badda bing, badda boom, you can run your old stuff, and when you’re doing your everyday stuff, you can do the socially responsible thing and be up to date. Everybody wins.

Or, if lots of old software’s going to quit running anyway, you could just take it as your cue to switch to Linux…

Go get ’em, SCO!

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m sure you’ve read it 4.3 billion other places already, but Microsoft has been granted a patent on double-clicking.

Well, there’s something you probably have only read a few hundred other places. Apple obviously had people double-clicking more than a year before Microsoft did, seeing as Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985 and the first Macintosh shipped in early 1984. Commodore had Amigans double-clicking by the summer of 1985. So did Atari.

Guess who supplied Atari with its operating system, since Jack Tramiel failed to swindle his way into ownership of the Amiga?

Digital Research, that’s who. DR provided Atari with a version of CP/M-68K, with its GEM GUI running on top of it. Atari marketed the bundle as TOS, for Tramiel OS.

Digital Research got crushed by the Microsoft juggernaut a few years later and eventually sold out to Novell. Novell then attempted to compete head-on with Microsoft (buying up its Utah neighbor, WordPerfect, and part of Borland in the process) and failed spectacularly. Smelling a rat–Novell believed Microsoft sabotaged some of its applications so they would not run under DR-DOS–it then pawned the Digital Research portfolio off on Caldera, a Linux company run by former Novell executives. The catch? Caldera had to turn around and sue Microsoft. Which they did, successfully.

A few more years later, The Santa Cruz Operation, a small Unix firm, wanted out. It sold its Unix-on-Intel business, as well as the rights to the old AT&T Unix (purchased from Novell, ironically) to Caldera, who soon changed its name to The SCO Group to reflect this business.

Yes, this is the same SCO who is now on a legal rampage, suing anything that moves.

Now, whether Novell or SCO is the more rightful owner of the double-click “innovation” is arguable. But such matters never seem to matter to SCO. It’s a frivolous lawsuit, but Darl McBride and Co. have made frivolous and baseless lawsuits into an art form.

Go get ’em, Darl.

A Free, Open-Source alternative to WinZip

Dave Farquhar Windows

Free graphical Zip/Unzip programs for Windows have come and gone. I’m always looking for one because I don’t use a graphical one all that often, preferring the command-line utilities from Info-Zip that I’ve been using since 1991.

But sometimes the graphical interface makes things easier. Info-Zip has a GUI front-end, but it’s difficult to install, at least compared to the typical Windows program. Power Archiver used to be free, but it’s slow, and now it’s shareware, and frankly, I don’t think it offers much of anything that WinZip or PKZip for Windows doesn’t.

Enter 7zip. It’s easy, it’s GPL, it handles all the common file formats, and it’s reasonably fast. Enough said.

It also introduces a new file format. The “7z” format compressed some of my stuff about 80% more than Zip. It also compressed better than CAB or RAR. You can do people a favor and make your 7z files self-extracting, so they don’t have to download yet another archiver (my big beef with RAR).

It’s not only free, it’s better. Go get it.

And while we’re on the topic of Zip utilities, I would be remiss to not mention Ken Silverman’s excellent Zip tools. If you’re not afraid of the command line, they are a must-have.

Optimizing Windows networks

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

My church’s IT czar asked me a good question the other day. His network performance was erratic and Network Neighborhood was messed up. Some computers saw different views of the network, although if you manually connected to other computers, that usually worked.
There are probably 35 or so computers on the network now, so it’s no longer a small network. He asked a few good questions, and the tips that came out of the discussion bear repeating here.

1. Establish a master browser. There’s supposed to be one and only one keeper of the Network Neighborhood’s directory, if you will. Whenever a Windows computer comes online, it calls for an election. Usually the winner of the election makes sense. But sometimes a computer that has no business winning the election wins. Or sometimes the computers seem to get confused about who won the election.

Networks shouldn’t be like the U.S. political system.

Windows NT, 2000, and XP boxes run a service called Computer Browser. Ideally, you want one master browser and a couple of backups online all the time. So pick four computers who are likely to always be on, and who are running Windows 2000 or XP, preferably (since they’re likely to be newer computers). Then turn the Computer Browser service off on all but those four computers. Browser elections and related bureaucracy can chew up 30% of your network bandwidth in worst-case situations, so this can be worth doing even if you’re not yet experiencing the problem.

2. Use WINS. Unless you have an Active Directory domain and you’re running DNS on Windows 2000 or 2003 Server, Windows boxes have to broadcast because they don’t know the addresses of any other computers on the network. All that broadcast traffic chews up bandwidth and can cause other unusual behavior. WINS is basically like Windows-proprietary DNS. Set up WINS on one of your Windows servers, if you have one, or on a Linux box running Samba, and you’ll end up with a faster, more reliable network.

If you’re running a home network with fewer than 10 PCs, this probably isn’t worth the effort–especially the WINS server. The Computer Browser service might be worth disabling but more because it’ll save you a little bit of memory. If you’re a large enterprise with hundreds or thousands of computers running that service, the freeware PSTools suite from Sysinternals has some command-line utilities that can help you turn off services remotely, to avoid the daunting task of visiting every desk.

Shrinking Windows 2000 and XP

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

Seeing as this used to be my big topic, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that it’s now possible to remove Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and other components from Windows 2000 and XP using software from litepc.com.
I haven’t tested it, so I don’t know how much difference it makes, performance-wise. It made a large difference in Windows 98–removing IE caused system speedups of anywhere from 10 to 25 percent, which is more than you gain by upgrading your CPU a speed grade or two. This was mostly due to two factors: reduced memory consumption and inefficiencies in the FAT/FAT32 file systems. It’s been known for about 20 years that performance starts to degrade dramatically once you have more than 100 files in a program or operating system’s subdirectory (Microsoft even said as much in the DOS 5.0 manual).

Since most people run XP and 2000 with NTFS, and since systems with half a gig of memory or more are becoming commonplace, I don’t know if removing IE will make as much difference in this day and age. It certainly makes sense from a security standpoint though–rip out IE, Media Player and Outlook Express and replace them with third-party apps, and you’ve just eliminated most of the programs whose security holes affect desktop PCs. It comes at the expense of compatibility though. Some programs utilize Outlook Express and IE components–although some programs will install the missing DLLs.

But for special-purpose PCs, or other PCs that aren’t running any software that uses those programs, or PCs that are strapped for disk space, it makes sense to give it a shot.