Disk defragmentation in Windows 2000, XP, and, uh, NT4

Dave Farquhar Software ,

The disk defragmenter that Microsoft includes with Windows 2000 and XP really stinks up the place.

I’ve been playing with an alternative.It’s free. It’s called DIRMS, an acronym for Do It Right Microsoft.

It’s text mode. That means XP and NT owners can schedule defragments without paying for Diskeeper, which is good, because Diskeeper is barely better than MS’s defrag because they were written by the same company.

DIRMS uses the same built-in API so it ought to be safe but it uses a different algorithm. Whereas Executive’s programs won’t even try to defrag a file if it can’t do it completely, DIRMS just does the best it can. And unlike Diskeeper/Defrag, it moves files to the front of the disk, just like Win98’s Defrag, which increases performance further.

I’m not ready to put it on any system I care about yet, but I think it has a lot of potential. Rather than running Defrag four times to clean up a disk, I can run DIRMS followed by Defrag to mop up the operation and get a disk that’s almost 100% defragmented.

In fact the two programs seem to do better in tandem than either could ever do on their own. At any rate, it’s free, and worth checking out.

Things to look for in a flatbed scanner

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

David Huff asked today about scanners, and I started to reply as a comment but decided it was too long-winded and ought to be a separate discussion.

So, how does one cut through the hype and get a really good scanner for not a lot of money?The short answer to David’s question is that I like the Canon Canoscan LIDE series. Both my mom and my girlfriend have the LIDE 80 and have been happy with it.

For the long answer to the question, let’s step through several things that I look for when choosing a scanner.

Manufacurer. There are lots of makers of cheap and cheerful scanners out there. Chances are there are some cheap and nasty ones too. Today’s cheap and nasty scanners will be a lot better than 1995’s crop of cheap and nasties, since the PC parallel port was a huge source of incompatibilities, but I want a scanner from a company with some experience making scanners and with good chances of still being around in five years.

Driver support. Much is made of this issue. But past track record isn’t much of an indicator of future results. HP and Umax infamously began charging for updated drivers, for example. But at least I could get a driver from HP or Umax, even if it costs money. My Acer scanner is forever tethered to a Windows 98 box because I can’t get a working driver for Windows 2000 or XP for it.

Umax used to have a stellar track record for providing scanner drivers, which was why I started buying and recommending them several years ago. I don’t know what their current policy is but I know some people have sworn them off because they have charged for drivers, at least for some scanners, in the recent past. But you can get newer drivers, in many cases, from Umax UK.

But that’s why I like to stick with someone like Canon, HP, Umax, or Epson, who’ve been making scanners for several years and are likely to continue doing so. Even if I have to pay for a driver, I’d rather pay for one than not be able to get one. Keep in mind that you’ll be running Windows XP until at least 2006 anyway.

Optical resolution. Resolution is overrated, like megahertz. It’s what everyone plays up. It’s also a source of confusion. Sometimes manufacturers play up interpolated resolution or somesuch nonsense. This is where the scanner fakes it. It’s nice to have, but there are better ways to artificially increase resolution if that’s what you’re seeking.

Look for hardware or optical resolution. Ignore interpolated resolution.

Back to that overrated comment… Few of us need more than 1200dpi optical resolution. For one thing, not so long ago, nobody had enough memory to hold a decent-sized 4800dpi image in memory in order to edit it. If you’re scanning images to put them on the Web, remember, computer screen resolution ranges from 75 to 96dpi, generally speaking. Anything more than that just slows download speed. For printing, higher resolution is useful, but there’s little to no point in your scanner having a higher resolution than your printer.

I just did a search, and while I was able to find inkjet printers with a horizontal resolution of up to 5760dpi, I found exactly one printer with a vertical resolution of 2400dpi. The overwhelming majority were 1200dpi max, going up and down.

Your inkjet printer and your glossy magazines use different measurements for printing, but a true 1200dpi is going to be comparable to National Geographic quality. If your photography isn’t up to National Geographic standards, megaresolution isn’t going to help it.

Bit depth. If resolution is the most overrated factor, bit depth is the most underrated. Generally speaking, the better the bit depth, the more accurate the color recognition. While even 24 bits gives more colors than the human eye can distinguish, there is a noticeable difference in accuracy between scans done on a 24-bit scanner and scans from a 36-bit scanner.

If you have to choose between resolution and bit depth, go for bit depth every time. Even if you intend to print magazines out of your spare bedroom or basement. After all, if the color on the photograph is off, nobody is going to pay any attention to how clear it is.

Size and weight. Some flatbed scanners are smaller and lighter than a laptop. If they can draw their power from the USB port, so much the better. You might not plan to take one with you, but it’s funny how unplanned things seem to happen.

Lionel bankruptcy

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Lionel bankruptcy

It was all over the news when it happened. Lionel, the train maker, filed Chapter 11 on Nov 16, 2004. But a lot of the news stories got some critical details wrong. It’s not the first time a Lionel bankruptcy confused people.

Lionel has been bankrupt before, but the company has changed ownership numerous times so it’s not the same legal entity that went bankrupt in the 1930s and 1960s. There have also been numerous rumors about bankruptcy after 2004. These are usually dealers trying to create artificial demand to clear inventory.

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Graphics software for Windows revisited

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

My girlfriend was asking me about graphics software today. She’d been trying to use Paint Shop Pro as an inexpensive alternative to Adobe Illustrator and, predictably, was disappointed.

The GPL alternatives to Illustrator still lack at least one crucial feature (bitmap pattern fills) but I remembered reading about Serif DrawPlus.Serif is a manufacturer of cheap desktop publishing/graphics software. By cheap, I mean they aim for the $99 price point for their flagship product, then they give away older versions, and, at least sometimes, when you download the older version they offer you a somewhat less-old version for $10 or $20.

So I downloaded DrawPlus 5 and played around with it. It’s a bit basic, but it has all of the fundamentals. After about five minutes of playing around I was able to do some nice effects with text–for example, I was able to add a border to the edge of the letters, add fills, and even add a transparency effect. Cool.

Standard polygon and circle tools are there too, and you can combine multiple shapes into more complex shapes. If you can picture something as boxes and other simple shapes, you can draw a scaleable image of it with this program.

Why yes, I do think I’ll be using this to draw buildings and such for my Lionel layout. How’d you ever guess?

It’s not as powerful as Illustrator, but for a lot of people it’ll do what they need. Someone unfamiliar with vector graphics might be more comfortable with a simpler program like this, then switching to the higher-end software after running up against the simpler program’s limitations. (For years journalism schools taught desktop publishing by teaching students Pagemaker first, then QuarkXPress, since the latter is much less intimidating once one is familiar with the basic concepts.)

Check it out at freeserifsoftware.com. Serif also offers a raster image editor (a la Photoshop) and a desktop publisher under the same plan.

Creative ways to destroy computer data

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

THe BBC has a feature story on data destruction. Of course I can’t let it go by without comment.

The sidebar provides the tastiest tidbits.One item in the sidebar makes fun of a user who freezed his hard drive. Don’t laugh. It actually is possible to perform amateur data recovery using a fridge and/or a hair dryer. But this is only a last resort, and I must warn you, the freezer trick can prevent a service like Ontrack from getting your data back in extreme cases, and in most cases will make it more expensive.

The idea behind freezing the drive is that if something inside is stuck, the expansion and contraction of the freezing can loosen it. The downside is that if it’s going to work, the drive’s life expectancy is reduced to approximately 30 minutes. So you need to have a computer ready to receive the frozen drive and immediately start copying files from the drive after retrieving it from the fridge, because if this is going to work, you won’t have a lot of time.

This trick only works for certain types of mechanical failures and, I might add, should only be attempted if you are extremely desperate.

A much less desperate method is to try heating the drive up to operating temperature with a household hair dryer. This can remedy a larger number of mechanical problems and presents very little, if any, potential for harm.

One thing I must say about data recovery: You really need to leave it to the experts. At the first sign of trouble, power the system down and call a computer professional. If said computer professional does not have any data recovery experience, the drive needs to be handed off immediately to one who does. As soon as that professional has exhausted his/her knowledge, a determination has to be made whether to bring in a high-priced specialist such as Ontrack.

A year or so ago, one of my clients had a hard drive crash. A number of people messed with it before passing it on to their desktop support person. He almost immediately contacted my old boss, who has done some data recovery. He in turn contacted me. It took us about five minutes to determine it was beyond anything either of us could do. Someone heard about a data recovery place about an hour away, so some executive decided we should send the drive to them because they’d get the data back to us faster. Well, they didn’t even have an answer in the promised timeframe, let alone the data. Finally the drive came back and we sent it to Ontrack. They quickly came back with sad news. Their chances of recovering the data, had they received the drive quickly, would have been very high, but so many people had gotten their hands in it that the drive was completely beyond salvage.

So, if you really need the data back, pay the $600-$900 and wait the week it’s going to take to have Ontrack or Drive Savers do the job. If you don’t have $600-$900, try things like the fridge but be aware it’s your last chance.

As far as driving off with your laptop sitting on your car, one of my former coworkers actually got away with that. He left his laptop case sitting on his trunk and drove off and actually traveled several miles before it flew off. Someone saw it happen, retrieved the laptop, and found his business card in the case. He called the following Monday, and my former coworker opened it up. The CD in the CD-ROM drive was shattered and there was gravel in the system’s various orifices. Remarkably, the screen was undamaged. He shook out the gravel and other debris, powered the laptop on, and it worked.

And his boss did immediately approve the purchase of another laptop right away, no.

I’m sure you want to know the make and model of this laptop. It was a Micron Trek 2. Current-production laptops from MPC (the successor of Micron PC) aren’t nearly that durable.

Both he and I have moved on since then, taking new jobs, so he no longer works with me and he took that laptop with him when he left the company. But it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it still works.

Pay off a mortgage in five years

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , , , , ,

Thanks to some circumstances where somebody knew somebody who knew somebody, I found myself tonight at a seminar where John Cummuta was speaking. He’s the guy who you may have heard on the radio hawking a system called Transforming Your Debt into Wealth. From him, I learned how to pay off a mortgage in five years.

Hopefully I won’t get into too much trouble by presenting the simplified version of his plan.The secret of credit is that creditors will not extend you more credit than you can conceivably pay off in a fairly short length of time (like, less than a decade). The secret is to make that work for you, rather than for them.

His system is simple enough that you can plug it into an Excel worksheet. Mine has three equations in it. Here’s what you do.

Take 10 percent of your monthly income and use it to pay down debt. Pick the debt you can pay off the fastest. Forget interest. Pay the minimum monthly payment on all of your debts except the one you can pay the fastest. Add that 10 percent of your monthly income to the debt you’re working on. So if it’s a credit card balance with a minimum payment of $22, and you make $2,000 a month, you pay $222 towards that credit card.

Then, when that credit card balance is paid off, you take the debt you can pay off second, add its minimum monthly payment to that $222. Keep cascading the payments until you’ve paid everything off.

Using that formula, I can have my car paid off in a year and two months, and my house paid off in five years and two months after that.

The more money you can plow into paying off debts, the faster it goes.

He said the interest rates are pretty much irrelevant because you are paying the debts off so quickly. So it doesn’t make sense to refinance or consolidate debts or anything like that because you won’t recoup the closing costs.

The formula is a bit crude because it doesn’t take into effect the minimum monthly payments you are making, nor the accumulated interest on the on which debts you’re making minimal progress. But he said those numbers pretty much end up in a wash. Following this crude formula, you’ll be within a couple of months or two.

Also, he suggested putting off investments until you have your debt eliminated. The exception is 401(K) or similar plans where employers match your contributions. The logic is that the compound interest on your debts will almost always be larger than the compound interest your investments can earn.

However, he did not say you should empty your bank accounts to pay debt. If you have enough money in the bank to be able to take half of it and pay your smallest debt, go ahead and do it, but otherwise leave your existing bank accounts and investments alone, suspend contributing to them (or do the minimum), and then, when you have the debt paid off, you can afford to contribute to them very aggressively. Remember, at the end of the plan, you no longer have those monthly house and car payments to make.

Someone who makes $40,000 a year and works 40 years will make $1.6 million over the course of that career. The idea is to pay as little of it as possible in interest, so that money is working for you instead of your creditors.

It seems to me that debt ought to be like college. It ought to be something we do for a few years in order to get something we need, but after a few years, it’s over. And if we have to make a few sacrifices along the way, just like we did for college, we ought to do them.

Update: It worked. Thanks to finding better paying jobs and applying that, we were able to pay the mortgage off ahead of schedule.

Troubleshooting a Compaq Proliant 1600

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , ,

I still work on a lot of Compaq Proliant 1600s. In their day, they were a very versatile server, packing lots of drive bays and open expansion slots into a 5U package. They were also very reliable.

Now that they are five years old or even older, they are less so. But I’ve collected some good suggestions from Compaq and HP technicians about working on them.The biggest problem with the 1600 is that so many parts are socketed. Over time, socketed components tend to work themselves loose. So, when a 1600 crashes a lot but will pass its built-in diagnostics with flying colors, the best thing to do is to completely disassemble it and put it back together.

If it seems to be having memory problems, don’t just reseat the processor board and/or replace the memory. I had one 1600 exhibit memory failures that would not go away until I replaced the PCI board, of all things. Why? Beats me. The HP technician was as stumped as I was. So reseat that board too.

It never hurts to clean the connectors when you have the system apart. Get some zero-residue contact cleaner from a hardware or auto parts store. Be sure it’s zero-residue. A lot of contact cleaners contain oil, which isn’t going to help intermittent electrical connections at all. If in doubt, skip the contact cleaner entirely and clean the contacts with a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol instead. Need I also mention you need to stay grounded at all times while doing these procedures?

When replacing the PCI and CPU modules, you have to use a lot of force. Don’t rely on the plastic releases on the back to put them in. Whenever I’ve seen a veteran Compaq technician reinstall one of these modules, he’s slammed the module into the back computer with so much force that it moved the system. If you don’t think you’re going to break it, you probably aren’t doing it hard enough.

Newer Proliant servers have many fewer socketed components, so their long-term reliability prospects are higher. They also usually have LEDs that indicate failed components, making diagnostics virtually irrelevant and system repair much more straightforward. But when replacement isn’t an option just yet, it’s nice to know there are things to do to return a 1600 to life.

Wake up your Backup Exec remote agent

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking

Usually when a Backup Exec remote agent refuses to respond and stopping and starting the service does no good (verifiable by creating a new job and attempting to connect to the remote server, only to find the drive selection boxes greyed out), the solution is to reboot.

There’s a last-resort method more appropriate for production servers.Telnet to the remote server on port 10000. As in:

telnet 192.168.1.2 10000

When I did it, I got a bunch of garbage characters. I closed the window, then tried to connect again. This time, the agent was awake.

I have no idea if Veritas sanctions this or not, but it worked for me, and I like the answer a lot better than rebooting.

R. Collins refuses to concede the election

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire

R. Collins Farquhar IV, aristocrat, scientist, and next president of the United States

To the voting populace.

Greeting:

Be it known that this past election was so close that I refuse to concede it.John Kerry’s rapid concession of the election proves that he is not an aristocrat. Unlike him, I did not marry my aristocracy. George W. Bush’s rapid proclamation of victory proves, well, nothing, because the votes are not all in. Unlike him, I did not marry my education.

There was one candidate who was qualified for the job of most powerful man in the world, and time will tell that that candidate was R. Collins Farquhar IV.

Unlike that pretender Kerry, I will not concede election until every vote is counted and either my manservants, lawyers, or myself have had a chance to personally tampe… er, examine, each and every ballot.

If anything, the events of the past week prove that the time is right for R. Collins as president. The political unrest in France and Palestine proves it.

I will not rest until we have conquered France and turned it into a training ground for our other wars, and I will not sit and watch as the jobs for our peasants get outsourced to foreign peasants. Our rabble need jobs just as much as the foreign rabble. If the foreign rabble want our jobs, they can get it the old fashioned way: Get an aristocrat to sponsor them and pay their way over here in exchange for a pre-agreed amount of indentured servitude. And when that time has expired, they can apply for a peasant’s job, or remain a manservant.

Or become a soldier. We will always have job openings there.