A sysadmin’s take on bloatware

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

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.

04/01/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Mailbag:

HD; Impressions; Apple RAM; DOS Utility

I spent some time Friday at my alma mater, giving a presentation at their second annual Technology Fair. I talked about the publishing industry, and how technology gives me something to write about, and allows me to write about it comfortably. Without e-mail, I never could write for Computer Shopper UK.

A lot of my fomer teachers are retired now, or nearing retirement. My journalism instructor is giving up that class next year so someone younger can come in–she retires in three years. My CS instructor is retiring in two or three years. My geology instructor told me about changes to the science program–they’re a lot more serious about teaching science now than they were in my day. Had it been that way when I was there, I’d have complained a lot, but they probably would have made an engineer out of me. Scary thought.

My former lit/writing/speech instructor asked how my books were doing and what I was up to. I told him I was learning the Queen’s English. He laughed and said it was about time. I complained about how the British use plurals and commas and acronyms, and he alternated between grinning, nodding, and rolling his eyes. At least I’m not the only one who thinks it’s strange–and it’s really good to know that the one who used to spill barrels of red ink on my papers struggles sometimes with the British way of writing things. He told me to let him know when I write something other than a computer book–he said even a Dummies book is probably too much. I told him the atrocious royalty rates a Dummies book pays. He couldn’t believe it. Andy Rathbone and Dan Gookin made money off their Dummies books, certainly. But at 25 cents a copy, most authors won’t make much.

The vice-principal came up, admired my published work, and said, “That’s so cool! I can point at this and say, ‘I know that guy! I used to yell at him!'”

That he certainly did. I did learn one really useful thing from him though. I was a sophomore, about to get fired from my first job (I thought). He saw I was down and asked me one day what was going on. I told him. “You know what you can learn from this?” he asked. I shook my head. “Imagine, if you’re a single mother of three with no education and no marketable skills, so all you can do are these Mickey Mouse jobs. You’re completely and totally at the mercy of those people. Doesn’t that make you want to stay in school and get out of there?” I don’t know if that tactic would work with anyone else, but it worked on me.

Going back made me feel old though too. One guy came up to me. “You know my brother.” He said his name. Uh, yeah, his brother and I were best friends. The last time I saw this guy, he was probably in the fifth grade, if that. Now he’s getting ready to go off to Mizzou and major in business. Remarkable. I thought I spotted another former classmate’s kid sister, but she didn’t say anything to me.

Afterward, one of the students showed me a Web application he’s putting together in PHP. It’s nowhere near finished, but when it’s done, it’ll be better than the commercial app the shcool is using now. I felt a long way from hacking out programs on my C-128, which was what I was doing when I was his age.

I’m jealous. In some regards, George W. Bush has the world’s coolest job.

Uh oh. I know they had this idea before I printed it, but the day after I suggested someone needed to copycat Apple’s cube design and put a VIA C3 chip in it, I read this.

Another source. Regular readers of the irreverenet British IT publication The Register will undoubtedly recognize the name Mike Magee. Well, The Great Magee has had some health problems of late, and then along the way it seems he’s split with the Register and gone off on his own, and at least one of his former staffmates seem to have followed him. You can find his stuff at http://theinquirer.net .

Monitors. I ordered a 19″ NEC FE950 monitor last weekend, the black model, since the place I ordered from was out of stock on the white. I got a good price on it too–$386 before shipping. I remember when a 14″ RGB monitor used to cost about that much. Sure, that was 15 years ago, but hey, I remember it. And that’s before calculating inflation. Very nice price. By way of comparison, my dear departed NEC Multisync II monitor cost about $910 new after adjusting for inflation. How far we’ve progressed.

Well, sorta. Back in those days, you ordered something over the phone, and it showed up about a month later. These days, when you order from someone reputable, stuff shows up in a week or less. And if you need it overnight, you can definitely get it overnight. But not this time. Not from this place. I order on Saturday. They finish processing my order on Thursday and ship it, but they haven’t notified me of the tracking number yet. I didn’t order from my usual sources–this place was considerably cheaper–and I know, you get what you pay for. But these guys had a pretty good ranking on reseller ratings, and a Computer Shopper reader’s choice award and a Better Business Bureau membership to boot. How bad can they be?

Well, by 1986 standards they’re still doing OK. But it’s a darn good thing I wasn’t in a hurry.

And I just realized, I could have used that logic to justify a 15-inch flat panel. Oh well.

Mailbag:

HD; Impressions; Apple RAM; DOS Utility

03/31/2001

Dave Farquhar General ,

I got the call late last night. My great aunt in Cleveland died yesterday.

It’s kind of become tradition, on my mom’s side of the family at least, for me to write the tribute when a relative dies. Somehow I’m good at expressing those sentiments, and, well, I am a writer. But I can’t write Aunt Lilian’s tribute, and it has nothing to do with Aunt Lilian being on my dad’s side of the family.

I hardly knew her.

When my dad moved to Kansas City in the early 1970s, he never really looked back. He adopted Kansas City as his hometown, and after he and my mom married, he adopted them as his family. His father probably saw me fewer than a dozen times. His mother only saw me six or seven times more than that. I’ve seen one of Dad’s cousins twice, and his other cousin once. I met his aunt and uncle once, at their 40th or 50th wedding anniversary, in 1989. I only remember it being a big number in a day and age when few people make it to their tenth.

Once I got out of college and on my own, I always said I’d make it back to Cleveland. Some Thanksgiving, or sometime when I had some vacation time due, I’d fly out or take a road trip. I never did. It was always easier to just go to Kansas City. It’s closer, and economies of scale were on my side. One year I even had an airline ticket. I ended up not using it.

Then Uncle Bob died. I didn’t even make it to the funeral. I knew Aunt Lilian wouldn’t have a whole lot of time left. When you’ve been married that long, once your partner dies, you generally follow pretty soon.

Last Thanksgiving, I thought about going. I didn’t. I was thinking maybe this year would be the year. But I know good and well I probably wouldn’t have.

This has been all about me. That’s terrible. So what do I know about Aunt Lilian?

She was my dad’s favorite aunt. I think she may have been his only aunt, but that’s OK. She was worthy of the title. Her brother was my dad’s father and my grandfather. You can say a lot of things about Dr. Ralph–he was a brilliant man, a wise man, a great doctor, a small-time tycoon. But he wasn’t a nice man. Aunt Lilian was much more pleasant than her brother.

Dad didn’t talk about his family much. But he’d talk about Uncle Bob and Aunt Lilian and their sons, Bobby and Sterling. I think that says a lot.

Aunt Lilian was known for her chocolate chip cookies. That was the first thing Dad said about her. She didn’t know what the fuss was about. The recipe was right there on the back of the package of the brand of chocolate chips she bought and had been buying for most of the century. So anyone else could follow the same recipe, but somehow it wasn’t ever the same. I remember Dad and his cousins, Bob and Sterling, discussing why at one point. It was funny hearing a doctor, a physical therapist, and an electrical engineer talking about why a cookie recipe couldn’t be duplicated. These three great minds couldn’t figure it out. Aunt Lilian did her best to ignore them, and that was probably for the best.

And sadly, that’s the only story I can tell about her. She must have been pushing 100 when she died; I know Uncle Bob was 95 or 96 when he passed on. Her brother died more than 21 years ago, and he was in his 70s. All that time. I’m 26. In my 26 years, I managed to spend one weekend with her.

Don’t make the same mistake I made. A life is a terrible thing to waste.

03/30/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

A big letdown. A lot of people (myself included) miss the days when you could build an SMP box on the cheap by getting an Abit BP6 motherboard and a pair of low-end Celerons. I read on Ace’s Hardware this week that Via’s C3 processor is SMP-capable. The C3 is a 733 MHz chip, derived from the Centaur WinChip 3 design, that plugs into Socket 370 and costs $54 in quantities of 1,000. Since a lot of places sell CPUs at or slightly below that cost and make their money on shipping, you can expect to buy it for under $60. The drawback with the C3 is weak floating point performance. For applications use that doesn’t make much difference, so for people like me who just want to multitask a bunch of productivity apps wicked fast, it would be nice.

But I was skeptical. Earlier Cyrix and Centaur CPUs (VIA now owns both design houses) didn’t support Intel’s APIC protocol for SMP due to patent problems. So Cyrix and AMD invented their own protocol, called OpenPIC, and prototype SMP chipsets existed but were never commercially released, probably due to lack of demand. AMD attempted to solve this problem by licensing the Alpha processor bus (and therefore its SMP architecture) for the Athlon/Duron and getting into the chipset business.

It was a Herculean labor for VIA to get the rights to use Intel’s P6 bus. I’d be shocked if they managed to wrestle SMP out of Intel as well. But if these rumors were true, it would have ushered in a whole new era of inexpensive SMP, albeit with a slightly limited audience due to the C3’s poor (but better than the AMD K6-2) gaming performance.

But VIA’s site made no mention of SMP. None of the reviews of the C3 or its predecessors mentioned SMP. Finally, I found confirmation of the truth on www.viahardware.com . The C3, in spite of photos of dual configurations originating at Cebit, doesn’t support APIC and therefore won’t do SMP. Bummer.

Want another letdown? OK. The C3 doesn’t do out-of-order execution like every other modern CPU (including even the Cyrix 6×86) does. That’s part of the reason why the C3 struggles to keep up with an equivalently-clocked Celeron, even if the Celeron is running on a 66 MHz FSB while the C3 runs on a 133 MHz FSB. For OOO, you’ll have to wait for the next revision of the processor, due later this year.

The lone drawing point, besides price, for the C3 is its cool operation and low power consumption. It can operate with just a heatsink, no fan. You could team it up with a fanless 135W power supply, a 4400 RPM hard drive (or a very quiet 5400 rpm drive), and an integrated motherboard to have a silent PC. You can’t do that with anything from AMD or Intel. So for quiet PCs, the C3 has an audience.

Hey, someone could take that chip, put it on a microATX board, and put it in a tiny squarish Lucite case with the CD-ROM drive up top, so you put the CDs in like toast in a toaster, and sell the computer on size, quietness, and looks alone. Oh, wait a minute. Someone already tried something like that.

You’ll also notice VIA is scrapping the Cyrix brand name, which is probably a good move. Cyrix chips weren’t bad; they weren’t ideal for 3D gaming but for everything else they were a fine chip. Cheap and fast. Unfortunately they were usually paired up with very cheap and very low-quality hardware (particularly cheap power supplies) and when the systems had problems, everyone blamed Cyrix. But my friends and I, pairing Cyrix CPUs up with Abit, Asus, and AOpen motherboards and Diamond video cards and Creative or Ensoniq sound cards, never had any problems whatsoever with the CPUs.

Discussion groups. I’ve often longed for the days of the old-style BBS. I never ran a BBS myself–in the golden age of BBSing, I was just a teenager, and a good BBS required a US Robotics dual standard modem, a 386, and a gigabyte hard drive, all of which could easily set you back $2,000.

The Internet has so many advantages to those BBSs. When you dialed in, it was very easy to spend an hour online. In the meantime, no one else could use the BBS. With 24 hours in a day, even with an average call length of 15 minutes, fewer than 100 people would get in, and that makes it hard to facilitate meaningful discussion. It happened, but unless the BBS was part of a network, the communities stayed small. The Internet doesn’t have those disadvantages. The line’s never busy (if you’ve got a decent ISP at least), so the community can be much larger.

The discussion groups facility on this site have always been very under-utilized. I think a grand total of four people have posted messages here. That’s largely my fault; I never configured the discussion area, nor did I ever get rid of that stupid skull and replace it with something intuitive (like, say, the word “Discuss…”). I started looking into configuring it, and lo and behold, it’s possible to create a nice discussion board with Manilla. The interface is a little different from UBBS, which seems to be what most of the popular discussion groups of today use, but it’s not bad.

Like most other online bulletin boards, you have to be a member to log in and post. There is no charge to be a member. Let me emphasize that. There is no charge to be a member! Understood? Excellent. There’s also no validation process, none of that other stuff. Manilla does maintain a database of members that I can look at. I’ve looked at it once. I just don’t have time to go snooping around there. I’m too busy to invade your privacy.

Non-members can read messages. Messages posted are indexed by this site’s search engine. It’s really nice.

To become a member, click Join Now to the left. It will ask for an e-mail address. That address is used for two things. If you forget your password, your password hint is mailed to that address. And optionally, you can get your daily (or more, if this board gets popular) dose of the Silicon Underground e-mailed to you. Probably most people will turn that option off. If you’re concerned about spam, or concerned about privacy, feed it a bogus e-mail address. Tell my site you’re billg@microsoft.com or something. I really don’t care. Honest. (A lot of Web robots seem to have problems navigating Manilla sites, so spam harvesters may find this site more trouble than it’s worth, but I can’t make any guarantees.) And if you want to use a handle, that’s fine too.

Discussion groups get their own calendar. When you click on March 29, 2001 in the calendar, you get that day’s messages, plus the rest from the previous week. If you just want to see just that day’s topics instead, click the link that says Chronological View, and it’ll switch. Sorry, I don’t know how to make that a preference that gets saved for you.

The advantages of a discussion group are many. First, this becomes more of a community and less something that’s all about me. When you want to have your say, you can just log in and respond and it’s instantly there. When you e-mail me, I won’t see it until I get home, and then I may or may not post it, depending on a number of factors. When you post, if someone else sees it first, they can respond. So if you’re having a problem and need a quick response, someone else may see it and respond before I get to it.

You’re still free to e-mail me of course, but I had this resource here and it’s really a shame I haven’t been using it. I’ll continue to respond to mail and have it posted, for those who prefer a more moderated discussion (a small few, if page reads are any indication).

You can get to the discussion groups at least two ways. You can click on the Discussion Groups link to the left. Or you can click the Discuss link at the bottom of a message.

Here’s hoping this will become a valuable resource.

03/29/2001

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Where’ve you been all my life? Yes, I say that to every program I find that I like. But this time I think I might really mean it.

My biggest beef with disk optimizers is that I never found one with an intelligent directory sort routine. You see, the most important files in the directory should appear first for best performance on a FAT or FAT32 volume. Norton Utilities doesn’t offer a foolproof method to get the most important files up top every time. Neither does Fix-It. Nuts & Bolts (now McAfee Utilities) had the best method, but seeing as talking about McAfee Utilities is a violation of the license agreement, I can’t tell you if McAfee Utilities still has the feature, if it’s improved, if it’s worth having, or anything of the sort. Frankly I don’t want to know, unless the answer is no. I refuse adamantly to do business with any company that thinks it’s above the First Amendment. Even Microsoft isn’t that despicable. Apple’s not that despicable. Hell, Apple and Microsoft put together, with ultimate crybaby baseball players Gary Sheffield and Frank Thomas thrown in for good measure, aren’t HALF that despicable.

So who cares if McAfee Utilities is any good? You don’t want it anywhere near your computer no matter what it does. (And I suspect it’ll do a royal job of breaking it, based on my experience with Nuts & Bolts, which was a versatile suite but dangerous if used improperly. And every other McAfee product I looked at before they instituted that license agreement sucked. I mean really sucked. And it’s easier to try to stop freedom of speech than it is to improve your products.)

So… You’ve got the powerful Norton Utilities, with lots of selectable options but a couple of options that should be there that aren’t. And you’ve got Fix-It, which is a lot easier to use but not very configurable at all, so it’s better than Defrag and Scandisk but far from perfect. What to do? Buy one of them. Then download lfnsort .

LFNsort allows you to sort directories intelligently. Using multiple criteria. Fabulous. Download it, then run it (preferably you should exit all running programs first). Here’s the syntax I use:

lfnsort -a-s c: /s

This sorts your directory entries by access date, or, if no access date is available, by size (the next-best indication of importance). In the root directory I think I’d want to go with a manual sort (on my machine, the c:windows and c:program files entries get buried deeper than I’d like) but otherwise LFNsort seems to work really well.

So if you want the fastest computer possible, get a utilities suite, then download this, test it, and if you like the results, register it.

03/28/2001

Dave Farquhar General ,

Mailbag:

CS Article; Programs; DOS Utilities; Ads

Ugh. I caught up on mail, had a long conversation with Steve DeLassus (a longtime friend and tech reviewer for Optimizing Windows), and otherwise didn’t get much done last night.

Resumes 101. The one thing I did do last night was look at two different people’s resumes. I’m not sure when the last time was someone asked me for resume advice. But I do see a resume every once in a while as part of my job. Sometimes my boss will flip a resume my direction and ask what I think. The really scary thing is, spelling everything correctly and using proper punctuation impresses me. I don’t see that very often. I was taught that kind of thing was expected. I guess not anymore.

Fonts 101. I guess the other thing that comes to mind is that if you want to make a resume stand out, don’t run it in Arial or Times New Roman. If you’ve got a reasonably conservative-looking font that isn’t bundled with Windows, that’d be an excellent choice. Bookman and Garamond are classy and easy to read, and they’ve been used for centuries. Book Antiqua, which comes with MS Office, is a good-looking font whose origins I’m not familiar with. One of my former editors got me hooked on News Gothic as a substitute for Arial, but that’s not a terribly common font. Century Gothic and Futura are good-looking sans-serif fonts, and even though they were intended by their designers to be ultra-modern fonts, there are ancient Roman engravings that look very much like Futura.

The general rule is that a font with serifs, like Times, gives you a traditional look while a sans-serif font, like Arial, gives you a more modern look. The problem is that Times and Arial (or Helvetica–Arial is just a Helvetica knock-off), while excellent designs, are so commonly used that they’re cliche. You can make yourself stand out subtly by using a different font. And the older the font, the better. People have been designing fonts for centuries; what worked then will still work now.

Display fonts like Comic Sans (and most people’s computers have plenty of wild fonts that make Comic Sans look conservative) have no place in resumes. They’re best reserved for greeting cards or other informal projects.

Usage of cutting-edge fonts and display fonts is hard to teach. Either you’ve got an eye for their use or you don’t. A good teacher can help you develop your eye a bit, but since design wasn’t my specialty, I can’t really explain proper usage of them other than to say experiment. And read lots of British magazines because they’re generally bolder than most American magazines, surprisingly.

I once had a font called Bloody that was exactly what it sounds like. When I was editing a student paper at Mizzou, one week we were all feeling a bit feisty in the editorial office, so we did a cover story of a blood drive, ran a big magazine-style picture of someone giving blood on the cover, and, taking a swipe at our rival paper, we overlaid the text “If it bleeds, it leads,” in Bloody of course. The main designer and I had a running joke that I wouldn’t let her use that font. So when one of the other editors had the idea, I of course jumped at it and told her. And I also let her think it was my idea.

Needless to say, that cover didn’t end up going in any of our portfolios. But it was fun, and let us get a laugh at our rivals’ expense, which is always a good thing.

Mailbag:

CS Article; Programs; DOS Utilities; Ads

A free memory tester and a Linux tip

Dave Farquhar Linux ,

I lost my notes for today somehow, and I’ve been home a grand total of 14 hours the past 48 hours (I think), so you’ll have to excuse this quickie.

Free memory tester. I found this over the weekend:

www.memtest86.com

It’s a memory test disk. Self-booting, about 74K in memory, builds from DOS, Windows, or Linux (and possibly others too). I use and recommend RAM Stress Test, by Ultra-X Inc. ( www.uxd.com ), but this seems nearly as good and it’s free. If you’ve got frequent bluescreens, download this and try it on your PC. A lot of problems are caused by bad memory, and the power-on memory test usually won’t find it. Neither will most DOS-based memory utilities.

MemTest is still no substitute for buying brand-name memory, though I’d never let commodity memory sit on the same table with my hardware without testing it first. About 1 in 1,000 brand-name sticks are bad, as opposed to about 1 in 12 commodity sticks, in my extensive experience. One of the first things I do when faced with an unstable system is test the memory overnight, just in case.

Linux (and Unix) tip of the day. If you vaguely remember a command but can’t completely recall it, type the part you remember, then hit tab. A list of possibilities will appear. Hopefully the command you’re looking for is among them.

And if any of the possibilities sound interesting, type man command. The online documentation will come up and explain usage.

Don’t let anyone fool you. You never master this OS. You just learn how to find what you need to get a job done quickly. And hopefully you develop a long memory.

Outta here. And if you’ve mailed me over the last couple of days, my apologies. I’ll get back to you tonight after work.

03/26/2001

Dave Farquhar General

The battle against the blinky Web continues. Regular readers of this site will know there’s virtually nothing I hate more than blinky Internet content. You know, stuff that moves for no good reason. Our natural instinct is to pay the most attention to the things that move the most, so if we’re reading static text and there’s some annoying Flash ad running, we’ll pay more attention to the blinky Flash ad.

CNet’s huge Flash ads are especially obnoxious. At the very least I wanted to drop the quality level down to speed up their loadtimes. Load times are no problem at home, but at work where the T1 is absolutely bursting because of hundreds of people listening to Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura all afternoon, with the result being a connection that’s slower than 56K dialup, I don’t want stupid Flash ads eating up all my bandwidth and CPU time.

So I went hunting through the Registry, and one of the few references to Flash I found was in regards to c:windowssystemmacromedflashswflash.ocx. Aha! An ActiveX control! I know how a quick and painless way to defeat those… So I went to Tools, Internet Options, Security, Restricted Sites, and added news.com and cnet.com to the list. Then I went to www.news.com , loaded a few pages, looked at where the Flash ads should be, and… I got the first frame. That’s it. Outstanding.

So if a page starts annoying you with too much Flash, try adding it to the Restricted Sites zone.

The next place I went was to www.allmusic.com , one of my favorite hangouts. I was looking for information about Dot Allison, former lead singer of Scottish one-hit-wonder One Dove. (Spending more time with teenagers lately has been making me nostalgic for the music I listened to when I was 18.) I found information about her, and I also found some Flash ads. Gack. So I added allmusic.com to the list of restricted sites, hit reload, and was greeted with another Flash ad. What on earth is going on? So I went to View, Source, looked at the page’s source code, and found the ads are located at ad.doubleclick.net. Figures. Those creeps should be in the restricted sties zone by default. I trust them less than the average American trusts the IRS. So I added them, hit reload, and was greeted with a GIF ad in its place. GIF ads I can live with, especially because I turned off animation.

Now that you’re using it, you might wish to click the Custom Level button and make a couple of changes to the Restricted Sites zone.

First, there’s an option that says Script ActiveX controls marked safe for scripting. It’s enabled by default. Repeat after me: “There is no such thing as an ActiveX control safe for scripting.” Again! “There is no such thing as an ActiveX control safe for scripting.” Good. Now click that Disable button.

Next, there’s the Downloads option. I’m torn on this one. Automatic downloads are annoying. Fortunately, they’re rare. With File download disabled (the default), you can’t download a file by clicking on it. So I generally enable this option.

The only downside is that the same options that knock out Flash also knock out RealAudio and QuickTime content. That doesn’t bother me, but it may bother you.

03/25/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

A dose of my own medicine. I was plugging away on my Celeron-400 yesterday and it was feeling sluggish. I mean it was bad. At times, barely usable. I started wondering what I’d pay for a Duron-700 these days, though I’d really rather put off any more hardware upgrades seeing as I just got around to ordering a new 19″ NEC FE950 monitor.

After I rebooted and Windows started booting really slowly (Linux never gives me this kind of trouble), a number of questions started running through my head. Is the hard drive going out? Are my backups current? Hmm. It froze, so I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart it, picked Windows off my boot menu (against my better judgment, because Linux, even a really old distribution, is miles better than anything Microsoft has ever made, especially if you invest a little time learning its command line), and watched it boot in something resembling its normal time. Probably the system’s memory had just become totally blitzed and needed a harder reboot than my usual pick-the-restart-option-while-holding-shift procedure.

So I ran Norton Disk Doctor, found Outlook Express had blitzed the dates on a number of its files–typical Microsoft–and let it fix it. I looked in my system tray and noticed a couple of parasite programs (but I won’t mention any names, Real Networks) had reinstated their startup status. So I ran MSConfig and killed those. Then it occurred to me that I probably hadn’t run Speed Disk in a long time. I launched Speed Disk and found a huge mess. Before letting it proceed, I checked the options and noticed, adding insult to injury, that when I last ran it I hadn’t used the optimal settings either (the settings to use are in Optimizing Windows). Before letting it run, I did a little more cleanup (some manual directory optimization, also described in Optimizing Windows, or in the DOS 5 manual if you happen to still have it). Then I had Speed Disk rescan the drive and let it rip.

And after about 25 minutes, I had a fast computer again. That’s a whole lot nicer than spending $200 on system upgrades. Besides, if I’d paired that drive up with that motherboard without a totally clean reformat and reinstall, it wouldn’t have performed all that much better anyway. Better to make the computer work smarter instead of harder.

Micron’s departure from the PC business. I’m not sure why I didn’t comment on this yesterday. I really like Micron PCs, at least their Client Pro line. The Millenia line is basically consumer-grade, no worse than anyone else’s consumer-grade stuff and in some cases better, but still consumer-grade nonetheless. Although with the tighter and tighter integration of motherboards that probably makes less difference now than it did a couple of years ago.

I found the quality of Micron Client Pros to be much higher than Gateway, and frankly, usually better than Dell. Their service is first-rate. Now granted, I’m approaching this from a corporate perspective–my employer owns about 700 of the things, so it gets better support than a home user might. Generally they use the same Intel motherboards Dell and Gateway use. They’ve always tended to come up with combinations of video and sound cards that work better than Gateway’s combinations do. (Gateways can develop weird problems with their video and sound drivers that I’ve never seen on other PCs.) They were less stingy with the quality of power supplies they used. I didn’t always care for their hard drive choices, but then again, most PC makers just buy hard drives from whoever can deliver the quantities they need at the best price at any given moment. Unless you custom-build, you’re not likely to get cream-of-the-crop drives.

I’m afraid Micron’s departure from direct sales will mean the same thing Dell’s departure from retail did. When Dell left retail, there was a noticeable decline in the quality of PCs sold at retail. AST’s quality decreased, Acer’s quality decreased, Compaq and IBM’s quality didn’t change much but they didn’t seem nearly as inclined to keep their prices competitive anymore.

Since everyone’s using basically the same Intel motherboards with a different BIOS these days, I imagine the impact on quality won’t be tremendous (though Gateway’s love affair with 145W power supplies will probably continue indefinitely), but it will probably have an impact on price. Micron always undercut Dell, and frequently undercut Gateway. Dell probably won’t be so eager to cut prices with Micron gone.

Micron makes it sound like they have a buyer lined up for the division and it’ll continue to operate. I hope that’s the case, but I’m not too optimistic. Gateway’s having problems, Dell’s not happy with its recent results, and I can’t imagine a group of investors new to the industry will do better than Michael Dell and Ted Waitt.

Micron’s PC business shouldn’t be confused with their memory business. Micron the memory chip company is the parent company. Crucial, the manufacturer of memory modules, is a subsidiary. Micron Electronics Inc., a.k.a. micronpc.com, is another subsidiary. Micron Electronics’ two big businesses were PC building and Web hosting. So the Micron name won’t disappear off this mortal coil.

Secrets about hard drive recovery and wiping

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Recovery. I found this link while messing around: 200 ways to revive a dead hard drive. I’ve used some of these methods myself in the past. I imagine I’ll get to use more of them in the future.

Wiping. I needed a program yesterday to securely wipe out a hard drive. I was just going to low-level format it, but Western Digital’s drive suite, whatever it’s called, refused to do anything to the drive because it was returning an error code of 0207. The drive still worked, but according to my Web search, an 0207 means imminent failure. Hey, that’s why I needed to low-level the drive–we got a replacement for it and had to send this one back, but the drive was in an executive’s computer and probably had sensitive data on it.

Incidentally, if you’re getting an 0207 and you’re here because you want to know what to do about it, back up your data immediately and get it replaced under warranty. No, it’s not practical to fix it. If it’s out of warranty, I’m sorry. Sadly, it happens.

But I digress. How do you wipe the drive to ensure no one’s reading your sensitive data? I found some DOS freeware to do it at my usual sources, but one of them wouldn’t run under Win9x’s DOS, and the drive is too big to be recognized under 6.22. Another one wouldn’t handle drives bigger than 2 gig. Another one seemed to work, but seemed awfully fast.

Disk wiping isn’t a terribly complicated thing, so maybe I should just write a program myself to do it. It’s been forever since I programmed, and I do kind of enjoy doing that… once a year. Or every couple of years.