PlaySound and DelayLaunch Improvements

PlaySound is a utility for Windows that allows you to play a sound file from the command line or from a shortcut. I find it useful also as a timer for the startup process in Windows. So useful, in fact, that I recently updated the setup program to do exactly that.
DelayLaunch is a similar utility, but it doesn't play a sound. It waits for a specified period of time, and then opens a specified file, which can be a data file, a batch file, or an application. I use this to fire up certain applications when my PC starts up, and the delay is used to make sure that all the programs don't try to start running at the same time, when the hard drive is still busy.
I have mentioned DelayLaunch before, but it hasn't been available for download until now. Now it is bundled in the PlaySound setup file, since the applications are so similar.

PlaySound.exe Replaces Beep.exe | PlaySound Makes Progress | PlaySound Download Page

Fixing G31M-S Realtek Audio Problems on Windows XP

My Sahara "FRAGG" PC uses an ASRock G31M-S motherboard, which uses the Realtek ALC662 Audio Codec. The problem arises when you try to use Windows XP instead of Windows Vista, because the Windows XP driver doesn't seem to install properly.
Even after downloading the WinXP driver (WDM_R213.exe) from the Realtek site, it wouldn't install. Then I did a Google search for "realtek alc662 winxp" and found this HardForum post, which explains how to delete certain "HDAudio" registry keys. I tried it, rebooted as instructed, and was initially disappointed, not noticing that WinXP wasn't finished. After being asked to reboot again, it now works!

Sabotaging Department Store Computers is Not Nice

Before Christmas I visited my local Game department store to buy a computer and a USB external hard drive. Because the computer was not properly labelled, and for other reasons, I only bought the hard drive.
I returned on Monday to see if the price tags had been fixed, only to find that someone had been fiddling with the machine. What they did was not nice, and clearly the store attendants have no idea how to fix it.
It isn't nice to go to the System Restore utility and restore the system back to a previous point. That effectively wipes out a whole load of carefully installed programs! Not good. In the old DOS days hackers used to type "format c:". At one computer show we renamed format.exe and copied siren.exe to the drive and called if format.exe instead. That caught a few perpetrators by surprise!
Another trick was to press Ctrl-Break on any machines running automatic demos, because the demo programs were usually written in BASIC and it stopped the demo dead in its tracks.
Today, demo machines should have the security locked down tight, or at least have screen savers with passwords on them, known only to the store staff. Alternatively, use Acronis TrueImage to restore the drive to a suitable image. But of course the technical expertise of a mass market department store is severely lacking. I guess PCs just aren't consumer items yet, and stores like Game can only compete on the basis of price.

Free Your Voice

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Benchmarking and Software Decisions

I have been setting up FRAGG, my benchmarking PC, with software and data in preparation for "The 2009 Defrag Shootout". That's the ZAPS logo on my desktop. I added it because I was so impressed with their prices and service. So far I have managed to fill up my 149GB hard drive with a lot of software, and test data. But I am still mystified about which benchmark software, if any, is capable of measuring the effects of file fragmentation on the system in a meaningful way.
Do I have to do "The Great Benchmark Shootout" in order to do "The 2009 Defrag Shootout"? I hope not. But I have a nasty suspicion that I'm going to have to learn a lot about how these benchmarks work before I can get anything meaningful out of them.
One thing I have noticed about Vista Home Basic: the hard drive seems to have a life of its own, partly because the page file size keeps changing. I guess this tells me that 1GB RAM is not enough for many of these benchmarks. I have installed the very useful HardDriveIndicator utility to show whether the hard drive is busy, because the HDD light isn't easy to see from my desk.
Another change to my normal behaviour is that I have forced myself NOT to empty the Recycle Bin or clear any browsing caches. So far I have accumulated 8,515MB of deletable files. It is going to be interesting to see what the various defrag programs make of this. I have also created some compressed folders, and copied several large files, greater than 4GB, to the disk, some compressed, some not.
The data files are a collection of archived podcasts, audio books, Word and Excel documents, PDF files, scanned images, photographs and recordings, made by my wife and I over the last few years. There are recent files and old files, and sizes ranging across the board, in various folder structures.
At the moment the system is a mess, and it sometimes takes a several seconds for the "Programs and Features" list to open (see below). I'm trying to get it to look like a typical home user's PC, or a badly maintained office PC. Normally I use NOD32 as my anti-virus program, but this time I'm using the freeware version of AVG, because it is extremely common, and because the automatic scan of all the files takes over an hour. I figure this may become a useful benchmark all by itself.
For fun, I installed all the major browsers (IE7, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera), and all the Windows Live and Live Mesh stuff, except Messenger. Then I added Microsoft Office 2007, OpenOffice.org 3, Windows Media Player 11, RealPlayer 11, iTunes 8, Quicktime, etc. I also added some extra fonts, the SysInternals Tools, DirectX, and a bunch of other stuff. I used Firefox's DownThemAll add-on to download most of the software, and copied other files onto a shared folder while this was happening, to attempt to get further hard drive fragmentation.
I have purchased PCMark05 (WinXP, Vista) and PCMark Vantage (Vista only), since they claim to be able to benchmark the system's hard drive, and these utilities were used to trash the performance of several defrag programs by MaximumPC. These utilities claim to be able to determine the boot time of WinXP and Vista, although they don't actually reboot the PC. Benchmarks used by the 3DProfessor for their Diskeeper propaganda include SpecViewPerf 10 and SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP2.
Further research on MajorGeeks and Downloads.com have led me to numerous other utilities for benchmarking, including the PassMark Performance Test 6.1 and IOzone 3.311. Here is the completed software list:
Now I have to back up the disk image with Acronis TrueImage and then start all over again with WinXP.

Diskeeper's Dianetics Difficulties

It seems that Diskeeper is having legal hassles once again. According to the Wikipedia article, the German government kicked up a fuss in 2000 about the inclusion of Diskeeper's defrag program in Windows 2000, because of their concerns about the company's close connections with the Scientology organisation.

"Executive Software [now Diskeeper] CEO Craig Jensen is a member of the Church of Scientology and has claimed his employees are schooled in the principles of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard.
"Our staff is trained on these procedures," Jensen said in 1992. (Wired article)

Now a former CIO is suing Diskeeper because he claims he was fired for not participating in Scientology training. The legal papers are long, and Diskeeper has responded to them, so the case will be heard at some point. Scott Pilutik writes:

Alexander Godelman and Marc Le Shay, two Diskeeper employees (Godelman was CIO and Le Shay hired as the Automation Planning Officer) have filed a complaint in the Los Angeles Superior Court alleging that Scientology training was a condition of employment and that their refusal to participate led to their dismissal. According to the complaint, "[T]he working conditions and work environment at Diskeeper were inextricably intertwined with the Scientology religion such that a non-Scientologist cannot escape constant impositions of said religion."
When Godelman complained that these programs ran counter to his own religious belief (Judaism), former Diskeeper CEO and current Chairman Craig Jensen told Godelman that his attendance at the "training courses" was "not negotiable," adding that Godelman would become more intelligent and his personal life would "improve drastically." Jensen also warned Godelman to not "complain about the process" in emails, which Jensen feared would be "misconstrued" and/or "taken out of context." Le Shay was eventually fired after he refused to attend and participate in a course series entitled "Basic Study Manual" and after Godelman interceded on Le Shay's behalf, Godelman was also terminated.

The Daily Tech article states:

Diskeeper’s response seeks to black out Godelman and Le Shay’s request that the company “forever refrain from … requiring any employee, as a condition of employment, to study, adopt and/or apply the [Scientology-authored] ‘Hubbard Management Technology’ and/or the related ‘Hubbard Study Technology’ in the workplace.” The unusual request is justified by the company’s First Amendment rights, of which it argues that injunctions prohibiting religious practice in the workplace are unconstitutional.

Coincidentally, (or is it synchronistically?) I was doing research on Wikipedia about "vexatious litigation" (in connection with my own case), and discovered that one of the most notable vexatious litigants is the Church of Scientology:

"Plaintiffs (Scientologists) have abused the federal court system by using it, inter alia, to destroy their opponents, rather than to resolve an actual dispute over trademark law or any other legal matter. This constitutes 'extraordinary, malicious, wanton and oppressive conduct.' As such, this case qualifies as an 'exceptional case' and fees should be awarded pursuant to the Lanham Act ... It is abundantly clear that plaintiffs sought to harass the individual defendants and destroy the church defendants through massive over-litigation and other highly questionable litigation tactics. The Special Master has never seen a more glaring example of bad faith litigation than this."

I just hope that Diskeeper has the good business sense not to employ the same lawyers and tactics that Scientologists have used in the past. They are not getting much good publicity from this case, and some of the reactions on Twitter have been somewhat hostile, with people saying that they are uninstalling the software because of this case. Personally, I can think of better reasons for uninstalling the software, including the company's over-reliance on HYPE to sell its products, and the misleading impressions created by their marketing.
I plan to do a proper review of Diskeeper 2009, along with its competitors. This is partly inspired by a June article in MaximumPC called "The Disk Defrag Difference", in which they cite "negligible performance gains" for 3 defrag products, based on the PCMark Vantage benchmarks. I think their choice of benchmark determined their conclusions, so I plan on using several benchmarks and tests on my new test PC, FRAGG.

My New Sahara Defrag Testing Computer

Today I unpacked "FRAGG", my brand new Sahara computer. I bought it from the good people at ZAPS in Randburg, after doing a search on www.pricecheck.co.za. The model DT825125-P601 cost me R 3,726 including VAT, and comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and a load of other consumer-friendly software.
My first task has been to disable the scheduled defrag program in Vista, and uninstall some of the "crapware" like Google desktop search. I made a System Restore point before downloading and installing all 41 available system updates. The second task was to do the Windows Update, and get Windows Defender working. I also used SDelete to set all the free space to zero, so that the compression will work better using Acronis True Image, since I'm doing a sector-by-sector backup.
Once the backup is complete, I'm going to decide what "crapware" to keep, and what to get rid of. The Samsung HD161HJ hard drive is enormous: there is 149GB disk space, so it will be possible to install a lot of applications and stuff on this machine, to really put it through its paces.
I also want to create a Windows XP installation image, with exactly the same software on it, so whatever defrag programs I test can be tested on both Vista and WinXP.
I'm using a Mecer Bravo external USB 450GB hard drive for storing the backup images and test files. I bought it on "special" at Game in Cresta, where it was advertised at R799.99 but they rounded it up to R800 and then wondered why I complained. I hope it was a loss leader. They also lost out on the sale of a Mecer desktop computer for R3800, and of course Hewlett-Packard didn't get a look in because of their bad driver for the HP1020 laser printer. Who says customers don't forget?
So thanks to Sahara and ZAPS for their efficient service, and to Game for reducing the price of the external drive. It's not every day that you order a computer on Saturday before Christmas and collect it on Tuesday; many computer companies are closed already. ZAPS is a gamer's paradise, so I guess they know about service.
Now the fun begins: deciding what applications to install, and deciding how to really put all the defrag programs through their paces. The computer should be fast enough: a Pentium Dual CPU E2200 running at 2.20GHz with 1GB RAM and 149GB hard drive. I actually only wanted an 80GB drive, but they weren't available. Its going to be tough filling this drive with fragmented files.
Here is the list of pre-installed software. Click on the image to read the details.

Uncle Jay Sings the News for 2008

Uncle Jay Explains the News is a brilliant, funny, satirical look at the week's news in America. Enjoy! He also has a YouTube channel.

His other most popular video is this one: