UltimateDefrag Announces Freeware and Special Offer

After announcing the new UltimateDefrag 2008 product, Disktrix also announced a freeware version 1.72 (with no technical support), as well as special offer: $10 saving until the end of June on the purchase of the new version 2008, which normally costs $39.95.
I will be publishing benchmarks and a review of version 2008 sometime soon, and the older version was reviewed a year ago, with a "thumbs up", especially for performance junkies. Disktrix have also announced improved boot time support, to be released shortly.

Eskom Unplugged by Noseweek

I love reading Noseweek ("news you're not supposed to know") because they are one of the few publications in South Africa that keeps us honest.
I bought their May issue only last week, and now courtesy of their web site you can (for a limited time) read their fascinating account of how Eskom has mismanaged themselves and put the entire economy at risk. Here is the summarised version of how to run a mega-corporation into the ground in seven easy steps:
Step 1: Look after number one
This involves lucrative "special contracts" with key employees and high flyers.
Step 2: Put your hand in the cookie jar
Sell off assets but keep the best ones for select employees who can then make a fortune by selling them at a profit later
Step 3: Take in a lodger
Rent space to SARS at a special low rate for 15 years, so you end up having to build extra space for your own needs and spend R50 million doing so.
Step 4: Be too clever to take advice
Set up a special relationship with the Reserve Bank and then ignore it.
Step 5: Do some truly weird stuff
Pay for a lavish junket to Iraq in an attempt to get business from Saddam Hussein.
Step 6: When the shit hits the fan, lie!
When power blackouts occur, give out little or no real information on how bad the grid is maintained and run. If in doubt, give out the wrong information.
Step 7: Give jobs to the boys
Give out contracts to ANC front companies so the party can make a cool R3billion profit from the deal. Never mind the contracts are late and way behind schedule, or that the pricing and product was originally not good enough.
You can subscribe to Noseweek online at www.noseweek.co.za

Little Brother: are you paranoid enough yet?

I bought and downloaded the audio (MP3) version of Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother", but you can download the text version for free. I found it fascinating, scary, entertaining and challenging. The book is nearly 12 hours long, and I found it difficult to stop listening. You can check out the Amazon reviews as well.
In the story scenario the school kids use a fictitious Linux distro called "Paranoid Linux" that tries to keep its presence on the net invisible, and uses Public Key crypto for sending secure emails. It's a pity that it would require a severe crackdown on civil liberties to get people to use this kind of email.
One thing you can do right now to secure the privacy of at least some of your data is to install and use TrueCrypt so that if (when) your computer gets stolen, your private files remain private.
What's the big deal about privacy? If your home has ever been broken into, remember how you felt to find that someone had invaded your space. Now apply the same feeling to your personal documents. Do you really want some criminal syndicate getting hold of your credit card statements, or finding out who your business associates are? Do you want your investment broker getting instructions to sell your bonds and send the proceeds to your "new" cheque account that doesn't belong to you?

Kauai Floo Fighter

Yesterday I popped into the Kauai coffee bar at my local gym, and tried their "floo fighter" hot beverage. It consists of Twinings Peppermint tea, fresh ginger, fresh lemon juice, Cayenne pepper and honey.
Quite a mixture, and strong too! It's definitely one of those anti-flu remedies that feels like its working, without tasting particularly vile. In fact, it was just the thing for a cold winter's day after a tiring swim. (It's nearly winter in the southern hemisphere, particularly on the highveld.)

UltimateDefrag 2008 Debate: I

Regular readers of this blog already know that I had an unfortunate spat with DiskTrix over their marketing emails. Since it was a genuine mistake I have removed the article. In the meantime I have had an interesting conversation with Robert Ferraro about UltimateDefrag, file placement, benchmarks and the like. I will include some extracts here, and hope to add some more soon. He writes:

"I just read your quick spiel on Defraggler before. You said that you’ve never come across a program that could analyze any faster than Defraggler.
"I am sorry but this is highly untrue….
"On a 500 Gb drive with 348 Gb and 405,001 files this is the result of my analyze:
Defraggler: 160 seconds
UltimateDefrag: 37 seconds
"We analyze a drive 432% faster than defraggler or in other words in 23% of the time – less than a quarter. When you minimize our display – we actually analyze that same drive in 33 seconds.
"I can assure you that with 3 years of perfecting our analysis routine – it’s as overhead free as you could get by all coding standards.
"Please note also that with UltimateDefrag – Fragmented Files Only (FFO) …. We can get you from program start to completely defragged much faster than Defraggler since we save all that time on analysis and you don’t need to select files manually. Of course one feature of UltimateDefrag is that we can defrag individual files or just all files in a folder for that matter. So while we have all of our advanced features – the most simple of all defrags – Fragmented Files Only – is there too.
"One “secret” about our Fragmented Files Only routine is that for this most basic of all defrag routines, our algorithm functions in the favor of promoting consolidation of free space. In FFO mode we defrag files in LCN order – meaning it finds the first fragmented file towards the outer tracks and puts it in the nearest available free space. If the space is now cleared then the next fragmented file, if it fits will be placed in an earlier space – so it’s always, where it can, tending towards the outer tracks and filling free space from outer to inner.
"There’s not much we haven’t thought about with our product – any true purist will see that our product does much much more than initially meets the eye and for defragging is as close to the holy grail for defragging as you can get. Our list of to-be-included features stands at around 86 more features to be added at this point."

In fairness to Defraggler, it is the quickest utility currently installed on my laptop, and I only have two 30GB partitions. I have noticed that it is slower on other drives. However my experience of UltimateDefrag 1.52 in June last year was not good: it took over 14 minutes to analyse my drive, because there was a large (>4GB) compressed file on the drive. I wrote to Robert about this, and was told to try various options, but he was unwilling to admit that this might be a problem. I plan to do some tests to see if the problem has been fixed.

Update: I obtained a license for UltimateDefrag 2008, and tried a quick test (see comment #1) on my Iomega 500GB external USB drive: I timed the "analyse" times (I ran each one twice, and used the second result) for the defrag programs currently installed on my laptop:

Program	"A"	"B"
Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) for XP SP3	20.03	17.65
Defraggler 1.01.068 beta	23.17	36.50
UltimateDefrag 2008 ver 2.0.0.48	26.53	176.56
PerfectDisk 2008 build 52	44.81	34.68
JKDefrag 3.34	47.31	47.28
PC Magazine Defrag-A-File 1.1	53.56	49.09

UltraDefrag gave an error, and PuranDefrag doesn't have a separate "Analyse" option.
Column "A" refers to the analyse times (in seconds) of the drive with a several large files, including a 9GB data file. Column "B" refer to the analyse times with the same files, but an additional copy of the 9GB data file, this time stored as a compressed file, containing 123235 fragments.
This confirms the behaviour mentioned in the UD1.52 review, but not nearly as bad as before: 3 minutes compared to 14 minutes.

Update 2: I noticed during the tests above that some programs took longer to load than others, so I did some timing (see comment 1).

Program	load time (sec)
Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) for XP SP3	<3
Defraggler 1.01.068 beta	<3
UltimateDefrag 2008 ver 2.0.0.48	10
PerfectDisk 2008 build 52	9
JKDefrag 3.34	N/A
PC Magazine Defrag-A-File 1.1	<3
Paint Shop Pro 8.10	8
Microsoft Word 2002	3
Microsoft Access 97	5
Microsoft Excel 2002	4
Microsoft Visual Basic Professional 6	9

These numbers are not particularly scientific, since it isn't easy to measure with any degree of accuracy, but it does confirm my feeling that UD2008 and PD2008 are larger, slower apps than the other smaller ones listed. Bigger is not always better.

Update 3: Rob (see comments) asked me to do the fragmented file test on my laptop drive. I couldn't manage the 9GB file because of space limitations, but did manage to create a 6GB file that was compressed, with 476,192 fragments. My timing results (not scientific) are shown here:

Program Analyse Times	mins:secs
PerfectDisk 2008 build 52	1:01
JkDefrag 3.34	2:00
Defraggler 1.01.073 BETA	7:53
UltimateDefrag 2008 ver 2.0.0.48	21:44

This is not a typo: UD2008 took nearly 22 minutes to analyse the drive. It takes 20 seconds to load the program on my machine, partly because it takes time to draw a picture of the drive.
As soon as I deleted the 6GB file, UD2008's load time dropped to 8 seconds, and the analyse speed dropped to 18 seconds.

Government Dithers Over Racist Attacks

Political correctness has now gone too far: it's all very well talking about Xenophobia and anarchy, but why is the government so scared of calling the rioting what it is: racism!?
These people are being killed because they are "foreigners", and therefore we call it Xenophobia, only because it is politically incorrect to call it racism. Normally Mr Mbeki is quick to use the race card, but I suppose because there are no whites involved he can't see it for what it is. What an idiot! People are suffering and dying while the leadership dithers and keeps silent.
If they do nothing for much longer then we can refer to the process as "ethnic cleansing", another traditional SA sport.
Update: On Wednesday 21rd May, nearly 2 weeks after the attacks started (they haven't finised) the President called in the troops, before leaving the country.

XP Service Pack 3 can free up disk space

I have been watching the size of my Windows folder growing over time, and Service Pack 3 is a perfect opportunity to sort the matter out. Yesterday I managed to free up nearly 1GB of disk space by installing SP3.
First of all, open the c:\windows folder, and then look for the $hf_mig$ folder, and delete the hundred or so folders it contains. Do the same with the ie7updates and SoftwareDistribution\Download folders. If there are folders beginning with names like $NT* then delete those as well.
Next, download and install SP3. If you only need to update a single computer, the Microsoft Update site is the best place to get it. There is also an ISO file (544MB) that you can turn into an install CD.
The installation process creates a $NtServicePackUninstall$ folder in the Windows directory, and also subfolders in the ServicePackFiles folder. If you're feeling brave, you can delete the $NtServicePackUninstall$ folder once you've tested that everything is working.
Once the service pack is installed, change the ServicePackFiles folder into a compressed folder. This will reduce its size from 564MB to 371MB, but 2399 of those files will be fragmented in 61641 fragments, so a defrag is then in order.
In any case, emptying the recycle bin will free up around 788MB, maybe more. On one laptop that had just been installed with XPSP1 and was in the process of downloading a gazillion updates, I freed up nearly 2GB of space in this way. Since the new (patched) system files are now distributed all over the drive, a good defrag program will help gather those files and position them where they are needed.
Normally the files stored in the $hf_mig$ folder are placed there by the Microsoft Update service, and they are necessary in case you need to "roll back" a hotfix, or if one hotfix needs another one to work correctly. It can be a real pain of those files are missing, which is why they are allowed to accumulate. But a full service pack reinstalls all those files, after testing that they all work together correctly, so the "safety" copies are no longer needed.
As a general rule I use CCleaner to keep my system from becoming too gunked up, but the file deletions described here are not covered by utilities such as this. In any case, you'll need to make a complete system backup before installing SP3, for your own sanity and peace of mind. What do you mean you never make backups???
Update: If you're running an AMD processor, read this first.

Another Look at Defraggler

Defraggler is a free product from the good guys who make CCleaner, which I use often. It has been in a beta program for months, and the improvements being made are impressive.
It's simple, but fast. I can't think of a single program that is able to analyse a hard drive quicker. And often the file defrag time is faster than I have come to expect. I always assumed that contig would remain my simple defrag utility of choice, but I am finding Defraggler indispensable.
I use an external USB hard drive for making backups, and once I have used SyncToy to make the backups, I do a quick check with Defraggler to make sure that nothing is fragmented. (See screen shot). A quick selection of the fragmented files, and a click on the "Defrag"button and the files are tidied up in no time.
Defraggler is not a full-featured defrag tool yet. It makes no attempt to optimise file placement, and relies on the availability of a block of free space big enough for the entire file being defragged. But when speed is required, or a quick check to see if there are a lot of fragmented files on a drive, this has become my first port-of-call.
It does not attempt to compete with fully-featured products like JkDefrag or PerfectDisk, especially with regard to file placement, but if you're used to using the built-in Windows defrag utility, then give Defraggler a try at www.defraggler.com. It's a small 445kb download, with no nagware or annoying ads: just a quick and simple way to tidy up your hard drive quickly.