jcarle

Open RegEdit, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders then make sure that the Desktop value points to the correct location.

For those of you who may not have noticed, WUD moved up to 2.24 Final this week. Nothing has changed since the last beta build, I simply felt that WUD 2.23 Build 842 was stable enough to warrant it becoming a Final release build, and to avoid confusion, I stepped it up to 2.24. Thank you everyone for the support and I'm glad as many of you enjoy using WUD. Also, I'd like to extend a very big thank you to Rj66 as well as the other members who help keep the ULs up to date.

RAID is not necessarily always appropriate for home usage sure but I'm sorry, the technology does not "suck". Most people don't even know that it stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, which in itself, is the great thing about RAID. It allows you to have real-time backups using commonly available technology at a low cost. RAID 0 was designed for performance and isn't a true RAID. I have 2 x 250GB in RAID 1 on my computer which contains all my data. Ghosting a 250GB hard drive is simply not realistic. Any other approach other then RAID is simply too costly or inadequate to use to backup 250GB of data. 250GB represents 54 DVD-Rs, which is also unrealistic. Tape Backup is too expensive. The ONLY solution to have that much data on your computer and be able to effectively backup that data is through the use of RAID. And at the prices of today's hard drives and the availability of RAID on most motherboards today, as well as having extremely affordable RAID controllers available as PCI cards, what reason is there to NOT use RAID?

It's a multi-billion dollar industry, hundreds of millions of servers rely on it everyday, but it sucks. Good one.

I've updated the integrator, it now modifies TXTSETUP.SIF appropriately so OEM preinstall is no longer needed. As for compression, at the moment I'm out of luck, doesn't seem to work without adversly affecting themes.

Older updates do not affect newer updates. The updates are smart enough to compare the version of the file and if the update is older then the current version, it just leaves it alone.

Let's see... 2GB file with 150 fragments. No NCQ, 150 read commands. NCQ, 150 read commands. Where the difference? Sure, the NCQ may finish faster because of the ordering of it's fetch commands but that's analogous to comparing a 5,400rpm to a 7,200rpm hard drive. It simply does not address the problem, you're approaching the situation using a band-aid fix. Compare the number of writes to hard drive back then to hard drives now, compare the amount of data stored, compare the quantity of changes, compare the quantity of files. It is self explanatory that exponentially speaking, defragmentation is more important now then it was then. You can compare this to a village vs a city. In the village, sure if the one bridge breaks, it affects the village in much more drastic fashion then if one bridge breaks in a city. However, repaving a broken up road in the village for higher efficiency, smoother driving and faster traffic flow has a much smaller effect then doing the same thing in a city. And you know, no one's claimed that diskeeper or perfect disk were miracle products. Microsoft cannot do everything perfect and they can't be number one in all aspects of every piece of software that exists in the world. If they were, people wouldn't use Winamp, they'd use Windows Media Player. They wouldn't use Vegas, they'd use Windows Movie Maker. They wouldn't use Photoshop, they'd use Microsoft Picture It!. And for the same reason, they wouldn't use a 3rd party defragmenter, they'd use the Windows Defragmenter. Microsoft's not perfect and some companies make a better product then window's own built-in applications. There is no way to reproduce the exact conditions every single time and as such, no way to put the blame on diskeeper. Who's to say that your drive heads were not in different places? Or that another system process was executing a task? Or that the memory manager had decided to move memory to the page file? Again, no one quoted miracle workings. And your reasoning for the pricing is flawed. Why do some people use Photoshop when Paint Shop Pro is cheaper? Because photoshop does it better and for some home users, that's what they want. I saw your tests. They're flawed in every possible sense. You proved absolutely nothing. All you proved was that there was almost no changes in all three scenarios. You did not replicate fragmentation in all three situations and you didn't even take any measure as to the level of fragmentation before you even attempted to prove the differences. Your data is useless, the tests a waste and the results a flop. No one's tried to forcefeed anyone. Everyone's shared they experiences with each product and we've move to analyzing the differences between the two leading products, Diskeeper and Perfect Disk to figure out which one is more efficient and more effective. As the representative of diskeeper so elloquently put it. If you don't like it, don't buy it. And finally, you keep quoting $100 for diskeeper. Yet, diskeeper 2007 home is listed at $29.95, $10 less then your quoted price for Perfect Disk. I see how you like to keep the comparisons fair.

Perhaps the age of the router could have to do with it... ? I don't see a dial-up router being that young... ?

Well, those files haven't been an issue. I managed to get them to install via TXTSETUP.SIF. There's a certain file that when compressed prevents the themes from loading, I've been trying to identify which one. Out of 164 WMP11 files, it's hard to nail which one.

I almost do have everything working, yet, for some reason, as you mentioned, compressing the WMP11 files causes the themes to stop working... any idea why?

Actually I'm behind two routers, the first is a wired router with my dial_up modem attached directly to it, the second is a wirless router attached directly to the first for my wireless internet connections. I was on one of the wireless machines today when I downloaded the Updates that worked. Curious, what difference would a router make? Thanks man, CarolinaCrawdad Some routers have been known to cause packet swapping leading to data corruption. Basically, if enough small packets are sent in a small enough amount of time some of them can end up becoming out of order, leading to the final product being corrupt. This is usually seen with P2P, Torrents or FTP. It could happen with WUD since WUD uses fairly small data packets.

Advertising has nothing to do with it considering this thread is about user experiences with their own favorite defragmentation utilities. I see no marketing tools being used anywhere in this thread. Reduces but does not eliminate. Native Command Queueing has nothing to do with disk fragmentation, does nothing to help prevent it and does nothing to reduce the effects of disk fragmentation. The evidence has already been brought fourth, a simple count of the number of files on a typical modern computer is more then enough evidence in itself to justify defragmentation. Considering that 8GB hard drive were landmarks less then 6 or 7 years ago, 320+GB hard drives filled to the brim with thousands of files are in much greater need of defragmentation then a mear couple hundred files that used to fill computers. Well, it's unknown to them surely because it has nothing to do with disk defragmentation. The prefetcher has no corolation to disk fragmentation. And in fact, I quote from microsoft's own text regarding the prefetcher: Do take special note of the phrase "Even though the disk layout optimization does insure some files will be defragmented, it is not a complete substitute for fully defragmenting the disk. Users should still defragment their drives regularly.". InvisiTasking does exactly what it says it does. It makes Diskeeper seem invisible in a perceptual sense. It retains it's work for period where the entire system is idle, and stops immediately whenever the system is no longer idle. Hence, giving the perception of not running. Placebo effect? I believe you are seriously misinformed.

Repost: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=86727

With the sheer amount of people who have downloaded WUD and no one else has ever reported this problem, I can only grasp that this must be caused by an exterior issue. Are you behind a router?

LOL. The entire world has an RTM key now. Are you really that suprised? :insert satire here:

Instead of: If Not (myStream Is Nothing) Then ' GetFullPath('myfile.txt') Dim fileName As String = "myfile.txt" ////Also I don't want to get path of predefined files Dim fullPath As String fullPath = Path.GetFullPath(fileName) 'checking! file is in correct format MsgBox(fullPath) 'close mystream myStream.Close() End If Use: If Not (myStream Is Nothing) Then Dim fileName As String = openFileDialog1.Filename myStream.Close() End If

UL has been updated. Btw, please remember to update your header with the wud schema, as follows: <updatelist product="Windows XP" platform="x86" language="PTB" lastupdate="2006-11-15" xmlns="http://wud.jcarle.com" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://wud.jcarle.com http://wud.jcarle.com/wud.xsd"> Thanks.

For those of you who don't know, here's a little tip: Copy your office 2007 cd to a folder on your computer. Then, run the Setup with the /admin switch. Enter your serial number and check accept license agreement under the "License and user interface" section. Save the file as default.msp in the Updates folder in your office 2007 folder. Burn the office 2007 folder back to CD. And voila, you have a office 2007 cd with the serial number automatically entered and the license agreement already accepted automatically.

What version of WUD are you running? What UL are you using?

Unfortunately, the DX10 generation of video cards will obliterate any need for a dedicated physics cards with the new universally programmable shader engines.

A plug and play monitor will NOT cause a delay in windows start-up UNLESS it was the first time it was plugged in.

DOS anyone?

You could try slipstreaming the driver into your windows CD using nLite.

Generally speaking, if you're able to pick the driver using F6, you're able to view your drive to start the installation in textmode setup and during the windows install it says that files cannot be found (which relate to your raid driver) then your raid floppy has been misconstructed.

Sounds like either your memory or your motherboard could be damaged.