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LangaList 2006-03-13 Please visit our sponsors and help keep the LangaList S.E. free!
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1) Safely Adding Or Replacing A Hard DriveHard drives fill up, and eventually die: It's a fact of PC
life. And while it's easy to add a new, empty drive to a PC as an adjunct to an
existing, in-use drive, that's sometimes not really what you want: What's better
is to add a new, fast, capacious drive, and move your data, intact, to it. This
way, you can pick up more or less where you left off, and you don't have to
rebuild or reinstall the operating system (unless you want to). If you keep the
old, high-mileage drive in the system at all, it's just as extra space--- not as
the main drive. In a previous column, "Another Hidden Gem: The Windows Disk
Management Tool"
http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=180207718 we looked at a little-known tool built into Windows for creating, formatting, or
deleting partitions and drives; changing drive letter assignments and paths; and
so on. But today, get that important second piece of the puzzle over at http://www.informationweek.com/1080/langa.htm. And then stay tuned! Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList S.E. Free! ) --- "Who ever said that you get what you pay for?
The Plus! edition is *more.* --------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 2) RAM Drive Question
In that article, we discussed using a RAM drive as a *great* place for transient data such as temp files; and as a host for certain kinds of very heavy disk-intensive operations. In the former case, it's a self-emptying cache. In the latter, the disk operations can take place at the speed of RAM, which works at nanosecond speeds (billionths of a second), six orders of magnitude faster than the millisecond speeds (thousandths of a second) of memory operations written to a hard drive. Six orders of magnitude is a *lot:* Very roughly, it's the difference between, say, the height of an average human and the height of Mount Everest! But as the article also says, their weakness is that they're ephemeral. Nothing in a RAM drive survives a reboot, or the disabling of the RAM drive. That data only "lives" in RAM, so when the RAM is emptied or powered down, the data goes away. That's why System Restore doesn't track what's going on in a RAM drive: It's all going to be deleted at shutdown anyway, so tracking interim deletions doesn't make a lot of sense. A RAM drive is a lousy place for critical data such as system files that might need to be restored. More generally, there may be problems related to drive letters that change when the RAM drive is present or not. You might try making the RAM drive the last drive on your system, say, the Z: drive. That way, when the drive comes and goes, it won't be affecting the drive letters of the rest of the (permanent) drives on your PC, which may be what was giving System Restore heartburn. (If, say, a drive that's monitored as "E:" turns into "D:" at reboot, SR may toss up its virtual hands and quit, not knowing what data goes where.) Also, the specific RAM drive you're using may matter: RAM drives can be coded very differently, and they can start up at different points in the boot process (or even on demand, after boot); and they can present themselves to the system in different ways. If one particular RAM drive doesn't work the way you want, the simple answer might be to try a different one. If nothing you change on the RAM drive side of the equation helps, then you might want to look at the System Restore side: System Restore is useful, but only in *very* limited ways. It also can actively work *against* you in many instances, such as in trying to remove some classes of malware. (See http://tinyurl.com/z4gr7 ) Perhaps the answer is simply to avoid System Restore and similar tools. (That's what I do.) Anyway, lots more on RAM drives: Click to email this item to a
friend 3) "Buffer Zone"
Thanks, Charlie. Buffer Zone is a form of "sandbox," or lightweight "virtual machine." It sets up a protected memory space into which you can download programs and play with them; the virtual "walls" of the sandbox keep the effects of the downloads constrained, so that (in theory) a malicious or poorly-coded download can't do harm to your PC or its files. Trustware's tools come in two flavors: "Single-application freeware that provides protection against hostile code embedded in files downloaded through any one application, including file sharing clients, browsers, email clients, messenger and other peer-to-peer software.... [And] full protection software that protects against files downloaded through any application whatsoever. For only $49.95, you'll protect your PC forever against viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, worms and all other forms of hostile code...." But there are a number of other vendors with very similar offerings, too; even others also called "BufferZone." ( http://tinyurl.com/zagee ) And please
also note that while there's a measure of convenience in a "run beside" tool
like this, you also can get free and low-cost Virtual PCs (also called "virtual
machines," or VMs) that do all that and
much more besides; giving you an entire, separate, safely isolated PC emulated entirely in software. That's what I use when I'm playing with something
potentially dangerous. Buffer Zone's concepts are completely sound, but there are many, many ways of implementing those ideas, besides Trustware's. <g> Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList Free! ) --- --------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 4) Update On EderRemember Eder, from Guatemala? He's one of the group of 13 kids sponsored on an ongoing basis by LangaList Plus! subscribers:
Since our last report, we've gotten a pile of additional information on Eder's progress. (He's doing fine, although one of his notes speaks of riding out last year's Hurricane Stan!) We have a new photo of Eder with his Mother and baby sibling; and a couple of drawings--- one bucolic and one that appears to be an insane clown. (Really! <g>) I've collected those updates into an "Eder" folder. To see how LangaList Plus! subscription funds have helped Eder since the last report, click here: Standard Edition Subscribers click here: If you're already a LangaList Plus! subscriber, thank you! You can feel
good about giving back a little to those less fortunate, and opening a
door to the future for a child in otherwise-desperate circumstances. New Subscriptions: Or, Give A Gift Subscription: Click to email this item to a
friend 5) "LDM Is Not Registered"
This site has a more detailed discussion, although it's definitely from the geeky end of the pool: http://tinyurl.com/oghmh If none of those fixes work, I'd take this failure as an early warning sign that something deep in your OS is hosed. I'd further suggest you restore a known-good image or full backup; or even consider a reinstall. Click to email this item to a
friend 6) Don't Make Me Beg! :-)If you think the LangaList is a worthwhile read, maybe a friend would
find it useful too Just use the following link to recommend the LangaList-
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may win one of three FREE ONE YEAR SUBSCRIPTIONS to the LangaList Plus!
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year.) Click to email this item to a
friend 7) New Partitions On A Fully-Allocated Drive
We touched on this briefly in a recent issue ( http://langa.com/newsletters/2006/2006-03-06.htm#1 ), but here's a bit more detail: If all the space on your hard drive is in use, then there is no unallocated area--- it's all been allocated and is in use. But you can still create a new partition: Back up your data. Defrag everything. Pick an existing partition that can afford to lose some space (shrink). Using the Disk Management tool, delete that partition; that partition's space will now show as unallocated space. Use the Disk Management tool to create two (or more) new partitions in the space where the one deleted partition used to be. Reboot, and then restore the deleted partition's backed-up data to wherever you want it to go. Note that more sophisticated tools like BootIt and Partition Magic let you resize a partition "on the fly," shrinking a "live" partition to create unallocated space that can be turned into a new partition. But either way, the idea is to use the space from one large existing partition to create two (or more) new partitions whose total size adds up to that of the original, deleted partition. Click to email this item to a
friend 8) More Reader Sites!Do you have a home page or website? (It doesn't matter what size.) Please
click over to http://langa.com/code.htm , and maybe you can join the
hundreds and hundreds of LangaList readers who have "Loaded the Code!"
(If you've already "Loaded The Code" and are wondering if your site will
appear here or on the Langa.Com web site, please see
http://langa.com/link.txt ) Manually Browse All Posted-to-Date Sites Starting At science show ddbb Group LLC Male health news Raajam RoboForm Blog Quitting cigarettes robert plumtree the other casualty of war ab technoblog Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList Free! ) --- --------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 9) Resource Leaks, Redux
"Resource Leaks" are a well-known problem in Win3/9x/Me, Mark; and the cause goes all the way back to the earliest days of that line of OSes. It's a fundamental architectural limit of the software, no matter how fast or capacious a PC itself is. You could put infinite RAM in a Win98 PC, and you'd still have Resource limits. (See: "Why Are There System Resource Limits, Anyway?" http://langa.com/newsletters/2000/2000-06-12.htm#3 ) BTW: Win2K and XP largely remove that constraint, and instead work to the limits of the hardware. In the older versions of Windows, a program may allocate System Resources to itself but then fail to give them back later for some reason (usually a programming error). As more and more Resources get eaten up this way, the total pool of available Resources seems to shrink over time, as if there were a leak! Eventually, you may reach a point when you try to run something that needs more Resources than are available, and the OS trips over itself. Crash! Because the leaks are hidden from the OS, there's no tool you can run inside the OS that will tell you what's leaking--- that's the whole problem. But you still can do a little sleuthing to track down and solve most leaks. In fact, we ran a whole series of articles on the topic:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17200581 And: I think you'll find the answer to just about any Resource-related issue in there, Mark. Click to email this item to a
friend 10, 11, 12, 13) Plus! Edition Only:Today's LangaList Plus! Edition contains about 40% more content including:
The Plus! edition is only pennies per issue, and
comes with a MONEY BACK Click to email this item to a
friend 14) Just For Grins
Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList S.E. Free! ) --- Crucial Memory --------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- (Give a gift subscription to
the LangaList Plus edition! The LangaList is published about 72 times a year, or about 6 times a month. See you next issue, 2006-03-16! Best, An easier-to read formatted HTML version is available in the "Current Issue" section of http://langa.com. (The HTML version of each issue normally is available by 9AM EST [UT-5] of the issue date.) All past LangaList issues are also available at the Langa.Com site. UNSUBSCRIBE (instant removal!):
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