Status Off-Line: Co-worker Panics

While I knew I had a strong online presence, I didn’t know how tightly bound I was to it. I accidentally went off-line, and the blackout raised concern for my personal well-being. Read more…

Those who know me have come to terms that I’m interfaced into the Internet almost in real time. eMail is always the best way to reach me. When I’m sitting in front of a terminal, whether for work or pleasure, numerous chat clients are active in the background. Even away from a machine, my phones and automated scripts keep some kind of virtual presence active of one form or another. As a result, friends, family, and co-workers can see my status, location, and reach me with impressively short response times.

Today something interesting happened.

Last night, I was working on a fairly complicated piece of code and had set up a rather complex environment that I didn’t want to have to reinitialize in the morning. Rather than shutting down the machine, I took all my instant messaging clients off-line, and this morning I didn’t start them up, relying on the built-in chat facilities of Google’s GMail.

However, as I was researching, I accidentally closed the GMail window unknowingly, and to the Internet, I went dark.

I had not realized how connected I had become, using chat and emails as a primary means for others to reach me. Well, that was until a co-worker came rushing in to see if I was alright with genuine concern.

He was fairly certain I was in the next room, his email didn’t get a near instant reply, and there was no way to reach me interactively. For anyone else, this would have been no big deal. However, my heart was warmed by this sincere response.

Yes, folks. If my Borg-like collections goes down, please check on me. I might have died or be in need of immediate medical attention.

Vista DeFrag Sucks

Vista’s Disk Defrag leave a lot to be desired. Here’s how to you can defrag your disk for sure.

Well before Vista was even real, I wrote about the problematic issues, bad practices for customers, and locked in formats that would make Apple Mac a highly attractive option. Pretty much most of the things people said couldn’t or wouldn’t happen have. It’s no wonder that the US Government would rather keep XP than move to Vista, that students on college campuses are reporting terrible problems interfacing with the IT departments and campus infrastructure, and that even Office formats are in dispute.

Even in our own offices, Vista has been one disaster after another, causing us all kinds of heart ache and productivity loss.

We thought the nightmare was over when we found a clever hack to make Vista think our networked HP LaserJet was a local printer (and we’d given up on being able to even use sound). However, we’ve been getting terrible disk performance on a laptop with Vista installed. Turns out the drive is badly fragmented.

Obviously, an XP user would simply run Disk Defrag and let that be that.

Not so with Vista. Sure, it has the program, but it provides no indicator of how much work needs to be done, and no visual interface at all about what’s being done. All you get is a stupid message that says the operation could take minutes to hours to complete.

So, we let Vista run overnight. And performance didn’t improve. At all.

You’ve got to see the conversation over on the Microsoft Developer Network about Vista’s defrager.

It seems that Microsoft expects you to leave your machine running all the time, and at some time like 2am on Wednesday, it will run the defrag automatically for you. Whether you want it to or not. And it will do the same crappy job.

If you’re running an enterprise service, you do not want to take an I/O channel hit “just because.” If you’re an IT administrator, you don’t want to screw with scheduling. If you’re a laptop user, you don’t want to leave your machine running.

Now I know I said I wasn’t going to give Microsoft support anymore. But I occasionally will share tips.

Grab the free version of Auslogic’s Disk Defrag. It will impress you. It’s clean, crisp, visual, astoundingly fast, and most importantly: it solved our fragmentation problems.