After running JkDefrag for several weeks,
I must say that my system seems a bit faster.
Give JkDefrag a spin on your computer. You’ll
be glad you did! See the Learning Path for
information about where to get JkDefrag’s
latest standalone executables (no installation
required!).
PageDefrag
While I’m on the topic of defragmentation
and performance, there’s one file in your
computer that’s probably taking up a lot of
space, is critical in terms of system performance,
and can’t be defragmented by standard
defragmentation utilities. That would
be your pagefile.
The computer I’m using to
write this article, for example,
has a pagefile that consumes
about 1.5GB worth of space.
As Windows swaps certain
programs in and out of main
memory, the page file is the
storage container that receives
the program data. I can’t even
begin to comprehend the complexities
of keeping a file such
as this optimized for maximum
performance, but fortunately I
don’t have to. Mark Russinovich
at SysInternals has done it for
me.
As you might know, SysInternals
was the home of some
of the best free Windows utilities
anywhere on the Internet. Recently, Mark joined Microsoft,
and therefore Microsoft
has inherited all these great
tools. PageDefrag is just one
of the many SysInternals
utilities you can find at the
company’s Web site. Figure
3 shows PageDefrag’s main
screen.
When I first ran PageDefrag,
the application presented
a list of files that it
would defragment (i.e., the
pagefile, the hibernation file,
event logs, and the registry
hives), and I was surprised
to see that my 1.5GB pagefile had more
than 2,000 fragments across my hard disk!
I instructed PageDefrag to defragment my
pagefile during the next Windows bootup
(the only time the pagefile isn’t in use, and
therefore the only time it can be defragmented)
and let it start its work. You can have
PageDefrag run once on the next reboot or
every time your system boots.
DriveImageXML
Have you ever had to restore a full desktop
system from a failed hard disk, with only a
recent Windows backup available to you? If
so, you understand the hassle of such a process.
First, you have to get a new hard disk,
place it in the PC that needs to be rebuilt, and
install a clean copy of Windows (assuming
you remember where you put that system’s
installation media). That process can take over an hour for most systems. Then, finally,
you can restore your full backup to the system
and get back up and running. Wouldn’t life
be easier if you had an image of your system
that you could just zap to a new hard disk,
and get back up in less time?
Disk-imaging tools such as Norton Ghost
offer a solution to this problem: Instead of
doing a system-level backup, such tools
create an image of the disk itself. Then, if
you experience a failure, you simply need
to write that image to a new disk, and you’re
ready to go—without
the intermediate step of
reinstalling a base copy
of Windows.
Runtime Software
provides a free utility
called DriveImageXML
for this purpose. It stores
the images it creates as
XML-formatted data so
that your images aren’t
locked up in a proprietary
vendor’s binary
format. Through the
DriveImageXML interface
(which Figure 4 shows), you can also
browse through diskimage
files to view or
extract individual files, if necessary. DriveImageXML works with all
FAT and NTFS partitions and runs on Vista,
Windows 2003, and XP.
CDBurnerXP
Several years ago, I realized I was getting
buried in original source-media CD-ROMs
and DVDs for all the different versions of
OSs, applications, and peripherals I regularly
work with. Keeping track of all these discs
was becoming tedious, so I started storing
ISO image files of every original media CD I
got, as soon as I received it. By archiving these
CDs in a central location on my network, I
knew they would always be available. If a CD
was ever lost or destroyed, I could still turn
to the ISO file and burn a new disc in a few
minutes, saving me the hassle of contacting
the vendor for a replacement disc.
CDBurnerXP is
the first tool I used
for this purpose,
and it’s still the tool
I use today. It’s a
full-featured CDburning
program
that includes the
ability to create ISO
files from CDs and
DVDs, and it can
burn CDs, DVDs,
HD DVDs, and
Blu-ray DVDs. In
addition to using
CDBurnerXP as an
ISO-reading and
-burning utility, I
use it as a capable audio disc burner. Figure
5 shows the tool’s UI. CDBurnerXP runs
on Vista, Windows 2003, XP, and Windows
2000.
Comodo
Firewall Pro
When I ponder the notion of a “free firewall,”
I get a bit skeptical. After all, considering the
speed at which Internet-based threats grow,
how good could a “free” firewall application
be? I’m always happy when my skepticism
is proven wrong, and Comodo Firewall Pro
does just that.
When I first installed Comodo Firewall
Pro, I initially thought I’d just installed a
copy of Zone Alarm (a popular, commercial
personal firewall application). After a
reboot to insert the proper network-level
modifications into my system, Comodo
Firewall Pro instantly recognized that
it was communicating on a network it
hadn’t seen before (i.e., my home network)
and asked me to provide a name
for it. Then, a few network utilities in my
Startup folder that Comodo Firewall Pro
didn’t know about attempted to connect
to the Internet. Comodo Firewall
Pro immediately saw this outbound
communication attempt and displayed
a dialog box identifying the application
that was trying to communicate (and
to where) and asking whether I wanted
to allow or deny the outward communication.
After I allowed these trusted
applications the rights to communicate
when necessary, Comodo Firewall Pro
never bothered me about them again.
Within five minutes of using Comodo
Firewall Pro, I was extremely impressed by
its thoroughness—especially considering
the price. Figure 6 shows Comodo Firewall
Pro’s UI.
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