Discount Computers

Let’s face it, back in the old days sitting and watching Norton
Speed Disk crank away on a 20mb drive actually had some
entertainment value, mostly because it only took a few minutes.
These days, a badly fragmented multi-hundred gigabyte drive may
take hours to defrag. If that’s still your idea of
entertainment, then I can bet you don’t go on a whole lot of
dates. Let’s try and free up your weekends anyway by showing you
how to automate your defrag on Windows XP.

What is a defrag anyway?

Think of your hard drive as a giant wall of mail slots you might
see at a big business. Each slot can hold a small amount of
data. If a file you are trying to save fits into a single slot,
great, no problem. However, if the file is going to require
multiple slots, you begin to get fragmentation if the system
writes one part of the file to one slot but then has to skip
over several slots before there is space for the rest of the
file. The more files you add and delete, the worse this
fragmentation becomes. By defragmenting your drive, the defrag
program rearranges all of the data stored on it so that each
file is in consecutive slots. This makes reading the file in
when you want it much faster.

How do you defrag your drive?

On a Windows XP machine, go to your Start menu, select All
Programs, go to Accessories, select System Tools, and then
select Disk Defragmenter. This will allow you to select each
drive you may have in your system, analyze it , and perform a
defragmentation if needed.

That’s all well and good for those people who actually remember
to do this once in a while, but the Naked Computer Guy is
nothing if not lazy. I would much rather be catching up on
TIVO’d episodes of American Chopper than remembering to defrag
my drive, so I created a very simple method to schedule a
regular defrag that I use on all of my client’s machines (as
well as my own) these days.

The Automated Defrag

The reason why this is possible is that in the current version
of Window’s defrag program, they put back in the ability to run
the defrag program from a command prompt. Armed with this
knowledge, we can create a simple batch file to defragment our
drives, and then schedule the defrag to run at specific times.
Start off by running Windows Notepad. We are going to add one
line in this file for each drive in your system using the format
defrag driveletter: so for most people, this will look like:

defrag c:

If you have more hard drives, just add additional lines for each
drive letter. Now we want to save this file, for simplicity’s
sake, let’s just save it to the root of your C drive. When
saving this file, be sure you save it as follows:

“dodefrag.bat”

If you do not put the quotes around the name, it will end up
saving the file as dofefrag.bat.text which will not work for our
purposes.

Next go to your Start menu, select All Programs, go to
Accessories, select Scheduled Tasks. Double click on the “Add
Scheduled Task” icon. On the first screen, click on Next, then
click on the Browse button, then double-click on the
dodefrag.bat file, and just to be a bit anal about this, let’s
select the Weekly radio button, and click Next.

Since I recommend keeping your computer on 24 hours a day (turn
off CRT’s) so that automated updates and maintenance tasks can
run at off-usage hours, let’s schedule your task for a time
frame that makes sense to you. I set mine to run at 4am every
week on Sundays. This means that on Monday morning, my system is
all set for me to begin my week.

Once you click the Next button you will be asked for the
security credentials of a user that the program can run as. This
is important because your system may not be logged in or it may
be logged in as a non-admin user when the time comes for the
task to occur. This step is a problem if you do not have any
accounts on your system that do not have passwords, this will
simply generate an error. If you have an account with a password
set that has administrator rights, enter that user name and
password, click Next, then click on Finish, and you have just
automated your defrag process. If you need to create a user with
a password for running these types of tasks, then follow these
steps:

– Go to the Start menu, then Control Panels, then User Accounts

– Click on Create a new account

– Put in a user name (I like to create an account called
Maintenance)

– Click Next

– Make sure Computer Administrator is checked and click Create
Account

– Click on the new account icon

– Click on Create a password

– Enter in a password and hint for this user

– Click on Create Password

– Close the User Accounts window

Make sure the user name in the Schedule Task Wizard screen
matches the new account you created, and then follow the
instructions above to complete the task creation process.

About the author:
Kerry Garrison is the Director of Technical Services for Tech Data Pros, a southern
California IT Consulting firm, and is the publisher of The Geek Gazette and VOIPSpeak.net.

Although both CD and DVD have the same media size and shape, the
similarity ends there. There are numerous points of difference
between the two, as listed below:

Data pits and lasers A disc has microscopic grooves that move
along in a spiral around the disc. Both CDs and DVDs have these
grooves. Laser beams are applied to scan these grooves. As you
may be aware, digital information is represented in ones and
zeroes. In these discs, very tiny reflective bumps (called
‘lands’) and non-reflective holes (called ‘pits’), which are
found alongside the grooves, reflect the ones and zeros of
digital information.

Here lies the difference – by reducing the wavelength of the
laser (from the 780mm infrared light used in the CD) to 625mm or
more infrared light, DVD technology
has managed to write in smaller ‘pits’ as compared to the
standard CD. This allows for a greater amount of data per track.
The minimum length of a pit in a single layer DVD-RAM is 0.4
micron, as compared to 0.834 micron for a CD.

Also, the tracks of DVDs are narrower, allowing for more tracks
per disc, which again translates into more capacity than a CD.

Layers As explained above, DVDs have smaller ‘pits’ and the
lasers have to focus on them. This is done by using a thinner
plastic substrate than in a CD, which means that the laser has
to pass through a thinner layer, with less depth to reach the
pits. It was this reduction in thickness which was responsible
for discs that were only 0.6mm thick – half that of a CD.

Data access
speeds DVDs access data at a much faster rate that do CDs.
Here is a comparison – a 32X CD-ROM drive reads data at 4M bytes
per second while a 1X DVD
drive reads at 1.38M bytes per second. That’s even faster
than an 8x CD drive!

UDF (Universal Data Format) Recording formats of CDs and DVDs
are quite different. DVDs use UDF (Universal Data Format). This
allows data, video, audio or a combination of all three, to be
stored in a single file structure. The advantage of this is that
any file can be accessed by any drive, computer or consumer
video. CDs, however, are not compatible with this format.

About the author:
Logan writes about various topics. This article is free to
re-print as long as nothing is changed, the bio remains, all
hyper links remain intacked and the rel=”nofollow” tag isnt
added to any links. Thank-You

The word ‘computer’ originally implied a person, who, under
instructions from a mathematician, performed mechanical
calculations. Mechanical calculating devices such as the abacus
were often put to use to aid this process.

At the end of the Middle Ages, mathematics and engineering in
Europe received a considerable boost, thus leading to the
invention of numerous mechanical calculating devices. The
technology for clockwork was developed by the early 17th
century. The period between the early 19th century and early
20th century saw the development of a number of technologies
which would be vital for the development of the digital computer
later on. Some examples are the punched card and the valve.
Charles Babbage was the first person to design a fully programmable
computer as early as 1837. However, he was unable to
actually construct his computer due to a variety of reasons.

Analog computers were increasingly used in the first half of the
20th century for a number of scientific computing needs.
However, they became obsolete after the development of the
digital computer.

The first digital computer was the Atanasoff Berry Computer . It
used a binary system of arithmetic, parallel processing, a
separation of memory and computing functions and regenerative
memory. Binary math and electronic circuits – both of which are
used in today’s computers – were first used in the Atanasoff
Berry Computer.

In the 1930’s and 1940’s, newer and more efficient computers
were continuously developed. Gradually, they came to possess the
key features which are present in modern day computers – digital
electronics and flexibility of programming.

Among the more important machines to be developed during this
time, the American ENIAC was prominent. It was a general purpose
machine, but had an inflexible architecture. Later a far
superior technique known as the stored program architecture was
developed. It is the foundation from which all modern
computers are derived.

Throughout the 1950’s, computer design was primarily valve
driven. This was later replaced by transistor-driven design in
the 1960’s. Transistor-based computers were smaller, faster and
cheaper, and hence commercially viable. Integrated circuit
technology, adopted in the 1970’s enabled computer production
costs to hit a new low, so that even individuals could afford
them. That was the birth of the personal computer, as it is
known today.

About the author:
Logan writes about various topics. This article is free to
re-print as long as all hyper links remain intacked and the
rel=”nofollow” tag isnt added to any links. Thank-You