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COMPUTER BITS BY JASON COLE Norton Utilities for Win95; Pt.2 Norton Utilities for Windows 95 Ver.2 has many useful programs and this time we shall talk about the Speed Disk utili­ty. This utility is used to “defragment” the files on your hard disc drive. Running Speed Disk regularly ensures optimum drive performance and greatly decreases the chances of file corruption. What is file “fragmentation”? Fragmentation occurs when files are split into smaller segments (or fragments) and written to scattered locations on the hard disc drive. This means that the drive has to work harder in order to open and save the affected files. Fragmentation occurs as files are written to and subse­quently deleted from the drive. The reason for this is that when you delete a file, you create a “hole” in the main block of Fig.1: this is the window that appears when you first load Speed Disk. The program scans your hard disc drive first to see if there are any errors. 88  Silicon Chip data where the files resided. This means that any subsequent files that are saved can be written to the free space left by this hole. Now if the file is larger than the hole, then what ever is left over is written in the next available hole. Adding to this, temporary swap files such as used in Wind­ows 95 are continually changing size and being written and deleted. This is why there is always some fragmentation on the drive. A small amount of fragmentation doesn’t cause any problems but if left unchecked, the speed and reliability of the drive will be reduced. Speed Disk Speed Disk is a powerful hard disc reorganisation tool. It works in a similar way to Symantec’s Defrag, which is already installed on most computers with DOS. The main difference here is that Speed Disk is a lot more powerful. Before running Speed Disk, it’s important to note that you should always use Norton’s Disk Doctor to correct any errors on the drive. If you don’t check for errors before running Speed Disk, you run the risk of losing files. When you load Speed Disk, the program scans the hard drive first – see Fig 1. This is just a quick check and is similar to Disk Doctor. If problems are detected, Speed Disk will inform you to run Disk Doctor to correct any errors. However, this does not happen often if you have already run Disk Doctor beforehand. After the hard drive has been scanned, a new dialog box appears (Fig.2). This box tells you the percentage of fragmenta­tion. In this case, 8% of the drive is fragmented. We can now start defragging the drive or quit. Fig.2 (above): this dialog box shows the amount of file fragmentation and indicates which of three options is recommended. Fig.3 (left): the Legend dialog box lets you change the colours on the disc map. If we choose to go ahead, then there are three options: (1). Full Optimisation: this reorganises the entire drive so that all files are at the beginning of the drive and in one piece. (2). Unfragment Files Only: this collects any fragmented files and rewrites them so that they are not fragmented. (3). Unfragment Free Space: this is similar to Unfragment Files Only, except that it works with the free space. This will leave fragmented files fragmented but will supply you with a section of the drive, generally at the end, which is clear of any files. Finally, there is a check box at the bottom labelled Opti­mize Swap File”. If you check this box, Speed Disk will move the Windows swap file to the end of the data. This minimises future file fragmentation and also speeds up the swap file by eliminat­ing the need to search for it all over the drive. If you now click Start, Speed Disk will start to organise the drive. This can take quite some time on older drives, large drives and extremely fragmented drives. However, if you choose Cancel, then you are taken back to the main screen (Fig.1). After a few moments, the display shows you some more detail about the drive, such as Swap File location, unmovable file locations and so on. Clicking the Properties button and then clicking Legend from the resulting menu brings up the box shown in Fig.3. This box lets you change the colours on the disc map but most people will stick to the default settings. You can view a fragmentation report of your data in the Properties menu (Fig.4) or you can click Properties, Options to bring up the dialog box shown in Fig.5. This is where the fun begins because you have three tabs to click and lots of options to choose from. These tabs are Optimisation, Appearance and Advanced. We’ll look at each option in turn. (1) Optimisation: this area gives you the same original options as shown in Fig.2, as well as two extra options. These extra options are Verify Writes and Wipe Free Space. Verify Writes takes longer because it checks the data after writing it to see if it has been written correctly. Wipe Free Space does just that – it wipes the free space after the data has been written. This makes it almost impossible to find any files that may have been deleted from the remaining area. Next to the Full Optimisation section is an extra button called Customize. This section lets you place particular files and folders in certain sequences. You can set up the program to place folders or even files first. You can place particular folders which are rarely used or written to at the beginning of the drive and folders that are continually being written to at the end, for example. Once you have chosen a particular setup and started the process, you can get yourself a nice cup of coffee as it will take a while the first time. This is because most files will have to be moved whether they are fragmented or not. (2) Appearance: clicking the Appearance tab brings up the dialog box shown in Fig.7. This gives you a couple of options for the Disk Map. Here, you can have the data appear as Blocks or Bars. Click between them to see which one you like. You also have the option of playing music while the disc is defragging – just tick the Play Music box and select a WAV or MIDI file from the drop-down list. Me? – I generally leave the room while the disc is defrag­ging and come back later. (3) Advanced: this area allows you to set up Background Operation (Fig.8). In this case, defragging will start after one minute of idle time Fig.4: the Fragmentation Report dialog box shows the amount of fragmentation for each file on the hard drive. Fig.5 (right): this dialog box lets you choose the optimisation method (in this case, Full Optimisation) and whether or not to optimise the swap file. There are also a couple of security options; ie, Verify Writes and Wipe Free Space. February 1998  89 Fig.6: clicking the Cutomize button in Fig.5 brings up this dialog box which lets you place particular files and folders in certain sequences. Fig.7: clicking the Appearance tab brings up this dialog box. Here, you can choose to have the data appear as blocks or as bars. You can also play music while the disc is defragging. Fig.8 (left): the Advanced tab allows you to set up Defrag to run in the background. In this case, defragging will start after one minute of idle time. Fig.9 (above) shows the on-screen display if you choose to hide the disc map, or you can minimise this so that it appears as an icon in the tray on the task bar (near the clock and you can choose to watch the communications ports (this will prevent defrag from starting in the middle of a down­load or if you’re using the mouse). Again it’s good to have but I rarely use it. If you choose to not use the map you can hide it to just get the box shown in Fig.9. This box can then be minimised so that it is just a small icon near your clock on the task bar. In fact, you would hardly know it was running since you can carry on with other work. This feature is great for administrators of large networks, where you don’t want to “scare” the machine’s regular user by bringing up a large SC Speed Disk box. 90  Silicon Chip Tip Of The Month If you have “Call Waiting” turned on for your telephone it’s a good idea to turn it off before logging on to the Internet. That’s because the tone that “Call Waiting” sends to let you know that another caller is trying to get through can be misinterpreted by your modem. In some cases, the modem can even hang up which is quite inconvenient if you’re in the middle of downloading a large file. Alternatively, the signal could corrupt the data that’s being downloaded. To turn “Call Waiting” off, simply dial #43# and wait for the facility tone (or a recorded announcement) before hanging up. You can turn “Call Waiting” on again after your on-line session by dialling *43#. If you have a recent Telstra Touchphone 400, you can turn “Call Waiting” off by pressing the ‘Cancel’ and ‘Call Wait’ buttons; or on again by pressing the ‘Store’ and ‘Call Wait’ buttons. Finally, to speed up your web browsing, turn the graphics and sound options off in Internet Explorer and Netscape.