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CyberArtisans Web Developers Newsletter |  |
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Welcome to the November 2008 issue of the CyberArtisans newsletter! Each month we try to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
Microsoft says the next edition of Windows, Windows 7, will be released some time near the end of 2009. Don't count on this release date, however — Microsoft has missed almost every announced Windows release date in recent history, in some cases by many months. Nonetheless, for those of you still running XP (as we are), this means it may be possible to skip Vista entirely. Windows 7 is not a complete redesign of the operating system, however. Some reviewers have suggested that it should really be called Windows 6.5, since it is, in effect, a cleaned-up version of Vista. But it does seem to address many of the gripes people have had about Vista. Reports from some Beta testers say that Windows 7 fixes most of the problems of Vista, requiring less memory, working faster on weaker processors, etc. This could be very good news, since many users liked Vista's features but were frustrated by its performance. Unfortunately, since it is based on Vista, users may find that older hardware still won't work with Windows 7 unless hardware manufacturers finally decide to update the drivers for these devices. More detailed analyses will come out as the product gets closer to release, so stay tuned.
Do you use Mozy to back up your system? If so, have you recently noticed green check marks on some of your file icons on your desktop? This is a new "feature" from Mozy. A green check mark indicates the file has been backed up by Mozy. A red X means it hasn't. Unfortunately, these green and red marks exact a system performance penalty — we found that Windows Explorer was suddenly slower to display the list of files in a folder, apparently because it has to look up the back-up status of each file when displaying it. Frankly, we're not happy to see Mozy (or any other software vendor) adding features without telling its customers about it. Any system change that occurs without an obvious reason is cause for concern, so when the green check marks showed up we went exploring and discovered that others had the same question. Fortunately someone had figured it out and posted an explanation in one of the technical forums. You can remove the green check marks by going onto the Mozy Configuration page, clicking on the Options tab, and checking "Disable icon overlays in Windows Explorer."
Do you defrag your disk regularly? Does it seem to improve performance? Using the built-in Windows defragger, we never saw any noticable performance improvement. But recently we tried the JKDefrag defragger (screen shot at left) and were amazed to see a very noticeable performance improvement. The screen image it provides while running is positively psychedelic and a little scary at first ("Is my disk really that bad?"). But left to do its thing, which sometimes means running overnight, it rearranges your disk and makes your system noticeably faster. How safe is it to use? Well, no defragger (including the built-in one in Windows) is completely safe, so regular backups are still advised. JKDefrag uses the same Windows code (the defragmentation API in the system library) that the Windows defragger uses, so it is as safe to use as the built-in defragger. And you can interrupt JKDefrag at any time without endangering your data. Most people will run it in default mode, but JKDefrag provides a number of options for those who like to tweak their system a little more. As with any defragger, you should run JKDefrag regularly, at least once a week and as often as once a day if you want. Oops, almost forgot the most important feature: It's free!
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