Optimizing The Windows Defragmentation Process

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When I switched to Mac, the thing I missed least of all was having to periodically defrag my hard drive. Since I’m currently doing Windows development, I’m back to running Windows in a VM and made the mistake of not defragging my Windows drive for several months. After running the built-in defragger off and on for several days with no end in sight, I decided to back up and try a different approach.

  • I used msbuild /t:clean to remove all of the build artifacts for my Visual Studio projects.
  • I used cygwin‘s rm command to destroy everything in C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temp. You could use the delete functionality of Windows Explorer or the Windows erase command, but I find rm to be much faster when there are 1000’s of files. If you use Windows Explorer, just make sure you empty your trash bin before you start the defragger.
  • I used rm to destroy most of the files in C:\WINDOWS\Temp.
  • I installed Smart Defrag.

Not only does it look like it’ll be done by the end of the day, but Smart Defrag‘s automatic functionality should keep future fragmentation down to a minimum.

We finally have the beginnings of a media server…

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We hooked up a 2TB WD MyBook to a Cisco E3000 router. After getting the it configured, the DirecTv HD20 found the media server and some of my photos I copied over. Now I just have to figure out all the supported file formats and size restrictions. The HD20 would only display my photos after I made them smaller. That’s a huge disappointment.

How is the average Joe dealing with the new home network?

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I just got off a 30 minute chat with Cisco where we were trying to figure out why I couldn’t access the web interface on my E3000 router when it was connected to the rest of my home network. The whole conversation was a little annoying because I’m supposed to know what I’m doing.

It turns out that the underlying problem was a new DirecTV box my husband hooked up a couple of weeks ago. If you’re tech-savvy, you know that most if not all of the network-enabled devices you buy these days are shipped with a static IP address of 192.168.1.1. So I imagine there are a lot of people out there who get really frustrated when they hook up that new router or DirecTV to a network that already has a device at that address and all hell breaks loose.

I didn’t have a clue what the problem was until I had one laptop connected to the E3000, the E3000 disconnected from the rest of the network and a second laptop connected to my home network with the wireless disabled. I pinged 192.168.1.1 and it still answered — something that could only be possible if there were another device with the same IP address.