At 12:16 8-6-01 -0700, Kristin wrote:
>my office machine runs Win95, it's attached AFAIK to a Windows NT LAN
Hmm. The reason for using NT instead of Windows 95/98 is security (Win95/98
isn't exactly full of security features). You can have Win95/98 computers
in a NT LAN, but IMHO, but any network administrator who allows that should
be fired. It's something like locking the door, but keeping the key under
the doormat...
>if I understood everything about network administration I'd be doing
>it.
Nah. I do that work, and I can assure you it's not all that it's cracked up
to be. Servers that go down for no apparent reason, cryptic error messages,
annoying and obnoxious users, long hours...
The pay is quite nice, though... :)
>Anyway, even if you aren't doing anything, every so often the network
>or maybe the network card driver spins up your disk - is it just pinging
>it or what?
This occassional spinning can be caused by several things, like the network
server checking if your computer is still online, or someone pinging your
computer, or an other computer in the network broadcasting a message. The
spinning is not necessarily caused by the network card, BTW; it could also
be any memory-resident program in your computer (such as McAfee Antivirus),
or Windows itself reading/writing something to/from disk.
>anyway, I'm sure it's something routine. Well I just had some
>new software installed (in house stuff for a project I have to work
>on) and my 3GB disk is over 2/3 full, so I decided to run Windows Defrag
>and maximize my free space and performance. It kept restarting itself over
>and over and over, because everytime the disk whirred a little bit it said
>the contents of the drive had changed slightly so you had to do it over
>again!
I think your antivirus software has something to do with that. When you
defrag a disk, the defragger not only moves files around, but also has to
update the FAT (File Allocation Table) on the disk; some viruses do just
that too (altering the FAT), so antivirus software reacts quite allergic to it.
When you want to defrag a disk, the best thing to do (IMO) is:
- turn off your pc
- disconnect from the network
- restart pc
- terminate all programs that are running (especially McAfee!)
- start Defrag
- go get some coffee
- wait for Defrag to be done.
After that, turn off the pc, reconnect to the network, restart the pc and
go back to work.
Of course, it's best to to let your network administrator do all that.
First, admins don't like it when users go fiddle around with a pc on their
own. Second, maintenance is one of the things s/he gets paid for. Third, if
something goes wrong, the admin will be blamed, not you... :)
>The whole process took over two hours! Somehow I don't think the
>disk utilities bundled with Win95 were designed with networked machines in
>mind.
Er... nope.
>Well whe I was done it did show I had an
>extra 85 megabytes free
That's an awful lot for a 3 GB disk. I've never heard that Defrag could
free up that much space by simply defragging. It seems as if Defrag also
finds and deletes temporary files -- didn't know it could do that, though.
Windows and applications can create a lot of those files, and they aren't
always cleaned up when the program or Windows itself is shut down. Do a
search on your hard disk for *.TMP, and see what shows up. You'll probably
find dozens of files, many of them only a few (1 or 2) kilobytes in size.
Most of them (but not all!) can safely be deleted. In my experience, .TMP
files that start with a ~ can be deleted without causing any harm.
Jeroen
Sysadmin: it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it...
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