Helix Software

Microsoft

Symantec

Last week I decided to clean up my computer; the drive was getting sluggish, I had files lying all over the place, and I had installed so many different applications to test that I felt I was losing control of things. I had recently purchased Helix Software's Nuts & Bolts, a software package that provides system diagnosis, recovery tools, and so on. It is just one of several such programs, perhaps the most well known being Symantec's Norton Utilities. Norton Utilities is one of those programs that everyone should have, just in case. Not too dissimilar to making backups of vital data on a regular basis---which of course we all do, right?

One of the first things I did with Nuts & Bolts was to defragment my hard drive. The first stage of this process is to optimize the directory structure. Well, Nuts & Bolts optimized it all right; it optimized my files right out of existence! There were still there, taking up disk space, but I couldn't access any of them. Since this was the first time I'd used Nuts & Bolts, you can understand my reluctance to perform further experiments with it on my already wounded PC. Sadly, I had also run Nuts & Bolts on my D: (data) drive already, but it failed right away with a GPF (General Protection Failure, or core dump for you Unix folks). But not before having "optimized" the files on it as well. Rats.

So, I took out my trusty Norton Utilities package. It turned out my data drive had several cross-linked files (files that share the same entry in the file allocation table (FAT)) that caused the Nuts & Bolts disk defragmentation program to fail spectacularly. It should have caught this of course; Norton Utilities did and promptly launched Norton's Disk Doctor program to attempt a repair. It was able to salvage some of the files on the data drive (a logical drive in an extended partition on the same physical drive (maybe I'll write another SIGPC musing on the mysteries of disk partitions in a Windows environment---but I digress)) but it couldn't do much with the C: drive, where most of my applications were kept. Disk Doctor was able to salvage some, but it had to leave most of the files as "FILE0001._DD" since the tools could not reconstruct the directory hierarchy. And there were over 7000 such files! This also caused a system error because it tried to place too many of them in the root directory, which has a limit of 512 entries by default. Even if it could have placed them in a single directory, the only way to find out what each file is is to open it, usually under QuickView. This is clearly not a plausible approach for this number of files.

What does this have to say about TCO of PCs? Nothing very good I'm afraid. I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable about this type of thing and yet it still took me several days to recover a portion of my lost data. In addition to being a Sherlock Holmes recovering clues as to the nature of the salvaged data, there is the time needed to reinstall the operating system and the special drivers for everything from the display to the modem. And for the extras, such as printer drivers, Zip drives, operating system patches and updates. Thankfully, most of these files can be downloaded from the Internet these days, but it still takes time to find them and download them (not always a rapid process over a 28.8K modem link). Normally this is not too difficult, but it is definitely time consuming. And it doesn't always go quite as planned.

For example, the PC that suffered through this TCO experience was running Windows 95, OSR2. This is a special version of Windows 95 that is normally installed only on machines delivered by OEMs, such as Dell or IBM. I had installed it because it provides all the patches to Windows 95 in one package, and it provides new functionality, such as the ability to access a logical drive large than 2G. However, IBM doesn't support OSR2 on the particular model of my computer (for good reason, as it turns out). When Windows 95 OSR2 is installed, it thinks the two PC Card slots are supported by CardBus, a new high-speed bus for these PC Cards (AKA PCMCIA cards). So it installs the CardBus drivers provides by Texas Instruments. But this model of my machine doesn't support CardBus, at least not in its current hardware configuration. After several attempts to fix things, I had no choice but to go back to the original version of Windows 95. Then I applied quite a few patches and enhancements downloaded from Microsoft's web site to gain the added functionality I wanted, such as support for ISDN. As it stands, my computer is now back in working order. Except for my floppy disk, which seems to conflict with the Iomega Zip driver, but only when Windows 95 is running, not when the machine is booting. Confused yet? I certainly am. Would I have been better off with an NC? Probably, if only because I wouldn't have to worry so much about the operating system and associated drivers. But NCs are immature at this point, so I'll reserve final judgement until I have to do through a TCO episode with them.

So what can you learn from my experiences? One obvious lesson is to backup your data---early and often! I know this is a no-brainer, but do you really backup your data regularly? Could you recover your email files if your disk got trashed tomorrow? How about all the configuration files you have created while using your PC? Document templates? Browser "Favorites" folders and cookies? There are many more data items that you use than you probably realize. Until you lose them.

Related information:

• SIGPC V1N11: Dilbert's View of the Network Computer (NC)
• SIGPC V1N5: Windows 97, NT 5.0 Delayed Until 1998; OSR2
• Office Computing: Office97 File Backup Utility

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