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A lot of the older de-fragging and organization utilities used to include the option to also sort folders in the directory. The ones I’ve looked at lately don’t include that option, although Piriform’s Defraggler is considering that option for a future release. do you know of any that currently have this ability? I know this doesn’t happen by virtue of teh fact that the thumb drive I use for music in my car, even after having done a complete de-fragment on it, still plays the most recently added folders on the drive AFTER the older ones, regardless of the defragmentation.

I happened to have the opportunity to “backup” a drive this weekend. I run a karaoke show, and had all my music on an external WD 2Tb Passport. I maintain a spare backup drive which had recently failed. The last time I cloned the drive with less than 700G of mp3 and zipped files each consisting of a pair of .cdg and .mp3 files (total about half and half of mp3 and zip) it took a day and a half from one passport to the other using USB 2.0. This time, with about 1.04 T of files, it completed over USB 3.0 in only 5 and a half hours – a major improvement! so I’m not sure why your test of 300G over USB 3.0 took as long as 10.3 hours. My two drives were connected to the same USB 3.0 card, since my motherboard doesn’t have native USB 3.0; don’t know if that made a difference.

On the subject of recovery, I had a frightening experience a week or two ago. I have a self-built computer with an ASUS motherboard. I’m using the on-board RAID controller to manage a RAID 5 array with 3 WD Blue 2TB drives, giving me 4TB to work with. It’s partitioned into a 500G backup drive (F:) with the rest for my music and videos (E:). I woke up Sunday morning to discover that Windows knew absolutely nothing about an E: drive or an F: drive. A look into the storage manager quickly determined that as far as Windows was concerned, the space was unformatted. AGGHHH! To make a long story short, after several wild goose chases, I was able to completely recover both partitions AND all the data intact with a product called Partition Guru. My hat is off to this product – it saved me months of re-constructive work! (yes, I now have a complete backup of the music drive on my shiny new Seagate 3TB USB drive…). It just goes to show you, there are failures that having a RAID 5 array just can’t protect you from…

Clint, you seem to have a store of knowledge about hard drives. I posted this on another thread weeks ago, but haven’t gotten any replies, so I’ll try here. I have a RAID 5 system build with 2TB Western Digital Blue drives. Western Digital seems to have discontinued the 2TB Blue, and only Black and green are available in that size. I’ve seen a lot of chatter related to poor performance of the green and black series of drives in RAID arrays. Do you have any advice on an alternative for me to expand my RAID array? I can add up to two more drives, and I’ll probably get to the point where I need to in 6 or 9 months.

WMP 11 in XP has an extensive meta-data editing feature accessible from the right-click menu given for any track listed in the collection. WMP 12 under Win 7 seems to have completely eliminated this feature; the only meta-data which can be edited is the stuff available from the properties sheet accessible from the Windows Explorer view of the file. What’s up with that? Or have they “improved” the feature and moved it to some obscure place?

I’ve always made extensive use of those features – album title, artist, composer, a whole laundry list of data – and now that I’ve moved up to current technology, it’s been made irrelevant.

Quite familiar with the problem of “piggybackware”. Last week I went to help a friend who had been taking an enormous hit in response time. After a clean boot, with nothing running (XP SP3) every 10 seconds you could see the hourglass coming on for a good 3 or 4 seconds. Response time was terrible. I finally discovered, in the process of replacing her “Norton nagware” with Microsoft Security Essentials, what was causing the problem. As soon as I uninstalled one of the more obnoxious and recent piggybackware products, the hourglass disappeared and all response time was restored. The product? McAfee Security Center!

Manu, the key to Daisy’s problem is the phrase “..coming from your IP address..”

That can only mean two things:

1. A spammer is spoofing Daisy’s IP address
2. Daisy’s machine has been taken over by a bot network and is actually originating all of that mail without her knowledge or permission.

She needs to first disconnect from the network, then have her PC completely scanned in a most thorough fashion for bots and viruses.

Any other opinions, folks?

Rich

My sympathies for your problem, glad the storm passed. The same thing happened to me 2 weeks ago, and it was a one to two day thing. It’s passed, but my biggest concern is that all of the bouncebacks were definitely coming from old addresses from my address book, not destinations selected at random. Worse, what was sent out wasn’t just spam, it was a link to a known infected website, and it was received by a lot of people still ON my valid address book. So they clearly got my address book contents from somewhere. I do Facebook, but I NEVER click the button which says “let us have your address book…” – or at least I don’t think I ever have. So I changed as many passwords as I could remember to find, and switched my default email to a different one (a pain, because the domain is MUCH longer to type than AOL), so if anybody has words of wisdom on my continued security, I’d appreciate them…