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1326

Living Room / Re: Malwarebytes self-start problem

« Last post by Shades on August 05, 2014, 08:55 PM »

S.M.A.R.T. technology that comes with every hard disk is used by software to indicate if the drive is healthy or not. I have here several drives that are perfect according to S.M.A.R.T., but in practice make your PC slow down to a crawl. I have learned to take any "advice" from HD health monitoring software with a grain of salt.

If the drive starts generating a lot of IRQ's...it is dying and definitely not to be trusted with important information.. Whether it is the drive (platters) itself or its electronics, it is dying. Time to get a new drive, clone the content from the failing one and when that's finished successfully, take it out and smash it to pieces/use it for target practice, squash it with your truck or whatever. It's not worth your time and you will be really miserable when spending hours trying to recover data from an almost dead drive...the proverbial sh?t and a fan.

For fun, you should download the MHDD iso, make a bootable disk/pendrive from it and use it to really verify the state of the hard disk. This software is very low level, it forgoes almost all hardware layers, the software allows just the BIOS to connect to the drive and takes over from that point.

Depending on the speed, size and health of the disk, a full check-up can take some time, but its results are brutally honest.

1327

Living Room / Re: New guy on the forums

« Last post by Shades on August 04, 2014, 11:12 PM »

Welcome Mason, we left the door ajar for you.

-cranioscopical (August 04, 2014, 06:53 PM)

saints preserve us

-Target (August 04, 2014, 08:53 PM)

By walling up? 

A most warm welcome indeed.

1328

General Software Discussion / Re: Real RAM amount consumed

« Last post by Shades on August 04, 2014, 11:09 PM »

260!?!?!?

What is practically always open all the time on my test pc: besides all the processes that are required by Win2012 R2, a test Oracle DB server, at least one instance of software to control any of the available DB servers, anti-virus, anti-malware, Firefox with lots of tabs open, at least 1 mail client (don't ask) with one or more message windows open, text editors, directory opus, process explorer, at least one irfanview instance, at least 4 word, excel and PDF documents and at least one of the applications  of the application suite I work with including at least one of the services it provides handling at least 4 time-/event-based processes + SOAP communication.

RAM use lies around 6,5GByte at all times (of 8GByte) and all of the above doesn't make a dent in the "zippy-ness" of this PC.

Anyways, I barely hit 80 processes (according to process explorer). With that in mind, please excuse my bewilderment about 260 active processes for a standard Windows PC (I ain't talking about proper server PC's, these can and do more than that). WTF ?!? (but in a positive way  )

1329

DC Member Programs and Projects / Re: Drive Policies Management Toolkit BETA

« Last post by Shades on August 04, 2014, 10:41 PM »

@wraith808 and Stoic Joker:
Your suggestions are valid, but I think I get the programmer why he chose this layout. We are in agreement that this interface is not as nice and tidy as it can be, but I find it also a pain in the donkey to continuously select an item from a list, configure it and continue with the next item on the list. Especially when I want to do that for all possible drive options. And keep an overview of what I have set.

The overview, offered by the chosen interface, more than makes up for the not-so-tidyness in my (sometimes) humble opinion.

@pax:
Replacing the buttons with combo-boxes (in the drive policies screen) would be an improvement, though. One conform way of placing (radio) buttons and check boxes (top-down or left-right, but not mixed) also helps in getting a look for your application.

"White-space" in an application does not need to be bad. If a certain look for an application is chosen, and thus keeping application windows (roughly) the same size, I really don't mind seeing some "white-space". This will make the application look more tranquil and also more like an application that is or would be used by professionals.

Also shorten the descriptions in the applications to the bare minimum that you can come up with and add an small info icon that shows the full text when you hover your cursor over it. Too much text in a application windows can make it look a bit chaotic.

In general, make sure that sentences should be as short as they can be and never group sentences in such a way that it takes up more than 3 lines. If you do have more text than that, separate them with a blank line. This make skimming a lot easier.

Please take my comment as it is intended (constructive criticism) because I do think that your application would get a lot of interest, even if you throw all suggestions made in this thread into the wind.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Real RAM amount consumed

« Last post by Shades on August 02, 2014, 01:24 PM »

Another link explaining more about memory management in Windows.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Real RAM amount consumed

« Last post by Shades on August 02, 2014, 01:21 PM »

The Sysinternal Suite also comes with a tool that will show you if your computer has a rootkit or not.

After only a quick glance over the screenshots I didn't see too much problematic things. However, there are 82 processes running on your system. That might be a bit on the high side. This could also mean that you are running out DHEAP memory. Although Windows 7 and up handle this much better than earlier Windows versions, you can still run out of it and in that case it really doesn't matter how much free RAM is still available in your PC. Running out of DHEAP will make your system become (extremely) slow and applications/services won't be able to start anymore. Behavior that is usually associated with PC virus/malware.

There is also the possibility that you ran out of threads. Processors come in various shapes and sizes. Each with their own, finite amount of threads they can handle. Each process uses a certain amount of threads, depending on its function or what it is currently doing. Running out of threads will make your applications/services slow and you won't be able to start more of them no matter how much free RAM your system still has left. Behavior that is usually associated with PC virus/malware.

In both cases, the best solution is to identify which of the 82 processes running on your computer is from a 3rd party (easily seen in Process Explorer). Then identify which of the 3rd party processes are essential to you and and terminate the rest. Then your computer should be much more responsive and allow you to disable autostarting crap (SysInternals Suite tool: AutoRuns).

Get familiar with the tools in the SysInternals Suite, there are a lot of them and are very, very helpful. The archive is just a 13MByte download and is provided at no cost, so there isn't much to lose.

[rant]
Keep your PC lean and mean by starting applications/services only when you need them and terminate these when you are finished with them. Lots of software claims it to be essential that it is started the moment Windows starts. Besides security software (anti-virus/anti-malware/firewall) there isn't much software that really needs to autostart with Windows or kept resident after you are finished with it.

This will free up a lot of the limited resources at your computer's disposal and make your computer behave better in general. If you would be a doctor, your computer the patient and it's resources the amount of health it has...would you really think that leeches are still a good treatment? In my (not even close to humble) opinion, it isn't.
[/rant]

1332

General Software Discussion / Re: Real RAM amount consumed

« Last post by Shades on August 02, 2014, 09:27 AM »

Process Explorer is part of the SysInternal Suite and it contains much more very handy tools. It is one of the first things I put on every PC I own/work with.

There is also an open source tool called Process Hacker. The feature set of both Process Explorer and Process Hacker are for 90% the same, I would guess. Their differences are interesting though. The process killing feature of Process Hacker is much more advanced than the already powerful one from Process Explorer. That difference alone makes it worthwhile for me to use both.

Both are free, can be used as portable application and allow you to hook them in, so they can take over as default Windows task manager. Real gems of (Windows) software.

1333

Living Room / Re: Vote for the best bike!

« Last post by Shades on August 02, 2014, 01:17 AM »

The last one is the nicest one of the set. Still, all the models shown use the form factor of the mountain bike. And that is not the best one for urban use. Great for exercise, yes...but that also means lacking in comfort, making most people not want to use them for a quick trip to the store or other common day use...defeating the whole point of the bike.

Bicycles in the Netherlands are shaped for comfort and as such much more popular, making people actually want to take the bike instead of a car/motorbike. China uses similar shaped bikes as the Dutch and there the bicycle is also very popular/useful.

Most designers are too locked in their thinking and flood the market with slightly more clever mountain bike models.

1334

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Create a modern version of Lotus Agenda

« Last post by Shades on August 02, 2014, 01:00 AM »

Not that long ago I was asked to take a look at the whole Lotus suite including the Domino server. Man, that was an exercise in frustration (in a virtual machine based on Windows 2008). To get it installed is one thing, using it is a whole different ballgame. And the fact that all of their software is build on the Eclipse interface doesn't improve usability.

Eclipse is a good development environment, but it should stay there. Eclipse is not the proverbial hammer in search of nails. It actually made me appreciate Exchange more. Lotus is undoubtedly capable, but the "specialness" of the interface rubbed me wrong in so many ways. I find it amazing that this software keeps getting so much "love" from companies and persons, to be honest.

Then again, until I was asked to try the software, I only had heard of Lotus, but never felt even a inkling of a desire to consider starting to install or work with it...for more than 20 years.

1335

Screenshot Captor / Re: [Error] Network homedirectory problem UNC paths

« Last post by Shades on July 30, 2014, 10:35 PM »

If you make the folder (structure) manually on the UNC location, can ScreenshotCaptor access it?

In case that is true, that would solve your immediate problem at least.

1336

General Software Discussion / Re: unattended large file copies that will not prompt for msg

« Last post by Shades on July 30, 2014, 01:29 AM »

Teracopy works marvelously when copying files from one computer to another over a LAN. That is where it really shines (in my opinion). I noticed it was (much) faster while more secure than copying with explorer or Directory Opus (likely also faster as the other file managers mentioned earlier in this thread, but as I only know of them I cannot say anything good or bad). 

It would also show you which files were copied ok (by checking hash codes of the original and the copy). It would even allow you a new attempt of copying only the failed files. Honestly, I didn't keep up with it anymore though. With gigabit LAN's there isn't much speed to be gained anymore and most file mangers have improved their copying routines. Hell, even explorer isn't that much of a drag anymore.

1337

Living Room / Re: Director wants his film on The Pirate Bay, pirates deliver…

« Last post by Shades on July 30, 2014, 01:14 AM »

Have you seen the numbers for average height per country? I can tell you...the Dutch are definitely not small! When I was working on a high school in the Netherlands, I regularly had to look up to students...but here in Paraguay I look like a tower with my height of just 1,83 mtr.

Actually, there is global research that says in case you want tall, healthy and (reasonably) well educated children you best make babies with the locals of the northern parts of Europe, like Scandinavia, Germany, The Netherlands and Denmark (not necessarily in that order ). The Game of Thrones reference: 'Making the eight' does apply though (Carice van Houten is a fine example of what the Dutch can do

Touting the Dutch horn even more...I believe that the area where I was born in the Netherlands (Veldhoven, Eindhoven, 's Hertogenbosch) is regarded by the UN as one of the most intelligent gene pools globally (if I wasn't born there, the area would have been the most intelligent gene pool, hehehe). For that reason ASML, Philips and other high-tech companies have big R&D divisions set up in this area.

More on topic:
Maybe the movie wasn't shot with high-def cameras, but I doubt that. Dutch movies are usually shot with very high quality cameras on high quality film...which is why there is always such a stark contrast between the production values and the camera quality.

Besides that, 1999 was still somewhat the year of VHS. Those devices were usually connected to a standard 4:3 TV displaying a PAL signal of 576i, so a copy with a resolution of only 320x240 would already have looked like shit on those old standards. I have no recollection of ever seeing anything as crappy as that on public or commercial TV stations in the Netherlands. And I come from an age with black and white TV's with 6(!) channels, where you actually had to leave your chair to change the channel.

1338

Living Room / Re: Thinking of switching to WP8 from Android

« Last post by Shades on July 30, 2014, 12:13 AM »

There are schematics to cut your card to the proper size. Did that myself when transferring from a Nokia 5530 Xpress to the Lumia 520 and that works fine. But if you are not sure of your cutting skills you can to a local vendor and they likely have a cutter that does this in one go. Perhaps your telecom provider has a close by outlet that is able to do this for you.

I have no clue about your other questions as my usage of smartphones is limited, hence I bought just the Lumia 520. Someone actually bought it, decided after using it for a day that he didn't like it and sold it to me for less than 100 USD, quite far under the normal retail price here in Paraguay (which is drastically higher than in the US (150USD without plan/contract), rest assured about that...which is not helping the MS cause one bit).

For my use that Lumia is actually a good deal, I like it better than the android phones in the same price range. Then again, I would have bought a Blackberry Z10 if that deal wouldn't go through. Android is more than capable, but somehow it didn't do it for me. And to be honest, the WP8 interface doesn't take long to appreciate it.

Choice of software is limited though. Not a bad thing in my book, but you have clearly more uses planned for your phone than I do. Perhaps there is more in (the Windows) store for you as you aren't a resident of the South Americas.

1339

Living Room / Re: Malwarebytes self-start problem

« Last post by Shades on July 23, 2014, 08:04 PM »

Sounds like your hard disk is failing (as in generating lots of Disk I/O for no apparent reason. With a tool such as Process Explorer you can see a rather high value appear at list item 'Interrupts'. It also tracks disk I/O for you.

If you see this, get a replacement for your hard disk and start transferring your data and/or installed software to the new one. You can also try to clone your old disk onto the new one (if the new drive is the same size or bigger than the old one) with a tool such as 'HDClone' or 'Clonezilla' You will be happy when you did. And likely enjoying your system for quite a while still.

1340

Non-Windows Software / Re: The future of networking - resources for: SDN, OpenFlow and Mininet

« Last post by Shades on July 19, 2014, 02:10 PM »

After seeing (just) the 'Eli'-video the concept is clear and very promising indeed.

That video didn't remove some of my doubts about the system.

Current networking functionality is quite rigid and if changes are needed, they need to be applied (by one or more able bodies) all over the network topology. A hassle management-wise to say the least. SDN will get rid of that by allowing changes to be done centrally and on-the-fly.

But in my (simple) way of thinking, does this not introduce a single point-of-failure? Where a virus or malware can take your complete network hostage? For example, by assigning all available networking capacity to a randomly chosen functionality (mail, HTTP, FTP, VOIP, etc.) every milli-second? That would severely affect every computer in your topology at once.   

1341

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by Shades on July 19, 2014, 01:19 PM »

I tripped across this a few days ago and it's popping up everywhere.

Rob sent in a press release for it to Cop Block, and I think it spread from there.

NSFW - The video contains extreme, graphic violence. But it's a darn good tune!

-Renegade (July 19, 2014, 12:40 AM)

Although I'm not a fan of rap, especially when the artist(s) only have 1 syllable words in their vocabulary, this actually sounds ok and addresses something. The video that comes with it is really disturbing though (at least to me).

1342

General Software Discussion / Re: The art of finding

« Last post by Shades on July 18, 2014, 05:22 PM »

On several occasions I tried the portable version of Thunderbird, but it never would work like expected when compared with the installed e-mail client.

But that isn't your problem. MAPI is your your problem. All mail clients support this standard, it allows for a mail message being generated, with the receiver, subject, body text and optional attachment automatically filled in. That more or less leaves one job for you to do and that is pressing the 'Send' button.

It shouldn't matter which e-mail client you use as this standard is supported on all clients.

However, Microsoft, in all their wisdom, made an extended version of MAPI to make a differentiation between their idea of an professional environment (Outlook and Exchange) and well, whatever...(any mail server with any mail client).

Depending on the MAPI functionality that is called upon by the software that wants to report the error, this can become a messy story. For example: encryption on a message-by-message basis requires the extended version of MAPI. Extended MAPI is only supported in Outlook. There are a lot more mail clients nowadays being able to connect to an Exchange Server, but for crap like this you have no other option than to use Outlook. To my knowledge at least.

Also, depending on the requested MAPI functionality, only certain Outlook/Exchange combinations are allowed.

You say you have Outlook 2002 on your PC, a version that is also known as Outlook XP. This is a very old version. So old in fact that Microsoft has already dropped support for the successor of your Outlook client. With that I mean to say that even if you configure your Outlook 2002 correctly, it could still fail just because it is too old (in Microsoft's opinion, not mine).

My usual advice is to just install the Thunderbird mail client as a regular application and you will see this problem go away automatically. Personally, I'm a great fan of portable applications and happily use these on a daily basis. Portable Thunderbird? Don't bother, it's just not worth it to lose your time troubleshooting over. It is only usable when you have very basic mail needs.

1343

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by Shades on July 08, 2014, 09:50 AM »

Weren't iPhones not phones where you cannot replace the battery? That implies there is no option to remove the battery...an aesthetically pleasing listening device according to the owners...whoever that may be. 

1344

Living Room / Re: Linux User Are Evil TERRORISTS! Shame on you all! :P

« Last post by Shades on July 07, 2014, 09:38 PM »

Is it then that Linux sucks? Or that some people's grand visions (in their own minds at least) are rubbing you the wrong way?

Windows has it uses, Linuxes has it uses and BSD has its uses. Just use the better tool tool for the job. I specifically did not say best tool, because that usually feeds the trolls. After all, your opinion is not mine and therefore not necessarily better or worse.

In my experience, it is always better to drink the alcoholic beverage of your choice together and discuss. If something stuck after trying to drown it with alcohol, it might be worth your time to investigate further. Granted, that could be just me 

1345

General Software Discussion / Re: Reindexing in the background software for databases

« Last post by Shades on July 07, 2014, 09:13 PM »

@ CWuestefeld:
If my posts indicated that one should not index, I'm sorry. I was trying to convey that you better let the database software itself take care of it, that continuous indexing is a bad idea and that compromises have to be made, no matter what database software you choose.

Since Oracle 10 automatic maintenance is done quite well in my experience. MS SQL Server is a bit more work to get indexing right. I have only played with the 2012 version and reading through the manuals, both off-and online, a lot of people (incl. Microsoft) mention that making and maintaining indexes within SQL Server can be tricky. There used to be a page that described how to design indexes, but for some reason it is inaccessible at the MSDN site. That was the page where I read about the do's and dont's with indexes on SQL Server (I think).

1346

General Software Discussion / Re: Reindexing in the background software for databases

« Last post by Shades on July 06, 2014, 01:45 PM »

Sorry, with RMDB solutions (Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL and the likes) indexing might not mean what you think it means.

Database queries that often occur are put into and index. With more complex ones That quickly becomes very resource demanding. It will make your processor/core(s) work very hard and it will start to do a lot of reading and writing to disk. Those two alone will make your PC a lot slower. I know that Oracle databases can be very demanding when they are indexed. Hence they do such tasks at times when the database is not or hardly accessed and when the DB has detected that there is a lot new rows added or removed.

However, I get the impression that you think your database is slow and that indexing is the only cure. Dedicate a computer to be a database server + giving that PC lots of RAM, a decent processor and the fastest hard disks and network card(s) you can afford, together with a monthly/weekly indexing of your database will help a lot more.

Then again, if your database is badly designed, then it will be slow no matter the amount of hardware or indexing you throw at it. Database design is (a lot) more difficult than you think.

I have no experience with this type of database, but you could try to use NoSQL-based database. Perhaps that concept will help you more. What I can tell you is that with choosing your database, you will always be subject to compromise.

If you want to use a different database, and your database is small (10 GByte of storage space or less) than you can use the express version of SQL Server for free. It isn't slow and comes with quite nice management software. But if your database needs more 10 GByte of storage space, you will have to pay quite a handsome amount of money for a license. Although that is still nothing when compared with an Oracle license. Although I must say that the Oracle Express database (also free, but limited to 4GByte of storage space) is very useful.

However, Postgres is open source, not (too) limited in storage space, uses an SQL dialect and features that are quite compatible with Oracle and works on practically any operating system.

1347

Developer's Corner / Re: friend can't run progs made with .net 4.5 on his XP machine

« Last post by Shades on July 03, 2014, 09:08 PM »

From this article/blogpost I gather that it might work to have two very different versions of .net installed on your build PC. I'm not so sure how well the "targeting" will work, though.

1348

Developer's Corner / Re: friend can't run progs made with .net 4.5 on his XP machine

« Last post by Shades on July 03, 2014, 08:39 PM »

Besides upgrading the OS, not really. See MSDN article or this even more devastating one from Channel9.

I did more reading, and it might be so that you can compile your .net 4.5 code in Mono, and the result should still work on XP. That still leaves the question: do you want to have such a mix-n-match of IDE's on your build PC?


* edit: added Mono suggestion

1349

General Software Discussion / Re: Reindexing in the background software for databases

« Last post by Shades on July 03, 2014, 12:13 AM »

With Oracle there are systems in place that do maintenance tasks such as (re-)index tables when a database is idling. That is because this consumes a lot of resources and it is better that during (re-)generation as little none to as little amount as possible database transaction take place so indexes are not (too) messed up afterwards.

The online documentation with MS-SQL Server already warns against creating too much indexes as they are more likely to degrade performance than enhance it.

Enterprise class databases don't even do what you want...or warn against these practices at least.

Ath is right, proper applications don't need continuous indexing.

1350

General Software Discussion / Re: help needed: owncloud contacts on vmware with IIS

« Last post by Shades on July 01, 2014, 09:22 AM »

When you use another PC to access the host with VMWare guest bridging works best. With the Workstation product so much more is possible than with Player, with regards to networking.  

I recently had to do a test with setting up a Domino/Lotus Notes and that system wouldn't work properly using the Bridged networking features of VirtualBox (my software of choice). But enabling NAT solved that. That made me realize 2 things. First: never, ever (!) use use Domino / Lotus Notes. And second, switching from a networking feature set only took a reboot and would have saved me an hour puzzling why Domino/Lotus Notes couldn't be accessed.

This might be a peculiarity of the VirtualBox software and not even occur in VMWare/Hyper-V. Bridging is the default option to use, I am completely onboard with that, I just wanted to mention that a simple switch between networking features helped me to get Domino / Notes going.