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Vance Hunt
has provided home-user help desk style support for his consulting company for over 6 years. Making his home in beautiful Southern California, Vance provides general computer Q&A for users via his weekly column.
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 | Friday, January 16, 2009 |
| Vista just keeps making friends. |
| By Vance Hunt |
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I've had it. I am so sick of having to change folder views in Vista,
which doesn't seem to matter as it seemingly isn't sticky and always goes back
to whatever it wants. Why isn't this like it was in XP?
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 You are so not alone. This is (still) one of the major complaints I
hear from users when they are working with Vista for any length of time.
Fortunately, it has annoyed enough people that a "solution" is available.
This solution, however, has the limitation of removing any folder views you may
actually want en lieu of a generic folders view. Personally, I don't mind
this, but others that work heavily with graphics or music might.
I'm not claiming authorship for this patch, you can find the entire process at
Annoyances.org. But to nutshell it out:
1 - Close Windows Explore
2 - Download (Save to desktop)
ResetExplorer.exe
3 - Execute and follow the prompts.
4 - Download (Save to desktop)
ChooseTemplate.reg
5 - Double-click to import
6 - Open the Windows Explorer, Tools | Folder Options | View and make your
"Default Folder Template" entry look like the picture.
Happy browsing.
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Is it possible to defragment an XP/Vista hard drive when you have started the
computer from a boot disk using the native utilities?
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The short and unhelpful answer is "no", or possibly "not easily". I'll
break it down like this:
It's 2009 and by now any administrator worth their salt has stopped using the
MS-DOS LAN Manager boot disks from 20 years ago. That 8 / 16 -bit
environment served it's purpose well, but is truly a hindrance to today's
hardware and Windows OSs. Since 2004 you should have made the move to
BartPE, and by now
dumped even that for a
WinPE solution. If you haven't, look into it now - you'll be amazed at
what you can now do and access from a boot disk when you're working in an actual
32 or 64 bit environment.
That said, you need to be in a 32 or 64 bit environment to really run decent
tools these days, and that includes defragmentation tools. Now, I've
played around with getting the native defragmentation tools to work when I'm
booted in my PE environment, and although I'm sure there are tutorials out there
on how to hack out all that is needed and load/configure those items within your
PE WIM (or ISO) - what a pain. There are other single-executable utilities
out there that will do what you want with minimal fuss.
On your PE disk or a keychain USB drive or whatever else floats your boat,
download and unzip
JkDefrag.
Boot your Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/X64 to your PE environment and launch
their executable. No fuss, it just goes and defrags. A quick note,
if run without command line options, it defrags EVERYTHING. This certainly
isn't bad, but may come as a surprise if you all of the sudden find yourself
defragging your 1.5 TB USB drive that you left connected when all you wanted to
do was defragment your 20 GB Windows partition. Information on this
product is clear and solid, and best of all, it's free. Give it a whirl.
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