Seeking Way Back Defrag Name Assistance
-
Greetings Kind Regards I seek your kind assistance to recall the name of the product or name of the firm / web site or name of proprietor who many years ago prior to the common use of SSDs sold a highly successful Windows tool for purpose as best as I recall hard disk defragmentation. I had purchased a copy for W95. He was and I hope still is a 10x programmer if ever there was one. He wrote Windows GUI code in assembler and offered gratis several other tools some related to networks. The product had a catchy obvious name but I do not recall now and a web search for PC hard disk defragmentation fails. I am curious what he is now up to as he always had various projects in development. Thank You Kindly
That bit about using assembler sounds like Steve Gibson, who created many products, and you may be thinking of Spinrite GRC | Hard drive data recovery software [^] I still use a number of his utilities, eg quickly log off or sleep the PC. He is also very much into internet security.
-
That bit about using assembler sounds like Steve Gibson, who created many products, and you may be thinking of Spinrite GRC | Hard drive data recovery software [^] I still use a number of his utilities, eg quickly log off or sleep the PC. He is also very much into internet security.
That's him! Thank you!
-
Greetings Kind Regards I seek your kind assistance to recall the name of the product or name of the firm / web site or name of proprietor who many years ago prior to the common use of SSDs sold a highly successful Windows tool for purpose as best as I recall hard disk defragmentation. I had purchased a copy for W95. He was and I hope still is a 10x programmer if ever there was one. He wrote Windows GUI code in assembler and offered gratis several other tools some related to networks. The product had a catchy obvious name but I do not recall now and a web search for PC hard disk defragmentation fails. I am curious what he is now up to as he always had various projects in development. Thank You Kindly
-
Greetings Kind Regards I seek your kind assistance to recall the name of the product or name of the firm / web site or name of proprietor who many years ago prior to the common use of SSDs sold a highly successful Windows tool for purpose as best as I recall hard disk defragmentation. I had purchased a copy for W95. He was and I hope still is a 10x programmer if ever there was one. He wrote Windows GUI code in assembler and offered gratis several other tools some related to networks. The product had a catchy obvious name but I do not recall now and a web search for PC hard disk defragmentation fails. I am curious what he is now up to as he always had various projects in development. Thank You Kindly
Defragler?
-
Greetings Kind Regards I seek your kind assistance to recall the name of the product or name of the firm / web site or name of proprietor who many years ago prior to the common use of SSDs sold a highly successful Windows tool for purpose as best as I recall hard disk defragmentation. I had purchased a copy for W95. He was and I hope still is a 10x programmer if ever there was one. He wrote Windows GUI code in assembler and offered gratis several other tools some related to networks. The product had a catchy obvious name but I do not recall now and a web search for PC hard disk defragmentation fails. I am curious what he is now up to as he always had various projects in development. Thank You Kindly
-
That bit about using assembler sounds like Steve Gibson, who created many products, and you may be thinking of Spinrite GRC | Hard drive data recovery software [^] I still use a number of his utilities, eg quickly log off or sleep the PC. He is also very much into internet security.
That's the first name that came to mind as well. His primary tool, SpinRite, isn't about defragging disks, but data recovery. It goes directly to the hardware, and tries way harder than any OS would to try to recover data from bad sectors. He's got some recordings of himself diving into the details of how it works internally. He co-hosts a weekly podcast, [Security Now](https://twit.tv/shows/security-now), which is well worth listening to IMO if you're a geek with any sort of interest in computer security--only, without the clickbait-y headlines you'll see everywhere else. Still, he manages to find the time to keep coding, in assembler of all things, and is just about ready to release a new update to Spin-Rite (the first in nearly 20 years), if it hasn't happened yet. The first time I heard of him, I believe, he was sounding some alarms about the way MS implemented their TCP/IP stack on XP (if I recall) and people were being rather dismissive of his warnings...but in the end, that's when MS had to introduce their built-in firewall in SP2. I've been listening to his weekly podcast for years now, and clearly he's no quack, he takes the time to do his research and presents things in a logical and sound way, and he's a real stickler for accuracy. And the few times he's been wrong about anything, he's always owned up. One type of comment you'll often come across regarding SpinRite is that it can actually be harmful to the hardware, because it's trying so hard to recover data. But those comments are typically coming from those who believe their actual hard disk is worth more than the information you're trying to recover, which goes against the very reason you want a tool that tries hard to recover data from a drive that has gone bad. SpinRite also has a maintenance mode, which *is* intended to be run regularly on drives that still have life left in them. Anyway, I don't know what it is the OP was after (other than recalling the name), so I don't know if any of this is of any use. But, I've grown to be a fan, and I rarely miss an opportunity to present him in the positive light I honestly believe he deserves.
-
Greetings Kind Regards I seek your kind assistance to recall the name of the product or name of the firm / web site or name of proprietor who many years ago prior to the common use of SSDs sold a highly successful Windows tool for purpose as best as I recall hard disk defragmentation. I had purchased a copy for W95. He was and I hope still is a 10x programmer if ever there was one. He wrote Windows GUI code in assembler and offered gratis several other tools some related to networks. The product had a catchy obvious name but I do not recall now and a web search for PC hard disk defragmentation fails. I am curious what he is now up to as he always had various projects in development. Thank You Kindly
Chris - make sure CP's backups are golden. This thread is an excellent example of the priceless information that pops up from time to time.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
-
Chris - make sure CP's backups are golden. This thread is an excellent example of the priceless information that pops up from time to time.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
-
Greetings Kind Regards I seek your kind assistance to recall the name of the product or name of the firm / web site or name of proprietor who many years ago prior to the common use of SSDs sold a highly successful Windows tool for purpose as best as I recall hard disk defragmentation. I had purchased a copy for W95. He was and I hope still is a 10x programmer if ever there was one. He wrote Windows GUI code in assembler and offered gratis several other tools some related to networks. The product had a catchy obvious name but I do not recall now and a web search for PC hard disk defragmentation fails. I am curious what he is now up to as he always had various projects in development. Thank You Kindly
Your question makes me think even further back, when we could increase disk performance by formatting the disk with the proper interleaving factor. I can't remember, though: Was the interleave factor a parameter to the DOS 'format' command? Or was an external format program required? If so, what were the names of those programs? For the youngsters: Interleaving meant that 'logical' disk sectors 0, 1, 2, ... were allocated at physical sectors 0, 2, 4, ... or 0, 3, 6, ... The disk electronics were so slow that after reading sector 0, it didn't 'recover' to read physical sector 1 until its sector head had passed, so you had to wait for a full rotation of the disk to read sector 1. Maybe the disk managed to make itself to read physical sector 2 in the time it took sector 1 passed, but maybe even this was not enough; it required the time for two physical sectors to pass, with logical sectors allocated on every third physical sectors. Obviously, the skipped sectors were not unused; they were allocated for the second and third rotation of the disk. To read an entire track, the disk had to spin 2 or 3 complete turns - but without interleaving it might require as many turns as a the number of sectors per track.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
-
Your question makes me think even further back, when we could increase disk performance by formatting the disk with the proper interleaving factor. I can't remember, though: Was the interleave factor a parameter to the DOS 'format' command? Or was an external format program required? If so, what were the names of those programs? For the youngsters: Interleaving meant that 'logical' disk sectors 0, 1, 2, ... were allocated at physical sectors 0, 2, 4, ... or 0, 3, 6, ... The disk electronics were so slow that after reading sector 0, it didn't 'recover' to read physical sector 1 until its sector head had passed, so you had to wait for a full rotation of the disk to read sector 1. Maybe the disk managed to make itself to read physical sector 2 in the time it took sector 1 passed, but maybe even this was not enough; it required the time for two physical sectors to pass, with logical sectors allocated on every third physical sectors. Obviously, the skipped sectors were not unused; they were allocated for the second and third rotation of the disk. To read an entire track, the disk had to spin 2 or 3 complete turns - but without interleaving it might require as many turns as a the number of sectors per track.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
I remember those days, even the venerable 386SX. Hard to fill up that 40 meg drive. Spinrite is the only program that I remember doing it. Don't recall it being a parameter of the DOS format command.
>64 It’s weird being the same age as old people.
-
Greetings Kind Regards I seek your kind assistance to recall the name of the product or name of the firm / web site or name of proprietor who many years ago prior to the common use of SSDs sold a highly successful Windows tool for purpose as best as I recall hard disk defragmentation. I had purchased a copy for W95. He was and I hope still is a 10x programmer if ever there was one. He wrote Windows GUI code in assembler and offered gratis several other tools some related to networks. The product had a catchy obvious name but I do not recall now and a web search for PC hard disk defragmentation fails. I am curious what he is now up to as he always had various projects in development. Thank You Kindly
Me: "who would write GUI code in assembler? that's not 10x that's insane" Also me: probably guilty of writing a few lines of inline-asm, in the distant past, to thunk from a static callback function pointer to an instance-method Also also me: (closes this web page and resumes reading tutorial on WebAsm)