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Comment Re:Maybe it'll be Bollux (Score 1) 227

I was thinking the same thing, those three books by Brian Daly were pretty good although they take place after Han escapes from the mines with Chewie but before episode 4.

My main concern is who are they going to get to play Han, and frankly the idea that Chris Pratt could play either Indiana Jones or Han Solo; that guy is just like Will Ferrell, a dope no matter how you slice it and he doesn't have the chops to play either character convincingly.

Comment Re:Not nessesarily..... (Score 1) 517

You could as you say set a windows system to "no pagefile" and then defrag the disk and then reset the page file to a static size however depending on how much data there is on the disk that could push the pagefile farther towards the middle or end of the disk and the farther towards the end of the disk the file gets the slower access to it gets. On your average hard drive sequential reads from the end of the disk can be 10 times slower than sequential reads from the beginning of the disk. There's actually a way to determine that by using the HD Tune software which can measure performance at various parts of the drive.

The procedure I outlined of creating free space and a partition before the boot partition guarantees that the pagefile will be as close to the beginning of the drive as possible where sequential reads are the fastest.

Comment Re:Not nessesarily..... (Score 1) 517

Yes you are correct, it would take incredibly heavy use for the pagefile (set to automatic) to degrade performance in only two weeks. In general, I'm talking about time periods of months and years, in one case I saw a Windows XP machine that had a pagefile of over 10,000 pieces and was so slow that the person threatened to "throw it out the window" if I couldn't do anything about it.

Comment Re:Not nessesarily..... (Score 2) 517

I do know this for sure. There are ways to find out how many pieces the page file is in and I've seen Windows Vista / 7 / 8 that after a year or three were in hundreds and thousands of pieces and after doing the procedure I outlined and moving the page file to a partition in front of the boot partition and making it all one piece the increase in speed was noticeable.

Sorry, I'm not wrong at all. The automatic Windows defrag utility can not defrag the page file anymore than any third party software can, the page file is opened very early in the Windows startup process and once it's opened it can't be moved or defraged, the PageDefrag utility written by Mark Russinovich for Windows XP included a driver that started before almost all other processes and services and it was able to defrag the pagefile before Windows opened it but it was very limited in that it could only move the pagefile to available continuous space and if there wasn't enough continuous space for the whole thing it would do it's best to consolidate how many pieces the file was in but it could not move other files to make enough continuous space for the pagefile. Also every time you did it (this is if you had your pagefile set to automatically managed) it would keep pushing the page file farther and farther towards the end of the disk (in order to find enough continuous space) and the farther towards the end it got the slower access to it got.

The utilities that come with Windows and the Windows auto defrag that was introduced with Windows 7 do a bare bones basic job, one of the best defragers I've ever used is MyDefrag and it does a really great job, better in many cases than commercial software.

Comment Not nessesarily..... (Score 5, Interesting) 517

From many years of working with Windows PC's there's one thing I know for sure and that's that one of the major reasons for Windows to slow down over time is the default setting of the virtual memory paging file which is "Automatically manage paging file size". As the page file expands and contracts on this setting the file gets ever more fragmented and access to it gets slower. When I first setup a new computer (with Windows pre-installed) one of the first things I do is change that setting from automatic to a custom size and make the initial and maximum size the same so hopefully it's allocated all in one piece and as close to the beginning of the disk as possible where access is fastest. If a computer has been running for years on "Automatically manage" it's page file many be in thousands of pieces and that could possibly slow the computer significantly when the page file is used. There was a utility called PageDefrag for Windows XP that allowed you to defragment your pagefile but the author Mark Russinovich never updated it to work with newer versions of Windows so there is no easy way to defragment a pagefile on Windows Vista and up but one method I've used with success is to use a partition manager to reduce the size of the boot partition (pushing it farther along the drive) and create a small block of space (perhaps 40 to 60gb) in between the system reserved partition and the boot / Windows partition; after that format it and give it a dive letter like X: and then put the page file there. When you do that it's as close to the beginning of the drive as possible and at a static size Windows never has to work to expand or shrink it and it never gets fragmented.

One other thing is that the author mentions Windows 7, at the end of 2014 over about a three month period I built eight new computers for people who wanted quality hardware (all eight were identical in motherboard, CPU, RAM and hard drive) and seven of them I installed with Windows 8.1 and one the person requested Windows 7; I noticed during installation and in general using the computer with Windows 7 that it was noticeably slower than the computers with Windows 8.1 so Windows 8 appears to be faster than Windows 7 on the same hardware, at least that's my observation. (and that's Windows 7 x64 versus Windows 8.1 x64)

Another thing that slows computers down is the accumulation of temporary files, there's a tool someone recommended to me called TFC (temp file cleaner), you can find it here http://www.geekstogo.com/forum... and it really does a phenomenal job; many computers that I've used it on show marked speed improvement after running it.

Comment Random Thoughts... (Score 1) 269

I don't know what platform you use but if it's Windows just use the mail client of your choice and something like ESet Smart Security which includes a really good spam filter; I have any number of customers using it and they are all very satisfied.

As far as customer service goes, I've deal with Comcast and Verizon many many times and it's always the same. The person you're talking to seems to have no idea how to address your problem; they put you on hold multiple times while they apparently run around looking for someone who has a clue and in the end you may be transferred multiple times and after spending what seems like days on the phone you either get no help or you get disconnected. Sometimes you could swear these people are paid to be as unhelpful as possible rather than to actually help the company's customers with their problems.

There's a really good reason Comcast was voted "Most hated company" and I'm sure that Verizon and Bank of America were runners up.

Comment Re:IOS not what it used to be (Score 1) 344

Given the number of complaints on the Apple forums and the fact that not only do I have it on my iPhone 6 but five friends that I know personally with iPhone's ranging from 4s up and running IOS 6,7 or 8 are all experiencing it I would have to say you are the exception rather than the rule.

I also have one friend who was brave enough to use the "Hairdryer heat trick" to get the wi-fi working on his 4s again after upgrading to IOS 7; if you've never heard of this the see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and read the comments about how many people tried this and it worked. Please note that Apple has never really had much to say about this and disavows the heat trick; you can also see some discussion of it here https://discussions.apple.com/....

Comment Re:useless without updates (Score 1) 83

I thought from what I read that because there's so much customization by each manufacturer for each model that updates or whole version upgrades (i.e. Ice Cream Sandwich to Jelly Bean or Jelly Bean to Kitkat) have to come from the manufacturer? That you can't just install a generic version from Google and have all features work?

Comment Re:IOS not what it used to be (Score 1) 344

I respect Blackberry for many things, including some really groundbreaking phones but they really were caught with their pants down by the iPhone and just couldn't catch up, even after years of trying. There was an article I read the other day and I really wish I could find it to post the link; but it detailed all the things that Blackberry did and wrong when the iPhone first came out. To name a few, someone told the president "Did you see this new iPhone has a full web browser?" and the president was quoted as saying something like "How did they do that? How did they get AT&T to agree to that? Our carriers refuse to allow us to put a full web browser on because they say it will kill their network!". The article also detailed the debacle that was the Blackberry Storm, a year late and so failure pron that 90% were returned or had to be exchanged.

I really hope that Blackberry can recover (also because I have several of my clients using the Alt-N MDaemon mail server and Alt-N was bought by Blackberry years ago and I'd really hate to see them get bought up by MS because I'm sure they'd kill the MDaemon because it's an Exchange competitor) but their reputation has suffered so badly in the last five years I don't know if that's possible.

Comment IOS not what it used to be (Score 1) 344

Just read the Apple IOS forums and you'll see that there are a lot of die hard Apple customers that are getting ready to jump ship because of a slew of problems in IOS ever sine version 6. The most annoying and complained about problem is the wi-fi connectivity problem; I've experienced that myself and suddenly you'll lose internet via wi-fi and cellular internet grinds slowly to a halt; the "fix" is to shut off and restart the phone (almost sounds like Windows, reboot when things aren't working right). This problem is definitely an IOS problem since people who had no problems on their device and then updated to the new IOS because they were tired of constantly being nagged to do so suddenly found their internet stops working at regular intervals and have to reboot. This problem has been going on seriously since IOS 7 and seems to have gotten worse in 8 and none of the updates Apple has put out to IOS have really addressed the problem and people are mad that these problems are not being addressed.

On the other hand if iPhone users start migrating to Android phones they'll find out that Android has some problems of it's own that really needs to be addressed.

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