TPFH's Journal: The Importance of Being Defragged

OK, so I'm late in discovering the world of downloadinv via bit torrents. I started last week and have gone a little crazy. I haven't been called by my ISP yet (knock wood).

But I think I screwed up one of my harddrives because of this. Maybe it was running too many torrents at the same time. Maybe it was copying files to the harddrive while running multiple torrents. It is an external USB harddrive. Last night I was really worried I might have a virus or something because things were running obviously slow in places.

Today I had the bright idea that maybe I should run scandisk on the drive because some folders disappeared or were renamed weird.

As far as I can tell the worst of the dammage is I lost a lot of filenames. The data seems to be intact, including my emusic.com collection, and the id3 tags for the jazz I personally ripped, and then tagged with precise detail of who composed, and who performed on each song. (Easier for some albums than others.)

And I think the tagging program I'm using can rename the files automatically while I sleep or something.

Just another reason I prefer Unix. But I haven't gotten bittorrent to run under linux yet. I'm thinking of upgrading. I didn't want to upgrade because everything was working good, except now sometimes when I try to install software I can't find it. (I tried to install bittorrent. It says it is insalled, but torrent and bittorrent are not working at the command line. Neither is bt. Sometimes people make the command to execute the program different from the programs name. OK, I haven't run across that very often but when I do it annoys the fsck out of me.) But Mozilla isn't being responsive lately in Linux. Sometimes I have to click repeatedly on a link, and some of the java/javascript stuff isn't working. I can't search UBL in Mozilla in Linux, some I'm thinking of upgrading to the latest Mandrake.

I'd like to try Debian, but I think I'll wait until I get my next box, which might be a while since I'm unemployed. One thing I'll tell you about the next box I get built for me, it will have drivebays or whatever they are called for the harddrives so I can get a bunch of harddrives and experiment with OSs when I want to.

I guess I'm rambling on tonight. I'm feeling a little down. I would say it is not the holiday, because I hate the holidays (long story, don't ask). But for the past few years I've had someone to spend them with and AFAIK I'll be alone tomorrow. OK, the money thing is really starting to worry me. I think I'm going to go back to school and get loans to get by until I figure out something better. Unemployement in PDX is now like 9%, and that's only the offical statistic.

But anyway. I installed Norton Speeddisk to optimize my external harddrive that was having problems. It said it found something that needed to be fixed, and wanted to run Norton Disk Doctor to fix it. Well, I didn't install Norton Disk Doctor because when I had it installed on my older computer it froze the computer every time it ran, and it replaced Scandisk as the default "check out the harddrive when it needs to be checked" program, so evertime I win95 crashed and I had to reboot inproperly, I had to be really quick about hitting F9 (or is it F8 I can never remember) to manually run scandisk or my computer would just freeze up. So right now I'm running Defrag and hope that fixes it. Otherwise I'll do the long scandisk tonight or something.

But it got me to thinking that if you use p2p software, especially if you use a specific harddrive mainly for p2p stuff, it is going to have fragmentation hell, and I haven't defragged this harddrive since I started using it.

So remember, defrag your harddives regularly, say once a month?

Norton Speed Disk is good too, but I refuse to install any of the other Norton Utilities from bad experiences in the past. Antivirus is good. One time when I tried to uninstall Norton Utilities using Norton Uninstall it FUBARed the computer. Fortunately I didn't lose anything really valuable.

(I now await the lawsuit from Symantec.)

linux

[sillypixie]

I haven't tried Debian, but I'm pretty impressed with SuSE..

I'll have to defrag my laptop, I'm sure it is a disaster right now. It is slow-as-molasses, but I've blamed that on the antivirus software.

Anyways, I have nothing particularly interesting to say - but I thought you might like to know that people are listening (-:

Pixie

Re:linux

[TPFH]

Anyways, I have nothing particularly interesting to say - but I thought you might like to know that people are listening (-:

Thanks.

There were times I was tempted to comment in your journal, but didn't feel I had much to say, or much to say beyond what others had already said. I sometimes have a minimalist attitude.

Mostly you would express frustration about job stuff, and I felt both sympathy, and envy at the same time as I really want to break into software engineering.

I guess I need to stop thinking