Refurbishing our Laptop - pt 2

As I was saying in my previous post, I thought I was really fortunate to find System Mechanic.  Not only could is clean up the registry but it also had at least a dozen other utilities necessary to "tune up" a computer.  Many other companies have these programs also but they want to change  you another fee for them.  On the other hand, having so many tools meant that I could now use them to continue improving the status of the laptop.

However, as I began using all these tools I found that many of them seem to be more smoke and mirrors or simply duplicates of what is in Windows.

An example of the latter: disk inspection and fix.  Not only does this procedure take a horribly long time but the report results looks a little familiar. After running it several times, it hit  me.  It was the old DOS program CHKDSK.  This is the program we used to use in DOS when it looked like the hard drive was beginning to act flaky.  It could be run in a test only mode or a test and automatically fix mode.  And it has been included in Windows Vista under Computer>C:>Properties>General Tools.  Defragmentation is there also.  Of course one of the advantages of a program like System Mechanic is that it gives you another way to access these programs since Windows can be a bit obscure.

Speaking of dis defragmentation, I think this is an example of smoke and mirrors.


When you begin the defrag process you see a display of both the "entropy" (bar chart on the left) and the fragmentation (stadium chart on the right) of the disk.  I've never seen such pretty defrag charts although I'm not sure what they really represent and whether they are meaningful or not.

I do know that after six hours there was a significant change in both charts.  And according to the legend, the changes indicated progress.

After another six hours there was still more evidence of change but it seemed like we were getting increasing less progress per unit of time.  And what was worse was that when I restarted the process, the entropy graph reverted back to almost the first graph in this series.  The entropy, however, they've defined it, does not appear stable.






Of course, the computer itself may not be stable.  One day it goes into so many infinite loops that we're ready to trash it and the next day it works perfectly - still slow but not dead.