Shocking Confession: Carnac the Magnificent is 13 levels below the publishing world’s celebrated “idiot” and “dummy” when it comes to computers.
Problem: It takes me about 45 minutes to run Ad-aware 6.0 on my PC, as this program slowly chugs through 92,000 “objects” on the C drive of my 10-gig, 500 mhz., 192-RAM, dial-up connected Tyrannasaurus Rex PC. If I want to do a full McAfee virus scan, throw in another 1-2 hours to scan about 90,000 data files—and that’s not counting the 450 megs of data I finally transferred over to CD, hoping to speed things up. Spybot is a breeze, taking only 15 minutes.
Yes, my PC is worm, Trojan, virus, and spyware free. But isn’t there a faster way to do a spyware and virus scan? Someone suggested I partition my 10-gig drive and then add a D drive. His idea is to transfer all the program files (I’m running Win2000 Pro and Office 2000), to D and keep my data files on C. That way, he said, future Ad-Aware and McAfee scans can be concentrated on a lean, mean C drive.
Does this make sense?
P.S. Another friend last year partitioned my hard drive somehow so that it was dual-bootable for Win 98/2000. When I reformatted earlier this year, I wiped 98 from the drive, but that greedy 2 gig partition still exists. How can I merge it into one 10-gig partition?
Can you recommend a simple idiot-friendly book for Carnac?
I would put your data on the D drive and programs/Windows on C, but otherwise, that’s a pretty good idea for plenty of reasons beyond just virus scanning. (Example: Windows just absolutely dies and you have to reformat. You can just reformat C:, removing Windows and programs but leaving all your data files intact and unharmed.)
For partition management, check out PartitionMagic or a similar third-party tool. Windows by itself is sorely lacking in good partition management beyond “make this partition readable by Windows” type stuff.
Anf FWIW, if you successfully reformatted and your computer is still working, you’re way above a whole mess of Idiots and Dummies.
OK, thanks. Let’s say I create a new partition and transfer all of my MS Word and Access files to the D drive and leave everything else–the MS Windows/Office program files–on C.
If I’m working on Word documents on D, will my PC automatically know that it should get the program files from C?
Assuming you’re only moving your documents and such to D and don’t move the program folders themselves, yes, everything will continue to work just fine. For example, I have a C: for Windows, D: for programs and games, E: for documents and other important files, F: for non-important files (MP3s, video clips, etc.) and G: for CD images (so I don’t have to swap CDs in and out of the drive all the time). Everything works perfectly.
The only thing you have to watch for is that a lot of programs will try to save to C: by default, which you’ll want to change whenever you make a new document. Existing documents shouldn’t have this problem, however.
"P.S. Another friend last year partitioned my hard drive somehow so that it was dual-bootable for Win 98/2000. "
You can’t always merge a new/old/empty w98 partition & a w2000 one, I tried that this week, you have to make sure both are the same FAT type first. Just get partition magic or search download.com for ‘partition’ might be some free stuff there. Might not be worth risking your data just for 2 gigs.
PM also includes a drive mapping utility, which instructs the computer where to find the files you put somewhere else.
You don’t mention how long a defrag takes. You do defrags on a regular basis right? And in Safe Mode? That speeds up stuff a lot.
The other thing to do is to make sure you have the right IDE drivers installed and configured correctly. Check with your PC or MB maker’s web site. Having “DMA” turned on is a good thing.
To gain back that waster space, the best free utility I know of is Partition Resizer. Delete the Win98 partition, resize the NTFS partition to include it.
Then run a defrag.
Having separate partitions for different purposes is a great idea. (I use 4 MSDOS partitions.) But to retroactively do it is a pain.
