Thats the price you pay for flexibility.   Macs dont have malware/virus'es because of two reasons, one being the marketshare isnt large enough to be a worthwild market for malware authors, and 2ndly because of the limited means to develop under the OS.  Malware is possible, software regardless will always have room for human error which allows security vulnerbilities.

The difference with Windows is it is a open development platform, you can use Assembly, C/C++, Pascal, Basic to build native applications that interface easily to one another without restrictions, and with this freedom to the developer comes the freedom to be evil.  As google says 'Dont be evil'.   No AV software will ever be free, AVG/Avira/Avast are all designed with intention to upsell their commercial products with added features.  No AV company can afford to operate on nothing by collecting samples, pulling them apart and writing signatures, so on the Windows platform, until either a Open Source av becomes available that is built as a collective effort (ie. unlike MyDefrag it requires a group effort to keep ahead of the malware distributors) or a commercial AV is built benefiting from banner/clickthru revenue (ie. The google of Antivirus), we have accept that these AV companies need to exist commercially to protect us sufficiently until a qualifier exists if we wish to have the freedom that the Windows OS offers

Tool, Symantec AV /IS was rewritten from edition 2009 due to that public conception of bloat that it did give the end user.  The 2009 edition is vastly improved in both resource usage both in memory and cpu utilization.  Its detection rates both proactive and signature based are one of the highest in the market, so come out of 2008 mate and stop talking out of your bum. Avira currently rates best for antivirus, although the false positives are still a little too high but have been improving each year whilst retaining its excellent detection rates.

MSE was born from Microsofts recognition of the ROI on Onecare was not worth keeping it based on its need to play catch up on signature patterns and have a commercial product thats inferior to competitor products that fails to protect its end user, effectively causing branding damage to Microsoft's name.  So they converted the domestic version to MSE and made it free, hoping to make it die quietly. Thats the story behind it.

In terms of the future of virus/malware protection, it will eventually be dependant on cloud computing, which eliminates zero day threats and enables effective whitelisting by Hash/MD5/CRC'ing of applications rather than chasing against polymorphic designed malware that increase overhead on the AV software to detect.

Thanks guys for the feeback.

As an example, when one has two physical drives, it is recommended to set the paging file to the phsyical drive that doesnt host the OS.  I was assuming it was a bandwidth increase rather than freeing the dominant partition's need to dual task normal disk activity and paging.

So in short, excluding ram and cpu overheads, there would be minimal gain from defragging two physical drives simultaneously under IDE/SATA configurations because these defrag API moves pull data into memory and then send them back to the disk and this bandwidth should be at its peak defragging a single drive.

lol

Writing your own defragmentation API is a calling to be put in jail for screwing up a lot of peoples computers.  Its a task that is endless in dilemma's and considerations.

The only scenario this would be feasible is a boot defragmentation, which is redundant for Vista and Windows 7.

Got a question regarding defragmenting multiple drives at once.

Below are some physical drive combinations, say C: on one physical drive and D: on the other physical drive.  In terms of defragmenting these drives simultaneously, which combinations would not defrag any quicker due to bus limitations (bandwidth) (also assume the machine has 4gb ram to support mydefrag running twice)?

Two physical drives, one is Master and the other Slave, connected with a interface (IDE) cable

Two physical drives, one is Master, the other is Master, connected each with their own interface (IDE) cable (IDE channel 0 and IDE channel 1)

Two physical drives, one is SATA0, the other is SATA1

Two physical drives, one is Mater on IDE channel 0, the other is SATA0

Jeroen,

I now officially like MyDefrag over JKDefrag    .  I certainly see your later releases making leaps and bounds in performance, which is great, I hope there is more to come.  Thanks for your efforts and hard work.

First thing is with the front end, when you select the MyDefrag script type, it would be better not to change the all the drives to being ticked.  When the program starts, certainly have it tick all the drives, but when clicking between the script types, a user may of preselected their drives first, then want to change the script second.

Second thing (Im double checking this to be sure), I chose to do a monthly on my C,D,E,F,G,H drives before I went to bed, upon waking up, it was sitting with finished on the Drive C.  Im running this again now to confirm this behaviour.

Thanks again Jeroen.

MyDefrag has a higher payload on resources and in my experience is slower at processing a Slow Optimize to a "-3" optimize with JK.

Generally speaking MyDefrag uses less memory and less CPU, and is faster than JkDefrag. You are comparing the MyDefrag SlowOptimize with the JkDefrag FastOptimize, not a fair comparison.

Whoops, my bad (never used that saying b4), I thought they were apples.  Thanks for pointing that out.  Still, I'm skeptical as a programmer how you've managed to curve the cpu overhead incurred by the use of your custom scripting language, I would assume that each file move needs to be evaluated by your script parser based on the script variables, whereas JKDefrag was hard coded by seperate functions specific to the zone they were working.  But I have faith in you Jeroen, I will just assume in my mind that that penalty is corrected by code optimizations elsewhere.

Also, going back to community collaberation efforts to JKDefrag, I would contribute, however *looks around* I code predominantly in VB, and I struggle to migrate.  Its more an acquired taste, but I consider myself a hardcore VB programmer, using ASM injections, undocumented pointer functions, that kind of stuff.  BUT if someone ported those Windows Defragmentation API's to a DLL that could be used by VB6, I would certainly have a shot at building a defragmentation algorithm to compete with Jeroen. http://www.programmers-corner.com/tutorial/4

JK and MYD both use the windows defragmentation API.  Im assuming some of the algorithms used to negotiate moves and find fragments were carried from JK into MYD during build, and that additional code was layered to support the script nature of it.  But Im also assuming that there were bugs tweaked along these development paths that could be passed back through to JK in its sorting algorithms and ability to perform more proficiently.

Again, JKDefrag is faster because its a "one use fits all" program, MyDefrag has a higher payload on resources and in my experience is slower at processing a Slow Optimize to a "-3" optimize with JK.

JKDefrag can still be a worthwild project to continue with, designed with its "one use fits all" approach tackling optimization and speed as its core selling point and adding new features that will improve the benefits of a hard disk defragmentation (ie. Prefetch defragging).

I think theres a lack of gratitude to Jeroen and his efforts.  He entered this project of creating a defragger and did open source it, however after seeing people rebranding the product and selling it commercially on ebay and other places online, its kind of a kick in the guts to know someone else has just taken your work, made money from it and now the end user is also bribed.

Respect Jeroen's decision, the software is still free and he deserves control over his efforts.

I however do understand your reasoning with the benefits of open source, it would certainly steamroll optimization, bug hunting and idea's into a fantastic solid product.  For me, MyDefrag compared to JKDefrag is a lot slower and I expected that with the script processing changes Jeroen implemented, which I tried to emphasis when it was in development that I was against, however I RESPECT that its Jeroen's baby and he see's the benefit in flexibility for the end user rather than a one solution fits all program.

Id like to see Jeroen and the community continue on JKDefrag as a open source "HOME" based defragger that improves its speed, efficiency and adds new features like Prefetch (boot) defragmentation and the like.  In such a scenario, Jeroen could contribute to JKDefrag's source optimizations in sort algorithms and vice versa, he can take improvements from the community bred variant JKDefrag and utilize them into his MyDefrag.

Thats my two cents, and I hope that idea takes off.  My idea of perfect software is optimized code & small compile.  Ive always loved the saying "An inventor knows he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".

Im sorry, but I couldnt help comment.

Seeming Im no longer a regular, Im going to do the honours...

Your ranting and its oozing too much over confident cockiness.   Bad Sectors are that, areas of the disk that are NOT repairable, sure you can remove the flag that classifies it as a bad sector, but its still physically faulting in that area of the platter.  I say you don't have bad sectors at all, rather file system corruption.  If you truely have bad sectors and hundres of thousands of them, and they appeared out of no where, then you better rap your hard disk in ice, and do what Jeroen said and use GetDataBack, or failing that SpinRite for reading the damaged sectors by moving the head in particular motions to increase the likihood of reading the magnetic data correctly, cause your disk is on its last legs.

In your instance, bad sectors in your quantity will certain produce 'grown defects' rapidly.

By the way, that clicking sound is not a feature.

Ok, first my drive doesn't do clicking sounds and I know a truckload about that dreaded clicking sound. I have to disagree with you about Bad sectors as completely unrepairable. Physical bad sectors, Sure, but NOT magnetic bad sectors. Most bad sectors are magnetic in nature and 97% of hard drives are repairable with a simple software as I stated earlier. These softwares are not popular simply because hard drive companies make them shut up by every means so to sell more new drives! Only PC repair shops buy those bad sector repair softwares and YES, they work!

As for physical bad sectors, people don't normally start throwing their drives around and platter surfaces are designed to work for 10-15 years under normal usage.

Heat is the main culprit in demagnetizing sectors. It's an over time thing and dependant on how much you use your PC.

My drive is OK now after remagnetizing surface and bad sectors have all been repaired and I also reset the allocation table so that windows sees no bad sectors, however I agree that temps are too high on that drive after checking it out. I would have never posted here if I had only checked the temps first. Heat over time was the culprit and demagnetized almost the whole surface thus so many bad sectors. I need a new drive simply.

Now, If only they can start selling those Solid State Drives at a more affordable price.

Your drive is OK now after remagnetizing surface?  Are you kidding me?  Your telling me your software can modify the physical properties of a disk platter? LOL

Bad sectors are there and there to stay, either rust, dust or areas that loose their magnetic capability.  If your hard disk miraculously has bad sectors that dissapear after a repair, it would be either:

1. The bad sector will now be invisible until the next write/read request occurs and the OS determines a CRC issue.

2. The firmware or SMART of the hard disk has intelligently pointed that bad sector to a reserved space on the disk, just as they do when they are released new with defects.

When a disk gets bad sectors, you get rid of it quick because of 'grown defects', you don't persist with it and attempt to repair them.

If your adament on remagnifying disks, then please, prove me wrong and show me how you go about remagnifying a disk with software or otherwise (Please post some links).

oh, and the error code 0xc0000005 is a common bsod error code that holds particular value to a faulty memory module.  Maybe with prefetching combined with MyDefrag's (sorry Jeroen) bloatiness memory allocation requests its hitting on the same spot of the memory module thats faulting, but because its memory allocated in usermode it doesnt bsod?

Try this:

Rename the MyDefrag executable JKDefrag.exe and try again.    Could be a rule set to disable execution of that executable, not sure how or why one would exist, but its another possibility for a executable failing to launch.

NOOOOOO!

Your doing it again just like you did with JKDefrag!

Its 4.01 not 4.1 , cause when you hit 4.9 and you go to 4.10, it doesnt look right.

Please, please be careful when you suggest that people delete .log files.

While some of them are simply logs in the traditional sense, some of them are the transaction logs (aka journals) for the transactional database files that make up the SAM and the registry. Removing them at the wrong time can mean the difference between a seamless and unnoticed journal replay at boot-time, and a PC that needs windows reinstalled.

Interesting Jimbo, got any links for more information on this behaviour, and more specificly, the scenarios where this journaling is critical.  I assume its something like Windows Updates.

Cheers

Im sorry, but I couldnt help comment.

Seeming Im no longer a regular, Im going to do the honours...

Your ranting and its oozing too much over confident cockiness.   Bad Sectors are that, areas of the disk that are NOT repairable, sure you can remove the flag that classifies it as a bad sector, but its still physically faulting in that area of the platter.  I say you don't have bad sectors at all, rather file system corruption.  If you truely have bad sectors and hundres of thousands of them, and they appeared out of no where, then you better rap your hard disk in ice, and do what Jeroen said and use GetDataBack, or failing that SpinRite for reading the damaged sectors by moving the head in particular motions to increase the likihood of reading the magnetic data correctly, cause your disk is on its last legs.

In your instance, bad sectors in your quantity will certain produce 'grown defects' rapidly.

By the way, that clicking sound is not a feature.