Stuff like this is cool.

How random is this? You're on a flight from Nassau to Toronto and just happen to witness a space shuttle launch. I love stuff like this. Life can be so cool sometimes.

New PC or just defrag?

We have one Windows XP system in the house. Over recent months it was getting slower and slower. Once booted up, which was taking longer and longer, the performance rapidly degraded.

I was in the habit of looking at the thing darkly and imagining the day I would replace it with a "real PC".

Instead, I went through it and freed up about 15% of the disc space, including wiping out all but the in-use *.tmp files. Then, I booted to Safe Mode and ran a defrag...hoping this would allow the files normally in use in a conventional boot to be movable.

The defrag ran for hours as the disc I/O in Safe Mode is a fair bit slower than in a normal boot.

But it was well worth it. The system now runs like a fresh install. It's responsive, moves between apps quickly and we can switch between users in seconds instead of minutes as had been the case.

The system is a 1.6Ghz AMD Athlon with 512MB of RAM. I'm guessing the amount of memory used for disc caching is now being used much effectively once the file system was defragged.

Now WinXP feels almost as fast as Ubuntu Linux 9.10 on the same system.