Win2K Idiosyncrasy

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from ---  on Fri, 10 Jan 2003 14:17:52 +0100

Manuel:

> Under W2000K (and only under W2000K)
> sometimes I hear a soft ticking and it seems like my system had some
> problem with the hard disk. Usually, it's only a moment and the system
> continues to run without more trouble but occasionally it leads to a
> system crash.

Are you sure they're related events?

> In this case I have to reset. I mentioned this point to a
> cousin that works under W2000K and she said that it's a typical
> NT/2000K/XP problem related to virtual memory management. He said it was
> related to a kind of garbage collection, reorganizing pieces of memory
> assigned to programs and afterwards releasing them. Due to a operating
> system design fault, memory is becoming very fragmented and a loss of
> performance increases when the system is left a long time without
> restarting. He recommends that I restart under those circunstancies to
> guarantee a well organized virtual memory. I don't know if it's true but
> it sounds believable. Not to mention that I have never suffered anything
> like this in my experiences with Linux. Glory to Bill.

Indeed. Well, I hear that ticking too, on all my W2K machines, from time to
time. If hard drives still made a lot of noise, we'd call it grinding. I
suppose everybody hears it. Your cousin is right: the machine is organizing
PAGEFILE.SYS. You minimize this phenomenon, as I have previously mentioned
once or twice, by setting the opening size of PAGEFILE, and the maximum size,
to the same value, and making it a liberal amount -- the rule of thumb [isn't
that a great phrase, "rule of thumb"? an English inch was originally measured
from the tip of the thumb to the first joint] is to set PAGEFILE to 1.5 times
the size of installed RAM. You might also run Disk Defragmenter on every
drive. Erunt has a nice utility called NtRegOpt.EXE, which optimizes the
Registry - that's worth running from time to time.

BUT! If it really *is* responsible for your system crashing, then your hard
drive may be going south (you would get error 0000000Cx -- "Unknown Hard
Error"). There Is Still Time, Brother! Act before you find yourself on the
beach. Use Start==>Programs==>Accessories==>System Tools==>Backup (which works
quite well, and is bloody fast) and start archiving your logical drives to a
backup hard drive or another networked machine. If you need to replace your
hard drive completely, and want to recreate your present system in all
respects, all you need to do is make a note of all drive sizes and file
systems, use Erunt (look for it on Google) to backup the Registry (the only
thing that W2K Backup doesn't do accurately), backup all the logical drives,
then swap in a new hard drive, install a minimal W2K system onto it from CD
(just enough to get connectivity with whatever you used as a backup location),
the restore all the backups, and finally restore the registry (ERDNT). Takes
about an hour altogether.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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