Alan_B

Sorry From your posts I understood that you were hesitating to click a button for an update/download, I had not realised that you were faced with authorising the charge.

Why the concern ? I would fully expect that if you just proceed it would NOT cost you anything without confirming credit card details etc first. Unless of course you have signed up for a recurring annual payment which authorizes the supplier to continue charging your account until you cancel, in which case they could continue charging regardless of whether you download. That at least has been my limited experience when getting services via the internet. Alan

"system reserved partition" is a pain that you need to endure if you want Bitlocker to lock you out of your computer. "system reserved partition" is a pain - your BIOS boots into this, and this SHOULD redirect control to Windows installation in another partition, NOT ALWAYS THE CORRECT PARTITION. I have an original multi-headed Windows on a HDD, and subsequently an additional hydra-headed Windows on an SSD which became my default system drive. One day I powered up and Windows was not quite how I remembered it - I found the "system reserved partition" had transferred control to the wrong drive :angry: I think a full Windows 7 installation will by default create "system reserved partition" if it is a version (e.g. Ultimate) that includes BitLocker capability, and you have to override installation defaults to avoid the aggravation of an unwanted "system reserved partition". I fully intend to undo the aggravation on my system, but not yet - I am deterred by the thought that I will REALLY learn how to do this by the PAIN of my own mistakes

Dear Pedro Learning from mistakes is very effective. That is how I do my best learning Better to learn from other people's mistakes, but learn at every opportunity Regards Alan

I guess that you keep Avast signatures up to date. It is known for such protective software to take an interest in CCleaner activities and to slow things down. It has been known for such software to disinfect or quarantine or even delete system files due to defects in a signature update. I do not see any reason for Avast to corrupt your files, or to change the modify dates, BUT whenever CCleaner is looking inside your folders to seek and destroy, your protection may also be closely observing with a view to intercepting CCleaner actions. I think CCleaner looks at the names of files, but not the content, and if it went wrong it would delete - not corrupt or modify. Some Antivirus tools have the ability to "disinfect" a file, and an erroneous signature update might cause the A.V. to "disinfect" and thus modify and corrupt files. Does Avast have such a capability ?

You were given by an "IT technitian" what you yourself described as a recommendation to use commercial software which I refuse to name. You tried that commercial software and it helped your situation. By asking mkdevo if he had tried that type of commercial software I understood you to be endorsing its potential suitability for his situation. Sorry if that offends you but I understood you to be recommending that he risk using commercial software. Commercial software that is designed to write to his disk with the purpose of fixing bad blocks, and might well overwrite data that could otherwise be recovered by any one of many alternative data recovery utilities, which REFRAIN from writing and thus destroying what the next alternative recovery utility could rescue. Personally I have forgotten how many pure data recovery utilities I downloaded and tried before I was able to recovery everything that had been held on a 600 GB HDD. I absolutely refused to allow anything to write to that HDD until I had rescued all data. I used Windows Disk Management to change the status of the drive from ONLINE to OFFLINE, and this ensured nothing could write to the HDD whilst running under Windows. Only then did I dare to download software that I MIGHT misunderstand and inadvertently authorize to write to the HDD.

I do not know exactly what, why, or how, defraggler or any other such utility does its work. By experimentation I have some understanding of both NTFS and FAT32 under Windows 7. I believe that :- There may be pockets of "free space sectors" between files, and each pocket is UN-fragmented; When Windows copies a file it will allocate from the start of the "pocket of free space" that is nearest to "fast end" of the disc and is large enough to hold the file. If Windows can use just one "pocket of free space" the new file will be UN-fragmented. If more than one "pocket of free space" is needed to hold the file then the file is fragmented. If you defrag free space, and if Piriform mean what I think they mean, that should hopefully provide one large "pocket of free space", and thereafter all new files will be UN-fragmented until either All free space is used and no new files can be created, OR, some files get deleted creating new "pockets of free space", and only then (I think) would it be beneficial to again defrag free space. I suggest you occasionally ANALYZE, and only when the map shows that the remaining "pockets of free space" may become too small for your next copy do you need to defrag free space again. My only concern is that I cannot understand why some people complain that they defrag files, and then defrag free space, and that fragments their files.. This however may be due to Windows permission adversely affecting manipulation of system files on C:\, which should not be an issue with media files on an external drive.

Have you any evidence or reason to support your theory ? I have a totally different concept which you might like to test. If you copy a set of files from one drive to another I predict that when you run defraggler ANALYZE, you should find the quantity of detected fragments will differ between each original and its "duplicate". Regardless of the number of fragments in the original, Windows copy (move) to a different partition should automatically deliver each fragment in the correct sequence as a continuous stream of output data, and this stream of data should be transferred into the destination free space. If the destination free space is defragged BEFORE the transfer then the duplicated file should be fully defragged. Regardless of whether :- you defrag the destination free space on the intermediate drive before copying files ; or simply copy them to fragmented destination free space and then defrag ; or just copy them to fragmented destination free space and refrain from any defrag actions :- when you copy the files back from the intermediate to the original drive I predict the final output on the original drive will be perfectly defragged if you first defrag the free space on the original drive, and just as bad as (or even worse) than before if you fail to defrag its free space. I could of course be wrong - I have not tested this theory I think my experience with Windows XP was that when it compacted a file it became much smaller and :- its MD5 hash checksum was NOT changed ; BUT if I copied that compacted file to another location the duplicate was automatically expanded back to the original un-compact size. Your Mileage May Vary.

CCleaner is not designed to repair a broken browser. When my browser crashes I NORMALLY can restart and use session-restore - but sometimes not. - even though I NEVER use CCleaner when anything is broken. I do NOT think your use of CCleaner was involved in your problem, BUT it is always possible that in some situations Mozilla may crash and its session-restore feature might need something in a folder that CCleaner is configured to purge.

Why do bad things happen to good Browsers ? I am happy to use Palemoon and avoid the mad race between Beta Browsers.

@pedro30 Your recommendation (which seems to cost $99 ) MAY be of use if a disk is worn out and you cannot afford a new one. The last thing I would ever consider is risking any write action that might endanger data I wish to recover.

There is an 8.2 on the way, it may become 9.0, I think it has a name "Threshold" - but that was yesterday and today I forget. Perhaps we have been visited by a Beta Tester because Microsoft want to make their next version of Windows compatible with Piriform's range of products

1. I use a USB2 external HDD to backup 6 GB Macrium image files. One day I found that 4 out of 6 created the previous day were invalid. I had never had any problem before nor since. I conclude that USB2 plugs and sockets do NOT have the integrity of permanent IDE or SATA connections. I then switched to using TeraCopy Freeware which computes a hash checksum as it copies a file, and then reads back and computes the hash of the "duplicate" and if there is a mismatch it is ready to try again. 2. That MAY also work on Flash Drives but I have yet to test. My concern with Flash drives is that immediately after a non-Teracopy drag-drop of an audio MP3 file between an internal HDD and a Flash Drive, I used HashMyFiles from Nirsoft to compute the hash checksum of the Flash Drive and the HDD, and was staggered to find that My Flash was compute AT THE SAME SPEED (or even faster) than the HDD. I safely removed the Flash and reconnected, which flushed data from the Windows cache(s), and then the Flash Hash took the rest of the day to compute. Windows cache(s) make the system work faster - but can cause surprises. 3. So far as Imageburn is concerned, I have not updated nor used it for some time. Perhaps it has a higher integrity slow burn mode - neither noticed nor used. BUT I have used and depended upon the option to read back after the burn and validate the hash. What I do not depend upon is the life of the DVD or CD after burning. I believe that when long life is quoted it normally refers to Pressed rather than burned discs More info here :- http://www.thetradersden.org/forums/showthread.php?t=658

Beta Applications are NOT supported by Piriform Beta operating systems will probably be severely damaged From where did you get Windows 8.2

It may be wrong, but it proves that M.S. recognize that the older O.S. is far more valuable and useful than their latest half-baked attempts.

I suggest you take a harder look. On a 64 bit computer windows deceives 32 bit applications by concealing System32 and presenting to them SysWOW64 as though it was System32 SysWOW64 holds the 32 bit executables System32 holds the 64 bit executables. The REVO free version only cleans up the 32 bit applications. You need the paid for versions to clean both 32 bit and 64 bit. That at least was the situation in the past.

Only good for 32 bit applications.

I am fairly certain that you need to supply very much more information. I screen shot showing all details visible in Windows Disk Management would be very useful.

You might be able to do this for even longer than 3 years so long as nothing bad comes in from the Internet, and nothing sensitive escapes out to the Internet. I guess you could install a Network Server of some sort that could protect your XP computers from direct contact with the Internet, only releasing to the Internet the content which you choose to release, e.g. totalling blocking all the ports which XP leaves wide open for malware to penetrate and extract credit card info and Intellectual Property; and scanning everything that comes in from the Internet and totally blocking any virus. It would also be very wise to use partition image backups to recover from any user mistakes or any new malware that does penetrate before signatures are determined.

Actually my concern was NOT rogue extensions to Firefox, but that Mozilla was incorporating into Firefox the ability to automatically accept updates that APPEARED to have originated from Mozilla, and I had concerns that the bad guys might have the ability to "authenticate browser updates as coming from Mozilla" (Whatever that might mean - I just know that in the face of the unknown I prefer to avoid. )

I specifically anticipated that Firefox would be vulnerable to such hijacks when Mozilla introduced their capability to auto-update Firefox. The only thing I cannot remember is whether I ran like a scalded cat for a different browser when I realised, or whether I just felt pleased with myself because I had already totally UN-installed Firefox because I had the aggravation of needing to frequently update.

Stuff can happen when you clean the registry.

Has this become possible with version 1.50

A picture is worth more than a thousand words If you would post a screen shot of all the information that Windows Disk Management can show for this drive, we would understand the situation much better than having a series of posts and requests for clarification. Regards Alan

Some time ago I read that NTFS was more reliable than FAT because Microsoft had copied journalling and transaction logging from UNIX I believed that Microsoft would copy from others. I doubted that the result would be more reliable - UNTIL :- My Laptop with a single HDD lost all 3 off NTFS partitions and 3 off FAT32 and FAT partitions due to damage to the partition tables, and Minitool Boot Recovery CD fixed the partition tables and the MBR, and then everything worked - EXCEPTING That when Windows first booted it insisted that Chkdsk had to run on one of the FAT32 partitions, and it fixed a vast amount of corruption there. Windows tolerated all the other partitions but I ran Chkdsk anyway and the other FAT partitions had a significant amount of corruption, but the NTFS partitions just had a few minor security issues. I suggest that by removing this $Logfile the NTFS partition will be much less reliable, as bad as and possibly worse than FAT32, and it would be irresponsible for CCleaner to purge this file.