[Alternatives to explorer]

A bloated media player with folder views built in. However they may just be using the Explorer.exe process for this.

 

If you want to know all sorts of statistics about your mp3's and other audio you could give Foobar2000 a try, you can even have the installer extract it as a portable version which won't register any filetypes, etc. And even if the default way it looks isn't to your fancy there's bound to be a plugin for it or theme.

This! I personally use this, it's nice to be able to sort and search by different criteria such a label, year, artist, etc (anything really). It will require lots of configuration, but you can sort playlists by any criteria you want, you can also browse folders in a list view with a standard component, or try out the "Facets" component.

[What did chkdsk do?]

Hi folks,

 

I ran Defraggler a few times on my NTFS drive in Windows XP to defragment and move all files to the start of the HD. I wanted to make another partition and install Windows 7. It's a nice program by the way!

 

I noticed Defraggler listed some bad sectors, so I ran chkdsk (XP) including the scan and attempt to repair bad sectors. After a few hours it reported 0KB in bad sectors. When I came back to defrag again, I see the bad sectors are still marked and the purple MFT marker stretched from 2 blocks to like 50 blocks (and is now in a bad position near the end of the drive...).

 

I don't know much about harddrives (yet), but please give me some explanation or link me if you can help me understand what is going on here.

 

Thanks