TheWebAtom

Based on the forum you've posted this in (CCleaner for Mac), I don't think you need to worry. Mac OS X has a daemon that runs silently in the background performing maintenance tasks, including disk defragmentation. Newer Macs use solid state hard drives (SSD) which do not suffer from fragmentation problems as described above. They do, however, suffer from a limited number of IO cycles - I still wouldn't worry though; they're more resilient than most people think.

Does the Kindle Fire have an option allowing you to connect it in "Mass storage mode" or something similar?

A very simple Google search will reveal how dangerously misinformed that advice is.

This can be achieved very easily. Creating a new instance of a Windows API and running it somewhat isolated to other instances can be achieved with about four lines of code in any decent language. (See also: Encapsulation.) I think you've hit the nail on the head right there. With a bit of engineering effort, this could be overcome (as you said); but it's the kind of thing that takes time to develop. You could get it working quite easily by querying WMI for all the physical drives, then match up all the partitions to drives and lock concurrent defragging for drives that share a physical disk. You only have to look to Piriform's Speccy to see how hit-and-miss querying WMI can be. There's a whole forum here demonstrating that WMI sometimes returns incorrect information. In the context of Speccy, the wrong information is a minor annoyance. If you were concurrently defragmenting drives based on the aforementioned misinformation, it would be a disaster.

Most likely situation is you've changed the overwrite method from one pass to multiple. Go to Options -> Settings and make sure secure overwrite is set to "Simple Overwrite (1 pass)" The other possibility is you've utterly thrashed your hard drive by zeroing it out far more frequently than you should.

That is the coolest thing ever.

'Intelligence Officer.' I could do that job. If Hollywood has taught me anything; it's that I wouldn't want to do that job. But I could.

To be fair, a link to the BleachBit (we're allowed to mention that here, right?) forums should also be added to the top of the file. Andrew's users could get confused about the proper support channels too.

I don't understand why they keep turning up here...

I wish WebP would take off.

There is a Microsoft .NET Framework Repair Tool, but I have no idea if Microsoft are still maintaining it.

I don't think they're going to have a choice. I don't see Malwarebytes continuing to offer definition updates for legacy versions of their scanning engine.

Major/sub major/minor is pretty standard for software projects.

In terms of invasiveness, OpenCandy is probably among the most respectful of users' wishes. As long as people have an expectation that software is free (or extremely cheap), we're going to be stuck with these sorts of advertising companies. Full disclosure: OpenCandy accounts for roughly 10% of my annual income.

If all you have to do to remove them is visit half a dozen different websites, I hardly see this as a big deal.

One word. LiteSpeed.

Exactly what Apple does with Safari, then. Nice!

I've never encountered this problem.

.icns files are an image format that's not supported by Windows. It's the Mac OS X equivalent of .ico files.

The same NSA that purposely weakens encryption standards so they can hack them with less effort?

This thread is amazing; no 'my sister's boyfriend's brother was looking at sketchy stuff,' just straight to the point. But seriously, as Nergal said; you're fine. In order to be convicted of a "looking at bad pictures" crime the authorities need to prove the legal principle of Mens rea; which simply put, is the intention to actually commit a crime. Law enforcement agencies lack the resources to investigate every accidental browser click or popup, so the majority of cases are ignored unless intent can be proved easily. As for overwriting the drive; the best recovery tools can restore data if you do one overwrite pass or 35. The worst recovery tools can't restore data from one overwrite, let alone 35. Taking that into account, any overwriting process beyond a single pass is largely superfluous. The only method effective against all recovery tools is physical destruction of the drive. mta's sea water idea is nice, but I've always been fond of fire. So many choices, so few illegal activities! Just use private browsing next time.

I admit to being wrong on two separate occasions in my life.

This guy could re-release Microsoft BOB and I'd still respect him more than I do Ballmer.

I don't think it's even technically possible for a 3rd party app to delete files from the RT filesystem. Although I could be wrong; it's happened twice before.

Yeah, I used an updated version of the Visual Studio compiler. It's interesting to note that the output was 40% bigger, even before I made changes to the code.