About 5 months ago, way back when Vista RTM'd, I posted about how Vista now automatically defragments your hard drives. This is a really neat feature, especially since I would never remember to defrag until my system started to get noticably slow. So, I thought I would revisit this to just see how well is it working.

But, How well does the automatically scheduled defrag work?

I was wonder this, so I decided to check the defrag stats available from within the Disk Defragmenter tool. And to my dismay, they removed that display. I figured there's got to be a way; so I search my favorite search engine.

And, I found this post: Whatever Happened to ... The Defragmentation App?

Apparently, the only way to view the fragmentation stats is to use the defrag tool from the command line. Well, I guess the stats really weren't usefull to the average use, so this works; but couldn't they've just left an "Analysis Report" button in the GUI of the tool?

Steps to view the Fragmentation Analysis Report for the C drive

1. Run the Command Prompt.
   Note: Don't forget to right-click the shortcut and click "Run as administrator"
2. Type the following in the command line: defrag c: -a
3. Press Enter and in a few moments it's display the Percent file fragmentation

My results of the auto-scheduled Defragmentation after 5 months

After running Vista for 5 months and doing the usual install/uninstall and write/delete of programs and files (which usually results in about 22% fragmentation for me within a few months) I see that my C drive fragmentation is only at 1%. Looks good to me, and I haven't experienced any performance degradation over this time period either.

Conclusion

The auto-scheduling of the extremely important Disk Defragmenter tool has made my system (and presumably everyone elses) easier to manage over the long term. One less thing I need to think about (and do) is always nice; besided this is very important for those who don't even know (I'm refering to the average user) they have to run the defragmenter. Way to go Microsoft on this small improvement with such a big impact!

Does anyone know if Mac OS X can be run within Virtual PC 2007 under Windows?

I've searched and can't find any evidence of this being possible. I am thinking about possibly doing this because I would like to do some software testing on Mac OS X, and I would rather spend less for just the OS than buy a Mac Mini.

Mac OS X - $129.00
Mac Mini - $599.00

If anyone has any clues please let me know.

Update 5/22/2007:
The day I originally posted this, I also contacted Ben Armstrong, through his blog (Virtual PC Guy), and asked hime if this is possible with Virtual PC 2007. Here's the reply I got from him:

This is not possible for three reasons:

        1) Apple does not allow this in their OS licensing

        2) Mac OS X specifically checks to ensure that it is installing on Apple hardware

        3) Mac OS X requires that the computer has an APIC - which we do not emulate

Cheers,

Ben

There we go, a definate answer of No. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to look for another solution. I think I remember reading somewhere that VMWare supports it...

If I find out more into, I'll post it here.

I bought a Belkin F5D7000 802.11b/g wireless network card for my Vista x64 desktop machine. There aren't any Vista drivers on the install CD that comes with the card, so I went to the Belkin website and downloaded there "beta" driver for Vista. Well, I couldn't get that driver to work. So I then searched and found a mention that an Atheros driver will work. So I tried it.

It works! The "Atheros Wireless Network Adapter" driver that comes with Vista will work for the Belkin F5D7000 card.

When installing the driver for this card, click on the "Browse my computer for driver software". Then click "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer". Once the list of drivers comes up, select "Atheros Communications Inc." as the Manufacturer, and then select "Atheros Wireless Network Adapter" as the the driver to use.

I hope this helps anyone, whos trying to install a Belkin F5D7000 wireless network card in their Vista box, that is too lazy to return it to the store and buy one that comes with Vista drivers.

RSS Autodiscovery is a technique that makes it possible for browsers and other software to automatically find a site's RSS feed. This feature is actually support by both Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.

To make your RSS feeds auto-discoverable just include an HTML/XHTML Link tag inside the Head tag of your website. You can even include multiple Link tags, which allows you to make all your RSS feeds auto-discoverable at the same time.

For Example:
<link rel="alternative" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Pietschmann's RSS Feed" href="/blog/rss.aspx" />

The most notible effect within IE7 that this will have, is it will cause the orange RSS icon in the top right of the browser to light up. This will notify the user that your website has a feed that they can subscribe to. It makes it easier for "normal" people to subscribe to blogs.

This feature has actually been around for awhile. If you do a search, you'll find other blogs posting about it back in 2005. The reason I'm blogging it, is because I just found out that this feature exists and I figure there are still alot of people that don't know you can do this.

For more info:
RSS Advisory Board - RSS Autodiscovery