New NT Utilities | Suite101.com

In case you haven't noticed, this topic is now bi-weekly instead of weekly, and will remain so for the near future. And of course, a bevy of items came up in the last few weeks that need to be touched on, so this week's article is sort of "choppy". Maybe the NT world will calm down over the Christmas holiday. :-)

New Memory Optimizer for NT

Sunbelt Software has a new optimization tool available for NT 4 (Workstation and Server): RamCharge for NT. You can download it to try until the end of the month (12/31/97), and it reportedly boosts memory performance by upwards of 200%. It's a smallish download, and the cost is reportedly going to be on par with a disk optimizer, so it's worth a look.

New Disk Optimizer for NT

You've probably heard about PerfectDisk NT by now: it doesn't just defrag your files, but also moves the most-used files to the front of your disk (for faster disk reads) the way that Norton Utilities' optimizer used to do for DOS/Win 3.x. Furthermore, it claims to "controls fragmentation rates", and since Sunbelt's patented that technology, I assume it has to do with the algorithm NT file systems use to "space files out" when writing them to disk (so as to avoid fragmentation of files by allowing a file to grow).

Anyway, you can download a 2.5MB trial version (15 days) to try it out (the retail version is about $400). Visit www.raxco.com for more information.

Make OLE Files Smaller

While on the topic of disk optimization: if you've ever worked with OLE [compound] files, you've probably noticed how large they can grow, and you've also probably seen that "removing" the OLE components doesn't necessarily shrink the file size. According to a PC Magazine Utilities article, the "average Microsoft Office user loses 1MB to 20MB of hard disk space because of compound file fragmentation." That sounds low to me! PC Mag provides a free utility to "unfrag" these compound files (available for download from the same page) -- well worth a download.

Windows Scripting Host Available

Windows Scripting Host for NT 4.0 is available for download, complete with example scripts in both javascript and visual basic script. Get your hands dirty... it'll be integrated into NT 5.0 -- but be forewarned that it doesn't provide for file management (ie, you still need the command line BAT or CMD files for that, I guess). I've read rumors, however, that WSH might be improved in that capacity by NT 5.0 launch, and if so, learning to script with it now can't hurt in the least. The example scripts are well documented, and provide a decent means of getting the feel for vbscript and javascript in an OS environment.