January 2012 in the Life of Ben (Blog)

  1. January
  2. February
  3. March
  4. April
  5. May
  6. June
  7. July
  8. August
  9. September
  10. October
  11. November
  12. December

Laptop: Disk Cleanup (18th January 2012)

The hard drive had 130GB used space at the start. By the end, it had 119GB. That’s a saving of 11GB for hardly any effort!

  1. Went to the Start menu and clicked Computer.
  2. That displayed a Windows Explorer window, showing my laptop’s drives.
  3. Right-clicked the Local Disk (C:) item and clicked Properties.
  4. That displayed the Local Disk (C:) Properties window.
  5. Clicked the Disk Cleanup button, next to the Capacity statistics and pie chart.
  6. That displayed the Disk Cleanup window.
  7. Opened the More Options tab, looked for the System Restore and Shadow Copies section, then clicked Clean up.
  8. That displayed a message box, to which I clicked Delete.
  9. The process ran, taking several seconds.
  10. When it completed I was returned to the Disk Cleanup window.
  11. Opened the Disk Cleanup tab.
  12. Ticked Service Pack Backup Files (920MB) and Temporary Files (30.9MB).
  13. Unticked Thumbnails (190MB) as that will cause thrashing in my GTA modding folders with lots of screenshots.
  14. Clicked OK.
  15. That displayed a message, to which I clicked Delete.
  16. The process ran, taking several minutes with no visible progress for over a minute on 3 occassions.

When it was completed I was returned to the Local Disk (C:) Properties window. This still said 130GB was used. Huh? I clicked OK and then opened a fresh instance of it.

Just 119GB is now used. Saved 11GB in less than half an hour of maintenance. That includes waiting for the processes and writing this entry!

  1. Opened the Tools tab.
  2. Clicked Defragment now.
  3. This displayed the Disk Defragmenter window.
  4. It tells me Last Run for Drive called C: was 23/11/2011 00:39 (1% fragmented).
  5. Does that mean it ended at 1% fragmented or is that how it started? (I can only guess it’s the latter.)
  6. Clicked Analyze disk, which is not the default action.
  7. This replaces the entry, so Last Run now says Running... instead of telling me what the last run was like. Huh?
  8. The final column is called Progress and it dutifully tells me 45% analyzed at the moment.
  9. There is no progress bar: neither in the window nor in the taskbar.
  10. The analysis completes after a few minutes.
  11. Last Run now says 18/01/2012 06:57 (7% fragmented).
  12. Should I defragment it now or not?
  13. What are the most fragmented files?
  14. How big are the most fragmented files?
  15. The tool used to tell me those things in Windows XP. Seems to be absent from Windows 7, now.
  16. I clicked Defragment Disk because such a large proportion of its data has been added and removed.

At this point I left the laptop to it. It was plugged in and power saving settings tell it to sleep after 10 or 20 minutes of inactivity. The screens are turned off after 2 minutes.

Later that day the laptop was asleep. It resumed promptly and once at my desktop, it said the Last Run was 18/01/2012 07:07 (0% fragmented). So that must be the percentage once it has finished. Hooray.

I clicked Close.

Amazing CSS3 :hover Animations (12th January 2012)

Look at these animated caption rollovers. Using Firefox 9 on a 2010 laptop makes them so smooth. Add the opacity and the fact it’s real, searchable text and I’m genuinely impressed.

A rare exception to my normal reaction to demo sites. I usually find them pointless or even harmful to what we do on commercial website. This one made me think: “Wow! Designers should see this.”

Aerobie Frisbee (11th January 2012)

Takes a rather odd technique but flies really well!

Holiday Round-Up (1st January 2012)