You are sitting at your computer, fiddling with your keyboard or mouse, perhaps deep in thought contemplating the next move of your game sprite or trying to come up with the perfect phrase for your next ComputorLink article, and then you hear it: The Noise. It is maybe not a loud noise, or a harsh noise, but it is a different noise, and it is definitely emanating from the bowels of your beloved computer.
The first thought that goes through your mind is: Disk Crash! And instantly the second thought is, when the heck did I last back up this thing?
In my case, I smirk, I sneer, because on my computer, I have a tape drive, and a second disk, and I am very faithful to backing up the volatile contents of the primary disk onto the second one, and am somewhat faithful in backing up the whole disk to tape. Go ahead and crash, I say scornfully, because I needed a bigger disk anyway, and for only about $200 I can get multi gigs now.
But then you remember that there is really no easy way to restore a whole disk If you are using the backup program that came with Windows 95, you are really completely out of luck. It will not write over the OS when restoring a backup, I am told. If you are using the Arcadia backup program, the first third party program to become available that would handle long file names when W95 came out, you remember that the advertizing said that you could restore your whole disk with this product. But, to restore it requires that you have W95 running on your system. And, if you are like most of us that had computers before W95 came out, you realize that what you have is a W95 upgrade from Windows 3.1, which cannot be loaded onto a blank system.
So, what you are looking forward to is, first loading your old DOS OS, after finding the drivers for the tape drive and your cdrom drive, and then maybe loading up Windows 3.1, and then using your upgrade disk to load a copy of W95, and then finally using that to restore your disk from your tape.
The sneer disappears. The smirk becomes a frown. Your disk crash, if it happens, is going to take the better part of a whole day to get your life back in order. Best to figure out just what is happening.
In my case, the funny noise was that of the disk arm thrashing back and forth, for no apparent reason. And I was blasted if I could figure out just why it was doing it. There were no programs running at the time, at least as far as the taskbar indicated. For some time, I could reboot the computer, and nothing out of the ordinary would happen for about three days, when all of a sudden the disk decided to run around the block for a few hours.
In the minicomputer business, you have a whole pile of system utilities to let you know more than you ever would want to know about just what is going on in your system. For one thing, there is a process list command line function of some sort. Some systems will gather statistics at regular intervals which you can play back later, to find out such things as CPU availability and disk activity. Even Windows NT has a few such utilities. W95 has little or none. You can do a three finger salute on the keyboard and bring up what they laughingly call the Task List, but as I later found out, this shows only a small fraction of the total programs actually running at any instant of time in your system, and it tells you nothing about the activity of those tasks.
It seems like Microsoft programmers realized this, even if Microsoft managers did not. An article in Infoworld newspaper turned me on to a set of downloadable utilities that you can get off the internet. I had known about a series of programs named Power Toys, but this article told me about a companion set of tools known as Kernel Toys. All of these are available on the Microsoft web site for downloading (www.microsoft.com/windows/windows95/info/shareware.htm).
The Power Toys have tools like a Round Clock (windows apparently do not have to be square), a screen resolution changer, a User interface tweaker, and some CD stuff. The Kernel Toys, according to their web page, exists because the W95 Kernel Programmers got jealous of all the attention the W95 Shell team got from producing its Power Toys, and decided to put together their own web page. The item of interest to me was something called Wintop, or as described on the web page, a Windows Process Watcher.
This program which zipped takes up only 17KB, is one of the tools that I use constantly. It answers so many questions about your system at a glance. The program generates a window that displays all the currently resident processes (programs, tasks, whatever you want to call them), how much percentage CPU use they have had in the last several seconds, how much total time they have clocked since they started up, and where they came from. All of this can be extremely hard to find any other way.
So, in my own case, I cranked up this program, waited three days or so, and found the disk hopping around the floor again. When I was finally able to tackle my monitor and look at it, Wintop showed me that the bad guy was a program named Runner. Now Runner was a program that I had some familiarity with, because over the past several months when I booted up the system I would sometimes see the message that Runner was aborting. Of course, I had no clue who Runner was, why he was croaking, and the system seemed just happy as could be with or without it. But now I knew: Wintop told me that Runner came from the Hijaak95 subdirectory. Hijaak is a program that does screen captures and graphics conversions, and I always understood that it ran only when I asked it to run. But there for all the world to see was this runner guy cranking away, and I never asked it to do this.
Not expecting any help, I turned to the Hijaak manual, and found that in addition to the things that I thought it was doing, it also ran this program Runner from time to time to update a database of all the graphic files on your system. Who knew? Well, somebody that read the free manual, maybe but.... The next problem was how to get rid of the thing. The options screen for Hijaak gives you a checkmark to let Runner run or not, but unchecking the button did not prevent it from running anyway. Maybe that is why they named it what they did - the program that always runs, no matter what you may want it to do.
However, a program that is deleted from the system, can no longer run, I do not care how well written it is, a good solid purge will take care of that problem.
This Wintop program has proven to continuously be of use to me, even after finding that problem. Like, just where are some of the programs that you find on the start list, anyway? I suppose there is a properties function somewhere that would tell you, but I now find the easiest way to locate the actual executable behind a screen is to let it run, and wintop will tell you exactly where it came from.
I recently got an upgrade to a program that I have described in these pages recently, CleanSweep, which is an uninstaller program. When the program runs, it asks you for an internet connection, and tells you it will be happy to update itself for you. This is pretty neat, since no matter how long the program has been sitting in the box, as soon as you load it up you get the most current version. Except that every time I reboot, I get this bloody dialog box, and no, I don't want to update the program every three days, I probably only use it every three months or so. Wintop to the rescue. It points out the exact name of the executable that puts up the dialog box, and Blam!, no more bother on boot up.
If you have a screen that seems to be hung, Wintop can help you here sometimes. It can be set up to always be the top window on your screen, so you can always see it. And it has a function to kill off any task that it shows. You can do this by bringing up the task list from the operating system too, but with wintop you just point and click and Pow! Another dead program.
You will be astounded at just how much junk is running at any one time in your system, when you think that you only have one window open. As I write this, with only WordPerfect, Wintop and After Dark seemingly running, there are actually 15 processes open. Most of these are systems things that you would never otherwise know about, like the idle task, and the print spooler and some sort of Windows message queue thing. But there is something named pfppot70.exe running, which is part of Corel Suite Version 7 (I am on Version 8 now, by the way) which I have no idea what this is or is doing to or for me, but it does not seem to hurt much (Ha!). And there are a bunch of Windows Systems directory programs that I better not blow away, since probably nothing will ever work again, but which I also don't really know what they are doing in there. But at least I can keep my eye on them now.
Its free, and it is one of the few free utilities that is worth more than I paid for it. Get it.