If you’ve noticed your computer getting slower over time you might need to defragment the files and folders on your hard drive. From Windows XP forward a basic defragmenter was included, but it was very poor. Microsoft did include a Windows defragmentation API that could be hooked into to provide better defragmentation.

The reason you might want to defragment your hard drive using something other than the included software would be to defrag files 64 MB and smaller, which are ordinarily ignored, but can still impact overall performance.

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When upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 the upgrade setup may hang at 62% indefinitely, and restarting the setup will only get it stuck at 62% once again.

This hang can be seen in the setupact.log

With the following line repeated about every 15 minutes.

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If you have more than one computer, and the computers are networked, you probably want to share resources like files, folders, and printers over the network. As a rule of thumb it makes no difference if the network is wired, wireless, or both, or even if the computers connect through a router or access point, the computers only see network devices.

There are now printers that have an ethernet port, or a radio to wirelessly connect to an access point, but you may also have an old fashioned printer that connects directly to your computer through a USB or some other cable connection. Sharing a printer is simple.

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When upgrading your hard drive to a bigger faster hard drive the Norton Ghost utility called Copy My Hard Drive can make the upgrade quick, easy, and painless. Copy My Hard Drive used to be referred to as cloning the hard drive.

First we’ll need to prepare the new hard drive. Click the Windows Start button -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management.

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On my home network I have a Cisco Linksys Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router that has a built-in firewall, and I run McAfee Security Center that also includes a firewall for each machine it is installed on. I tried sharing files and folders, and printers, between a wired PC and a wireless PC, but was denied. It makes no difference on a network if the PCs are wired or wireless, because they all look the same on the network, and use the same protocols.

Since I could see the other PC on the network, but I could not see any printers, or shared files and folders, I suspected the McAfee firewall was blocking the ports needed to share.

Let’s setup sharing between these computers.

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