Microsoft Steps In ........................................................................................
Over the years the friendly folks at Microsoft have seen the various utilities and
add-ons sold by other companies and have said, “Why not have it all?” Step by
step, DOS and then Windows were expanded to include versions of nearly all
the enhancements made by outsiders. Today, Windows XP includes the ability
to undelete files from the trash can (a bit of Norton and a bite of Apple to some
people’s eyes). It also includes a defragger utility and system restore utility,
each of which echoes in one way or another offerings by third parties.
The Microsoft utilities of Windows have nothing particularly wrong with
them. They do the job and come with an official promise of some level of sup-
port and compatibility with other Microsoft products. That is not quite the
same as a guarantee that they are the best at what they do, or that they are
without any flaws. (On the other side of the coin, when you purchase and use
a non-Microsoft product you run some level of risk — decreasing over time as
market share increases and as the federal and international court systems
ratchet up the pressure on Microsoft to come as close as possible to an open
system — that changes in the operating system will make the utilities obso-
lete or unusable.
All these minor warnings aside, I recommend laptop users install some
important utilities from companies other than Microsoft on their machines.
Those utilities are either faster, more efficient, or more capable than the ver-
sions that have been grafted onto Windows.
Denying the past with Undelete .......................................................
The two best undelete programs for my money (and yours) are:
The Norton Protected Recycle Bin, which is a component of Norton
Utilities and also included in the larger system tune-up and repair pack-
age Norton SystemWorks.
Undelete from Diskeeper Corporation.
Norton Utilities expands on the capacity, ease of use, and user controls of the
basic Windows Recycle Bin. Once installed (and fine-tuned to meet your pat-
terns of use and the amount of available space on your hard drive), it just sits
there as what techies would call a LIFO garbage can. LIFOmeans “last in, first
out.” In other words, once the can becomes full, the space occupied by the
oldest file in the can is released to the operating system to hold new informa-
tion. Depending on how heavily you use your machine and how large a drive
you have, the enhanced recycle bin may hold files that are weeks and even
months old.
292 Part V: The Software Side of Life