Took a break from piano teaching on December 21, and I officially start again on January 2, 2009. However, it wasn’t a complete holiday as I had to make up some replacement lessons, do the Christmas Choir thingy, and play at the hotel. Still, it was nice to have pockets of free time available, which is why my postings have been more frequent, if you’ve noticed.

I was elated with my male offspring’s PMR results (see my previous post) and since I’m a man of my word, I’ll be getting the Linksys WRT54G2 wireless router and USB adapter for him, so that he can share my Internet line on his computer. But as luck would have it, the darn thing is out of stock here, so I’ll have to exercise patience and wait for stocks to arrive (patience—Joshua, are you reading this?) Then I’ll probably have fun setting up the router, what with my system being on Vista and his on XP. If I can keep Murphy’s Law at bay, I will. For the uninitiated, one famous Murphy’s Law states:

If anything can go wrong, it will.

Fingers crossed, hopefully the router will arrive by next week, when said male offspring goes back to school (10th Grade, or Form 4). I’ll hook up the whole shebang and surprise him when he returns.

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are in order for my son (aka male offspring) Brandon, who managed to score a maximum of 8 A’s for his PMR—a major Malaysian examination for 9th Graders (or Form 3, as it’s locally known). This is wonderful news indeed, to start off the New Year, and as promised, Brandon, your Linksys WRT54G2 wireless router and USB adapter is on the way, as soon as stocks are available, lol.

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Question: what do teenagers and Windows (the Microsoft type) have in common? Answer: they leave a mess in their rooms and hard drives. Having said that, I can’t totally fault Windows (this applies to every version that has appeared, from 3.1 right up to Vista) because what happens is this—over time we accumulate a lot of files in our hard drives—even a clean installation of Vista deposits thousands of files into your C: drive. Then we add, delete, copy, or move those files. And what does Windows try to do? Like an inexperienced maid or servant, it attempts to cram files in-between all the empty spaces in our hard drives. Picture if you will, somebody stuffing socks into a closet full of underwear. Or odds and ends into a bookshelf, you get the idea.

The result is that over time, Windows has to search for files that have been torn and scattered over our hard drives. Files are no longer contiguous. If the user doesn’t do anything about it, it will appear as if the computer has begun to run slower and slower. So what’s the solution for this? We need a program to defragment our drives, in order to make the files contiguous again. It’s akin to employing a professional butler or housekeeper to come and make our homes spick and span. And we know their services come at a price.

The past few versions of Windows have come with a rudimentary disk defragmenter, but well, it’s rudimentary. Almost like asking one’s offspring to tidy up their rooms—it’s never done well, is it? There are plenty of defragmenting programs available on the market, such as Diskeeper, Perfect Disk, O & O Defrag, etc. You’ve got to cough up some cash for them though.

What if we could enlist the help of a professional butler for free? Fortunately, there are some available, and the one that I’ve been using for some time now is Piriform’s excellent Defraggler (try saying that fast, three times). OK, the screenshots may not employ all the eye-candy of the big boys, but Defraggler gets the job done in a no-nonsense manner, and it is fast.

Look at some of the features Defraggler has (and remember, it’s free):

1. Very small download size—702KB, adware and spyware-free.
2. Defraggler can not only analyze and defrag drives, it can even defrag folders and files of your own choosing. An extra bonus is its ability to check drives for errors (no need to use chkdsk anymore).
3. Priority can be set to Normal or Background, if you want to keep working while it defrags.
4. Options include auto-update, moving large files to the end of the drive, and get this—it even has a scheduler—you can schedule a defrag when you’re out or going to bed.
5. Need I mention this again, Defraggler is fast. The more often you defrag, the quicker it gets.

So what should you do prior to a defrag? Here are some tips:

1. Clean out the gunk in your hard drive first. CCleaner is my choice for this, and surprise, surprise, it’s by the same folks who make Defraggler (Piriform) and it’s free.
2. If you have tons of MP3 or video files on your drive, consider burning them to DVDs to free up disk space and lessen the burden of defragmenting these big monsters.
3. Don’t activate any other scans (like antivirus or antispyware) while defragmenting.
4. Unless you like watching grass grow, defrag when you have something else to do, like having a meal or going out. By the time you come back, it’d have done its job.

Once your hard drive is defragmented, you’ll notice that your system will be more responsive, instead of sluggish. Try it and see.

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As 2008 draws to a close, I am drawn again to this famous passage by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) from A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

In short, 2008 has been a very trying year for me—more downs than ups. But as my tag line says, I can’t, and I won’t sweat the small stuff. Life is such that everyday can’t be a bowl of cherries; disappointments will occur from time to time. The big highlight for me was of course, the launching of my own website, http://philipyeoh.com. This was primarily to promote my first ebook, Learn to Play the Piano in 12 Lessons. April 2008 also saw me venturing into the blogosphere with my own WordPress blog—that’s the one you’re reading now. Maintaining these two sites has kept me occupied, besides my own piano teaching, etc. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” so I’m not going to let my mind (or my hands) remain idle.

Be that as it may, although I can’t wait for 2008 to finish, it is with some trepidation that I await the arrival of 2009. The world outlook doesn’t seem too promising for next year, but we’ll see. Live for the moment, one day at a time. I’ll enjoy the daily blessings that I have, and not lust for more. Again, to quote Charles Dickens:

Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Wishing all of you a very Happy New Year, and may your lives be filled with love, joy, and peace.

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The pun was intended in the post title. As you can see in the picture below, the Management has blackened out the offending letter after I informed them about it (see my previous post). At least we don’t have a word that means “poop” lining the front of our porch. However, I don’t think “Dropping Zone” means anything much; perhaps it would be more appropriate to put “Loading/Unloading Zone.” Yes, I’m nitpicking, I know.

Anybody else got any better ideas?  Drop me a comment and let me know.

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Besides Spybot 1.6 and Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, I have A-squared free (latest version is 4.0.0.21) running on my PC. Of course, make sure that only one antispyware program is on at any moment, since having more than one active might cause conflicts and impact system performance. I’ve talked about Spybot and Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware in previous posts, so I’ll concentrate on A-squared free here.

Some things I like about A-squared free:

1. Clean and user-friendly interface.
2. Although updating has to be done manually, it’s not a big chore. There are updater options like installing program help, additional languages, etc. I turn these off and just update the spyware definitions.
3. Four scanning options—Quick, Smart, Deep and Custom. For normal purposes, the Quick or Smart option is fine. I use the Deep Scan for times when I’m away from the PC. It takes more time but is more thorough.
4. The ability to quarantine and selectively delete suspect malware is very easy to accomplish.

Here are some tips:

• Before running a scan, clean out the gunk in your hard drive first. CCleaner or ATF Cleaner are the programs I use to do this. Then run the scans and be patient. Take a break and go do something else.
• Since I have three different antispyware programs, I run their scans in rotation. For instance I might run Spybot’s scan today, then a few days later I’ll do Malwarebytes, followed by A-squared.
• In conjunction with the AS scans, I run my Avira Antivirus scan at least once a week. Yes, it’s plenty of housekeeping, but this is the only way to make sure those nasties from the Internet don’t make their home in my hard drive.
• Last but not least, I have Comodo Firewall Pro (it’s now known as Comodo Internet Security, and comes complete with an antivirus option) running at all times. It does bother you a bit during initial installation, but after it has learned your system, it sits quietly in the background, monitoring your Internet traffic. And need I mention that it’s free? Heartily recommended.

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I’ve heard that DDR2 RAM (memory) prices will be going up very soon, and seeing as how cheap it still is, I told Santa that I could do with a RAM upgrade—currently I’ve got 2GB in my computer. He said, “Very well,” rummaged in his sack and produced a stick of Kingston 1GB RAM for me. “Will this do?” I said, “Yes! Thanks very much, and Merry Christmas!”

This morning I opened up my PC (other normal people open up their presents) and it took me less than 5 minutes to slot the new RAM in. Voila, now I have a massive 3GB of RAM in my computer. I’ve now reached the maximum amount of RAM for 32-bit Windows Vista. So to all you computer geeks out there, it might be worth your while to maximize your RAM now, while the prices are still low.

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