2014 — 8 March: Saturday
Nothing is ever quite as simple in the Win8.1 Pro world as you might hope, is it?1 Having yesterday chelated all traces of spinning rust technology from inside BlackBeast (to the non-detriment of power, noise, and heat issues — not that there were any real ones, if I'm honest) I still have un petit problème.
Divergent opinions...
... and mountains of misinformation exist on this Interweb malarkey. My SSD problem is simply stated: I want all four SSDs on SATA 3 ports (obviously). But only two of those ports (the ones that are not motherboard built-in RAID SATA ports) allow Win8.1 to understand that the drives connected on them are SSDs. Thus the newest-fangled "Optimisation" baked into this half-baked OS will respond to optimise requests by sending TRIM commands to those two SSDs — which we can all agree is a Good Thing. But it will blindly attempt "normal" defragmentation instead when requested to optimise the two SSDs that are not being seen as SSDs — which is a Very Bad Thing.
And No! the oft-repeated Interweb claim that simply re-running the Windows Experience Index will force proper detection of an SSD as an SSD is false, at least on my system. I know; I've tried it. Actually, the WEI has been hidden away from us poor Win8.1 users, although the Admin Command Prompt
Winsat formal
will still run the scan, and still generate the same data. It just doesn't automatically show it to you any more. Where would be the fun in that? :-)
Thus I have to spend me some money — which is also a Very Bad Thing. Briefly:
- I've already been able to prove that Raxco Software's "PerfectDisk" does indeed know how to treat all four of my SSDs nicely and show them a Good Time (though the experience-derived opinions here [and I very much approve of opinions based on real world tests and comparisons] remain dubious about any of the purported benefits of free space defragmentation as interpreted via the TRIM command in the SSD world).
- "Solid State Doctor" is currently looking like the only other real player in town.
Further investigations will have to wait until I've loaded some optimising breakfast. [Pause] Aha! The small print regarding an automated TRIM command on Solid State Doctor is clear: "Not compatible with RAID, drives that detect as SCSI, or with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSDs." That makes my purchase decision easier.
It is a truth,...
... universally acknowledged, that the only reason I so rarely play Peter Gabriel's first solo album is that, actually, it's not all uniformly good. Another universal truth (as revealed in today's further salvo of snailmail marketing from one of my more aggressive credit cards) is that the only time it's easy to get money is when you can prove you don't need it or want it. Were Christa still alive, I think the shock of seeing such an extended period of high inflation and rubbish interest rates could well kill her.
Meanwhile, the fact that the only real change I could see in the online interface of one of my banks (after being earnestly invited to "take the tour" of their new website) was that they'd changed both the colour and the on-screen location of the "Login" button. Now, within a week of unveiling this wondrous new banking experience, their site is undergoing maintenance, for which inconvenience they equally earnestly apologise.
Come back with me...
... a mere 18 years to some of the earliest days of IBM and Java :-)
I'm now installed in yet another office, at the other end of the basement of the House. It was formerly the telephone operators' nest, so it has wonderful wood panels and sound-deadening stuff in the ceiling. No heating, though, and bars on the windows that look out, at ground level (I do mean ground level) on to the back lawn. On Friday, I announced to the world, from our Web site, that IBM is co-sponsoring the JavaOne conference in San Francisco at the end of May — who knows, I might even get a trip out there myself. We shall see.
I didn't, then or ever. Talk about "back room boy". Still, at least I had a small degree of outside awareness for a year or so.