Sunday, March 14, 2010

Why new hard disks might not be much fun for XP users

Why new hard disks might not be much fun for XP users
XP and Server 2003 will run slower with new-new hard disks that use 4K blocks because of partition alignment boundaries in the OS (unless you were fortunate enough to have taken a class years ago where the instructor advised creating partitions manually before installing the OS and using the parameter "align=64")

Friday, March 12, 2010

Too many arguments in command line.

Too many arguments in command line.

The magic is in the help, more /?, which contains the (oddly) helpful line "Switches can be present in the MORE environment variable."

Apparently Windows' default is to add the '/e' switch to more.com somewhere in the registry. I don't know what I did, but suddenly the command
more mytextfile.txt
produced the complaint "Too many arguments in command line."

I restored the behavior to which I was accustomed by adding the environment variable MORE with the parameters
/e

I also tossed in /c and /s for good measure:
/c - clear screen before displaying page
/s - squeeze multiple blank lines into a single line