A few months back decided to try out Visual Studio 2010 which uses version 4 of the .NET Framework. So I proceeded to install everything and after a few reboots everything was done. However my boot process was no longer showing me its race cars and rockets. No, it was more like turtles and slugs. The startup application loading process would stop halfway for about 2 minutes and after that everything would start loading again. What was weird was that the windows firewall built-in to Windows XP, my anti-virus, and networking all would not load. Of course after the initial 2 minutes of wondering whether I’m going to have to install the OS `again`, everything proceeded normally. So I did what I normally do when things act up. Which is dig in the forums, blogs, and general internet. Eventually I found on my own that the new version 4 of the NGEN service was to blame. For some reason it was failing to load or something and was holding everything else up in the process. After googling some more and turning up empty I decided to just disable the NGEN service at startup, only starting it after everything else had loaded.
Recently I found some new forum posts from August that described using the command “ngen update†from the directory “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\â€. After waiting for what seemed like forever, I set the NGEN v4 Service back to Auto so it would start at the next boot. I rebooted and logged in and to my amazement everything was fixed. No disabled firewall or anti-virus and the network was immediately available. It ran just like it was before when the service was disabled but without the 2 minute wait times. So I’m very happy to have this problem fixed. Just another bug and another day.
In recent months there has been some buzz about SSDs, otherwise known as Solid State Drives. Performance from some of these drives is better than their mechanical counterparts. With access times in the nanosecond range its no wonder they appeal to speed junkies. But for the rest of us who either don’t have the cash or can’t upgrade an older machine. For example, that old IDE laptop you got sitting around. Fortunately there are some things you can do to give your old clunker a little more zip. One thing is to defrag your hard drive. Before I found my current defragmentation program, I used Defraggler from Piriform. It however was too slow for me. It would move a few blocks and then sit there and think about what to move next. I’m not really a waiting kind of person. So I started looking for something new. That’s when I found Auslogics Disk Defrag.