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Andavari

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Everything posted by Andavari

  1. GRC ValiDrive License: Freeware Publisher: Gibson Research Corporation Supports: Microsoft Windows XP SP3, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11 Website: https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm Overview: Validate USB mass storage drives. Helps determine if USB mass storage drives are fraudulent/fake/counterfeit. Quickly spot-check any USB mass storage drive for fraudulent deliberately missing storage. Note: USB mass storage drives with low quality NAND flash (many are even from known brand names) will take a considerable amount of time to validate vs. high quality NAND flash which validates quickly.
  2. On my Win10 Home v22H2 laptop that's located in: C:\Users\UserProfileName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\IndexedDB\ I only have 2 folders with 3 files in each folder, totaling 78 bytes in size. It seems like a database/logs for extensions. That whole IndexedDB folder and all of its contents on my system is 128 MB in size. Edit: However I do NOT use Edge Chromium, and only have uBlock Origin installed as an extension that I occasionally check for updates. If you regularly use it perhaps that's the cause, but it seems like too much. You having 52+ GB in size would make me wonder if it isn't some sort of bug in Edge Chromium, perhaps not properly self-cleaning itself, or perhaps you've found a bug that can be reported to Microsoft. As for controlling the size of that folder there's 'Options > Include' in CCleaner. I've noticed that none of the Edge Chromium cleaners that I use from the community Winapp2.ini and those I've made myself don't target that folder at all.
  3. Exactly. Some drive wiper/wipe free space programs (not referencing CCleaner in particular with this comment) have the potential of damaging the drive contents (files, and the filesystem) that they're wiping free space on such as the Windows OS drive if exited in an incorrect way such as forcing them to close. I had such a thing happen over 20 years ago (not with CCleaner), and I found myself minutes later reinstalling the Windows OS.
  4. uBlock Origin Users Start Regularly Checking Your Trusted Sites List: I discovered that over the last week of looking for a new TV that some (not all) display manufacturers have automatically without my express permission added themselves into the uBlock Origin Trusted Sites list. I definitely didn't manually add them into the Trusted Sites list (like how it's supposed to work) especially for a one time visit to look at the specifications of a particular TV. I would consider this a security violation.
  5. The problem you had years ago with SSDs is understandable and is documented online with some SSD controllers having serious issues, etc., or drives wiping themselves clean leaving nothing on themselves for no apparent reason. More modern name brand SSDs (avoid no-name/no-brand drives) from 2018 to current are much better than SSDs released for example 10 years ago when they were overly expensive and some having serious issues. SD Cards just like USB Flash Drives are unreliable, slow, and very easy to loose slow SSDs that don't feature TRIM to help speed them up after so many writes start to make them unbearably slow! SSDs with a DRAM Cache are going to be way more reliable. SD Cards and USB Flash Drives are alright for temporarily storing files and then moving files around from one system to another, but nowhere near as reliable as HDD for archiving purposes. But as always multiple copies of each disk/drive are going to be required in case one fails. The first HDD I've ever had fail was running nearly non-stop for 13 years 2 months, just happened January 2024.
  6. HDD technology will of course continue, and that's why defrag software also needs to keep up with advances instead of having some old versions that don't properly work or just barely work with modern HDDs. Some defrag tools take too long to just Analyse an HDD, let alone defragment one sometimes with rather outdated algorithms in my opinion such as; "why is it even bothering to move that" and "why isn't it moving that at all" comes to mind. Something a few years old at this point in papers is the use of Zoning in HDDs, and some can take advantage of a TRIM command. Then there's also the supposed upcoming speed increase that will get some of them near enough to SATA 6gbps SSD speeds (probably only sequentially). But then comes the noise levels, I look at my Disk Network set top box and think it makes so much noise and it's because of the HDD inside it constantly making allot of clatter.
  7. Allot of defrag tools are now several years old at this point. Be happy that it still works in modern OSes, and in particular if it doesn't crash. The crashing is why I don't bother with Defraggler at all, although I do have it archived on several external backup disks. Perhaps the lack of updates in many defrag tools has something to do with the adoption of SSDs, and their price drop over the years.
  8. Possibly something to do with Explorer in Windows not refreshing and updating the view. Try This: * Sign Out, and then Sign In to your Windows user account. * If that doesn't work Restart the computer.
  9. How new is the motherboard? If it's relatively recent that could be the reason, because at this point with modern hardware Speccy would be considered a "legacy" program that's too outdated for allot of modern hardware.
  10. Probably the best course of action is to not allow CCleaner to run on startup sitting resident in the background. It kind of defeats the aspect of paying for it doing that however since it's annoying people with pop-ups that's a solution to look into. Then only use it as a free user would which is on-demand, and that way it will only run when the user has actually started it manually, and when done cleaning and exiting its essentially off again.
  11. That's why for years I've used GRC InSpectre to disable the Meltdown and Spectre patches so my Intel 4 Core 8 Thread laptop CPU does run like ****.
  12. It may not be technically adverts if everything in CCleaner that's possible to disable it, but pop-ups in general coming from software will anger allot of people, especially if it's from a disk cleaning tool that would normally not announce its presence at all if not opened directly by the user.
  13. It will be 10 years in April of this year that they discontinued Windows XP updates, and I still run an old XP desktop for audio related stuff. And in those nearly 10 full years that old XP desktop hasn't had one damn thing (Microsoft) mess it up - of course using real-time protection antivirus on it and don't browse any websites whatsoever on it either.
  14. Like practically all defrag software that runs on Windows including Defraggler is using the Microsoft Defrag API (the safest way to defrag Windows) and to my knowledge that has never had a feature to set the Memory Buffer Size. That isn't how defrag works anyways because it copies the file(s) to the new location (sectors), verifies it was copied correctly, and then deletes where it used to be in the old location (sectors), rinse, repeat until defrag completes. Not really much for volatile RAM to help with since it's all done on disk itself, the safest approach. If RAM were involved I'd image that would be a serious risk of causing file corruption if it were copied into RAM then back to disk, just think OS crashes, power surges, etc, that the disk is usually rather immune to. About the only "speed up" option is when using the default Defrag ("Optimize Drives") tool built into Win10/Win11 which has an /H switch for the command line version that will use more resources to finish the defrag "quicker."
  15. It tried to install again on my laptop last night, failed again. And they seem to be pre-loading something in C:\$WinREAgent with a new update.wim.
  16. It might instead be in Task Scheduler, some things that start at system boot can alternatively start from it. Edit: Then again it's possible to have null dead entries remain when for example uninstalling a program.
  17. I have both registry keys in Windows 10 Home v22H2 and both contain data: * replaceString has this data in it: - * searchString has this data in it: Fontface
  18. If it's going to clean such things it should definitely warn before pulling the trigger. I know when using the community winapp2.ini file it has a warning feature. Seems all too similar to a few years ago when Microsoft had in Win10 the ability to clean/delete everything in the Downloads folder in Disk Cleanup that would cause severe grief if unknowingly used, and Microsoft eventually removed the ability to clean the Downloads folder for obvious reasons.
  19. That's the problem when everyone does their own thing, i.e.; no official standards, not that any would follow "standards" anyway. I have two recovery partitions, the first after the OS partition is 548MB, then the next after it is 1GB. Both too full to install the useless update that isn't for Win10 Home. That's why I'm not worried about it. They probably want to update systems that features aren't available on since they're essentially already installed just not usable unless someone knows how to force them to be available like how Group Policy Editor can be enabled on Win10 Home since it's already installed.
  20. I don't know about modern versions of Microsoft Office, but in really old versions an exclusion of just one .BAK file (it was just one .BAK file there weren't any more, and it was located in the AppData folder) had to be inputted into most 3rd party cleaning software so they wouldn't break the installation when deleting it. So if CCleaner or some other cleaning tool does list any .BAK file(s) for Office that would be what to exclude, that is if modern versions of Office even still use that and break if it's deleted.
  21. I deleted the Software Distribution files with BleachBit, and then paused Automatic Updates for 7 days since I don't want it to keep trying to install. I'll let Microsoft fix it at some point, and I'm not messing around with resizing partitions to accommodate an update I can care less about.
  22. Sometimes that can be caused because the cleaners for particular software have been updated which is also now cleaning too much or even possibly the wrong file. One way to narrow down which files should be inputted as a personal exclusion in your CCleaner configuration is to clean only a little bit at a time, such as (example): Only clean Nvidia (or just click Analyse so it lists what could be cleaned) to try and figure out exactly what file/files being cleaned is breaking the program. Some may be file exclusions, and some may be registry exclusions. Registry exclusions are far more tricky to figure out though because when CCleaner cleans registry MRUs (recently opened files) it doesn't list them at all, it only lists the physical files like logs, etc., it has cleaned. It will likely be time consuming to figure out what needs to be excluded when dealing with multiple programs like in your situation. That's why it's important to only clean a little bit at a time and don't use CCleaner as you normally would until you figure out what exactly to exclude on your system. Excludes can be added in CCleaner at: Options > Exclude
  23. You could always try other file recovery tools, if needing your files back is critical don't get locked into using just one program to recover them. As for them showing up as unrecoverable: Even if nothing is ever touched by the user on a drive after storing files on it that doesn't mean that operating systems aren't doing something in the background which can make recovery difficult and what Windows does can make recovery an issue. It's important to always have at least 3 backups of important files, with 1 copy being off-sight such as being left at a relatives house or in a safety deposit box, etc.
  24. My experience with CCleaner and attempting to uninstall Windows Installer installations from .MSI led to the final conclusion a long time ago (probably over a decade ago) that CCleaner shouldn't be used to uninstall those at all because things would act weird, buggy, or whatever, and instead revert back to using what's built into Windows to uninstall them.
  25. I've successfully used Recuva on a floppy diskette maybe 10+ years ago, it got every file back that was accidentally deleted, but there weren't any bad sectors to deal with. With bad sectors your mileage may vary, if there aren't any files stored where there are bad sectors you may be able to get the files back, but floppies far too easily start getting bad sectors while just sitting around and not being used - the Earths magnetic field can't be all that good for them either over several years.
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