NT 5.0 Disk Defragmenter Promised
WINDOWS NT USERS will finally get a long-awaited, integrated disk
defragmenter to allow better use of hard drive space and improve file access
speed. Executive Software says that Microsoft has agreed to include Executive's
Diskeeper defragmenter in Windows NT 5.0.
NT 5.0 will include a manual version of Diskeeper, and administrators
will have the option to upgrade to the automatic set-it-and-forget-it version.
The manual version of Diskeeper will be similar to other manual utilities such as DOS's CHKDSK, and the automated version will let you schedule, monitor, and launch defragmentation processes across a network.
—Mark Joseph Edwards
News Analysis:
Microsoft's Salability Day
Microsoft brought together financial analysts and the press for a
briefing on new announcements and products, and company direction. As with
Scalability Day held in New York last May, the company announced this Microsoft
Windows Platform Briefing with a lot of fanfare, and promised great
demonstrations. And as with Scalability Day, those who attended the briefing
debated its merit. (See Mark Smith's editorial, "Scalability Politics,"
July 1997, for his perspective on this controversy.)
Despite the hype surrounding this latest public relations event, which I've
coined "Salability Day," it delivered information on one new, slick
technology. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, called Mindnet,
is a database containing thousands of words and millions of connections between
words.
An Internet search engine can use this technology to improve the relevancy
of a word search. For example, an Internet search on who makes the fastest
computer chips provides thousands of hits, most of them irrelevant. At the
briefing, a presenter demonstrated a search using a standard Internet search
engine, and then a prototype Internet search engine using Mindnet. The fast chip
search using the standard search engine produced only 20 percent relevant hits;
the MindNet search produced 60 percent.
Microsoft claims that NLP technology will apply to many applications, such
as voice recognition. The company will not speculate on a ship date, telling
participants that the project is "a long-term thing."
The briefing produced a few other interesting announcements. Desktop
Applications Division Vice President Jon DeVaan announced that Microsoft Office
will soon include self-repairing technology. He defined self-repairing as a
means to restore deleted DLL files in Microsoft Word. That way if you
accidentally delete some DLL files and then start Word, it looks across the LAN
to an installation directory for the original DLL files, and then copies them
automatically to the local hard disk. This capability saves you from having to
search for the files.
Microsoft gave participants a sneak peek of the Windows user interface of
2005. The company referred to the product as its concept car, produced with
ideas prototyped in Visual Basic. Microsoft also announced that it's calling the
next version of Windows, previously code-named Memphis, Windows 98.
—Mark Minasi
Windows NT Magazine Earns Finalist Spot
Windows NT Magazine is a finalist for the annual CM Circulation
Management Excellence Awards. The awards, sponsored by CM/Circulation
Management magazine, honor innovative and creative circulation marketing and promotion techniques. CM magazine is a publication of Cowles Business Media.
"It's a great honor to have CM recognize the success of Windows NT
Magazine," said Tim Ewing, circulation sales and marketing manager at
Windows NT Magazine. "I'm grateful to our readers and their
acceptance of our publication, which has allowed us to contend for this award."
Launched in September 1995, Windows NT Magazine has a circulation
of 100,000 paid subscribers. It entered the contest in the new launch category.
—Lynn Schwebach
Building Bigger Armies
During fiscal year 1997, Microsoft says it spent $2.2 billion on
research and development (R&D). The company projects its R&D budget in fiscal 1998 to grow to $2.6 billion. Microsoft's new chief financial officer, Greg Maffei, told financial analysts that he expects the R&D body count to rise with the budget, from 8800 people in fiscal 1997 to 11,600 in fiscal 1998.
—Mark Joseph Edwards
New Hotfixes for NT 4.0
Since the release of Service Pack 3 (SP3), Microsoft has released
several new hotfixes for Windows NT 4.0. The hotfixes address issues including
LAN Manager authentication, Iomega Zip drives, and security problems. The
following list outlines the hotfixes in chronological order, and briefly
describes each hotfix. Be sure to test any fix before loading it on your live
production system.
6/26/97 lsa-fix: Corrects the problem of NT generating an access violation
error message in Lsass.exe. After this error occurs, users cannot log on
locally.
7/2/97 dblclick-fix: Fixes the problem that doesn't let a system loaded
with SP3 recognize a double-click. This is also a problem on systems loaded with
Visio Professional 4.x, and possibly other software. The system acts as if you
had clicked once.
7/2/97 icmp-fix: Stops the Ping-of-Death 2 attack, in which ICMP packets
crash an NT system.
7/12/97 lm-fix: Lets users control LAN Manager challenge/response and NT
challenge/response. Users can define the authentication mechanisms and thus
create a more secure network environment.
7/14/97 zip-fix: Corrects the problem of Windows NT identifying the ATAPI
(a driver for AT-style drives such as IDE and CD-ROMS) version of the Iomega Zip
drive as a floppy drive and assigns the Zip drive to the first available floppy
drive letter.
7/16/97 getadmin-fix: Corrects the security problem that lets intruders
gain Administrator access to an NT system.
7/21/97 simptcp-fix: Corrects a problem in the Chargen service where User
Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets cause abnormally high bandwidth usage.
8/8/97 winsupd-fix: Corrects the problem of Windows Internet Name Service
(WINS) silently terminating after it receives invalid User Datagram Protocol
(UDP) frames. After WINS crashes, domain synchronization, browsing, and other
connectivity problems may arise. Event log entries may show an Event ID 4119,
stating that WINS received a packet in the wrong format.
8/11/97 ndis-fix: Stops either a memory leak, or the Blue Screen of Death.
It identifies the error as IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL in Ndis.sys. These
errors can occur after you load Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS)
layered miniport drivers (such as encryption drivers) on NT 4.0. Many software
packages, such as a firewall, install these types of drivers on your system. To fix the problem, install the new hotfix located on Microsoft's FTP site.
—Mark Joseph Edwards