Scott Hanselman

It's just so darn hard to copy a lot of files these days. If it's more than 1000 files or larger than a gig, I don't even try with Explorer anymore. It's not worth the angst. I used to do this:

xcopy *.* d: /s /e /z /v

But when there's not a "No to all" option, and I've got it halfway copied, I get pretty frustrated. There's a few really good alternatives...

Robocopy

First, Robocopy. If you have XP or Windows Server you can easily get this in the Resource Kits. If you have Vista, it's already in your path. That's always nice. It's Robust, indeed (hence, Robocopy) but it's legendarily unforgiving. If anything is wrong with the command line options you'll just get the help. It's so hard to use there's even a GUI Frontend you can get. However, when I want to get a directory from here to over there, I just do this (no wildcards allowed! Doh!) and it just gets there, auto skipping files that are already at the destination. It's also wonderful over an unreliable network:

robocopy "H:\Source" "z:\Dest" /S /Z

Where /s means subdirectories, and /z means in restartable mode.

SyncBack

Second, for repeatable jobs, I love SyncBackSE. It's $30, but there is a free version with less features available. SyncBack is option-ful and literally moves nearly every important piece of data in my house around weekly.

It's UI is really amazing. You create as many "profiles" as you like, as complex as they need to be, using it's very nice wizard UI. I've never had to make a profile without the wizard - it's that comprehensive.

It's a huge part of our backup strategy and it even backs up this blog via FTP. Do take a moment and download at least the trial. Profiles can be named and called via the Windows Scheduler or at the command line - that's why it's really for jobs you'll do more than once. It's a great way to deploy or backup a website, and it'll talk to FTP, WebDav, etc. It'll keep folders in sync, and profiles can be grouped and run in tandem as well. It will also backup and ZIP at the same time.

XXCopy

Last, but certainly not least, XXCOPY. It's huge. Epic even. It's even got a nice windows progress bar that pops out of the DOS Box. The Technical Reference is comprehensive to say the least. Here's a summary of the features. It'll sync directories, maintain short names, qualify by date/time, copy security info.

If you are a command-line bad*ss, this is the utility for you. You'll like it immediately because it's command line switches are mostly compatible with xcopy and Robocopy, then it adds a million more so you can tweak your copy or mirror to be most effective. There's both free and pro versions.

The author is quite bold, and even has a section on how XXCopy supersedes RoboCopy. I think I just stepped in a big pile of sassy! But, I've got to give him credit. The options are insane. XXCopy does it all. Truly. Highly recommended.

Regardless of which one you pick, just please stop using XCopy.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My seventy-fifth podcast is up. In this episode I'm sitting down with John Lam at OSCON a few hours after his presentation on Iron Ruby.

• Subscribe:
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If you have trouble downloading, or your download is slow, do try the torrent with µtorrent or another BitTorrent Downloader.

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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It's time for the Great Geek Gadget Giveaway Grab Bag. I mean, Auction. You give me money and I give you gadgets. I didn't have a good alliteration that was all G's and got the whole Auction part across.

The full and unbelievable scope of this Auction can not be expressed by the simple picture below. You have no idea the treasures that await you. Perhaps you're a geek. Maybe a dork or a dweeb. Possibly a nerd, or a DIY (Do It Yourselfer). God forbid, a Trekker. Either way, I don't discriminate.

The Auction is up on Ebay right now.

Here's what's up in this amazing grab bag in no particular order. Note also that everything is in working order. Everything runs, turns on, has batteries and operates. Everything has drivers or firmware available on the net. If it doesn't work when you get it, it broke in shipping, YMMV.

• Two (2) Linksys WRT54G Routers flashed with DD-WRT Firmware
• 2gig iRiver Clix and cable and case
• 2gig iPod Nano and cable
• Handspring Visor (Color) Prism with USB Dock and Leather Case and stylus
• Viewsonic Pocket PC V37 with Pocket PC 2003 and stylus
• Monster© Powerstrip (US Plugs)
• Ergodex DX1 - Configurable Keyboard with all 25 keys as used by me in GuildWars
• Microsoft USB Fingerprint Reader
• Wacom Pen Partner 4x5 with pen (Of course! All this stuff is complete.)
• Targus Folding Stowaway Keyboard for Handspring/Palm
• Cuecat Barcode Scanner - Actually, no, nix that. It's Travis's and I may have more for it. Not included, just a tease.
• Casio Disc Title Printer - USB Printer that prints labels directly to CDs and DVDs.
• IDE Hard Drive USB Enclosure - Turns any IDE drive into a USB external drive
• Microsoft Trackball Optical - The last remaining awesome trackball. All subsequent ones from all other vendors sucked.
• Color Logitech Quickcam - Still my favorite Quickcam as it doesn't need drivers in Windows XP and supports Windows Image Acquisition.
• OmniFI DMS1 UPNP Client - This is the small black box on the lower right corner. It has a blue LCD, controls and menuing system that let's you access your Media (Pictures or Music) via uPNP (Windows Media Sharing Service) or any uPNP system like Twonky. Also included are Ethernet and Wireless Adapters.
• CrystalFontz USB LCD Display as seen in my first Coding4Fun Article.
• x10 Radio Transmitter
• Playstation One (PSOne) with two controllers and two games. I was going to convert this into a portable PSOne system.
• Casio Color 3.5" LCD Portable Television - This was going to be the screen for the portable PSOne.
• My copy of Hacking Video Game Consoles - Again, for above project. This project was derailed by the birth of my first son and will be picked up again in ten years.
• Microsoft NMEA USB GPS as seen in "Where the heck am I?" Works with any laptop mapping software.
• Logitech IO2 Pen - You can even blog directly from this optical USB pen.
• Saitek USB Dual Analog Windows USB Gamepad 
• An original Palmpilot with 512k of RAM.
• A 2nd Generation iPod

Why am I auctioning off this glorious grab bag, Dear Reader? To raise money for an iPhone? No, please. I'm not that gauche. To pay gambling debts? Nope, I stopped watching after Reuben came in second. No, I'm doing it to avoid divorce*. There's only so much the wife can take, Dear Reader. The WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) only stretches so far, and a decade's worth of glorious gadgetry is about as far as it goes. So, my pain is your gain, my friend.

These items are well loved, but all operational. They've all at one point been part of various crazy schemes that I've had to take over the world, or at least learn how better to interface hardware with my computer.

You pay shipping and I'll send it anywhere. You'll get it in this large plastic bin. I suspect it weighs at least 40 pounds. Perhaps more. I'm sure you'll have years of fun, as I did, with this diverse collection of gadgets.

* kidding about the divorce, but let's just say she'll be happy to see it go to a good home.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I apologize for this post ahead of time. It will be full of gushing computer hardware pron. Mea culpa. I just got the Ultimate PC in the mail from Jeff and I'm typing on it now. Here's some pics from the set up on Flickr. Jeff sent the thing double-boxed in a box so large that even the UPS guy commented on it.

First Impressions

• The Antec case is unreal. Brilliant design, built like a tank and very clean lines. Remember this is a collaborative case built with the folks at SilentPCReview.
• Jeff is an artist when it comes to building a quiet system and adds a lot of noise reduction materials. The whole inside of the case is lined in a foam.
• It's ridiculously fast. The word "obscene" comes to mind. It's working at least 80% of the speed of my thoughts (as opposed to 10-20% on my last PC.) I wait for little. Even opening a tab in IE7, once a chore that made me cry, happens instantly.
• It is SO quiet that my wife immediately noticed a different in the sound upstairs. The last computer sounded like a jet plane. This one I literally have to strain to hear if it's on.

The Setup

I  hate waste, so I wanted to continue to use my existing 24" 16:9 and 20" 4:3 Dell monitors, so I bought another 20" 4:3 Dell. Now I run three, all via DVI, with a free DVI port for one more monitor in case the spirit moves me.

I need to tie up all the cables in the back there, but I've only been at this for an hour or so. Eventually all the cables will be clean and the whole area will be "office-like" - just like I like it.

Here's the Hanseldesk. Microphone and pop-filter on the right there, next to the XM Radio Boombox and Mac Mini. Two WDC MyBooks (love those drives) under the 24" LCD. The 20" on the right is a few years old and the 20" on the left is brand new (and half the price. Sigh.)

Vista 64-bit Ultimate

For some reason I thought that 64-bit would be this scary new world where nothing worked. So far it's been a total non-event. I don't know what I was sweating. I got a 64-bit driver for my Canon Pixma MP500 Multi-function Printer/Scanner and everything else has just worked out of the box. All 4 Gigs of RAM are available and in use.

What I Installed

I'm going to try to keep this machine free of crapware, so I'm starting to be a lot more judicious about what I go installing (unlike last year.) Here's what I needed to get going this evening:

• Windows Live Writer
• Windows Live Messenger
• Silverlight Alpha
• Microsoft Secure Content Downloader
• Visual Studio 2008 Pro
• MSDN Library
• Expression Blend 2 August Preview
• Silverlight Tools Alpha for VS2008.
• Daemon Tools (x64)
• WindowClippings (x64)
• 64-bit Firefox (Minefield)
• SmartFtp (x64)
• TortoiseSVN (x64)
• Google Talk
• Flickr Uploadr
• Del.icio.us IE Toolbar
• SlickRun Beta
• e Text Editor (Reminder: Pay this guy)
• FeedDemon

At this point, after about 90 minutes, I have a machine I can use 80% and be just fine. I'll get Office and a few other things later.

Benchmarks

The overclocking worked nicely and the system is rock-solid stable, even though it's nearly 100 degrees in Portland today. The 2.40 GHz chip is running nicely at 2.84 GHz giving me a nice 18%ish speed bump for free.

You'll have to tell me, Dear Reader, what kinds of Benchmarks you'll want to see. Here's a few easy ones:

• Previous 3Ghz P4 Bootup Time from after POST to Desktop: 48 seconds
• Current Quad Bootup Time from after POST to Desktop: 12 seconds.

Here's what the 64-bit CINEBENCH Benchmark from Maxon says:

CINEBENCH 9.5
****************************************************
Processor        : QuadPower
MHz              : 2.8 Ghz
Number of CPUs   : 4
Operating System : Vista 64
Graphics Card    : NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS
****************************************************
Rendering (Single   CPU): 469 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 1417 CB-CPU
Multiprocessor Speedup: 3.02
Shading (CINEMA 4D)                : 531 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 1737 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 4328 CB-GFX
OpenGL Speedup: 8.15

****************************************************

Versus the P4:

CINEBENCH 9.5
****************************************************
Processor: Intel® Pentium® 4
MHz: 3.0GHz
Number of CPUs: 2
Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS
****************************************************
Rendering (Single CPU): 248 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 293 CB-CPU
Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.18
Shading (CINEMA 4D): 278 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting): 1079 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting): 1685 CB-GFX
OpenGL Speedup: 6.06
****************************************************

I'll do some real world developer-specific benchmarking to see if, for example, DasBlog REALLY builds faster.

For now, as it's getting late, here's my Windows Experience Index, up from 4.2 on the P4.

Link Round Up

Here's the complete set of links talking about this project from concept to now. A few more real world benchmarks (with scenarios supplied by you, Dear Reader, or didn't I say?) and we'll be done.

Podcasts

• Hanselminutes Podcast 69 - Building a Developer PC
• Hanselminutes Podcast 74 - Jeff Atwood overclocks the Ultimate PC

Blog Posts

• The CodingHorror Ultimate Developer Rig Throwdown: Part 1 - The idea is presented and my list of demands goals is kicked around.
• The CodingHorror Ultimate Developer Rig Throwdown: Part 2 - The hardware list from NewEgg with a total of $1903.00. It'd be probably $1600 or less today, just a few months later.
• The CodingHorror Ultimate Developer Rig Throwdown: Part 3 - Jeff gets my system to boot and I link to him excessively.
• Building a PC, Part I - The Basic Build. Jeff unpacks and get my system to POST in two hours.
• Building a PC, Part II - Lots of pics as Jeff moves beyond BIOS POST and adds my 10,000 RPM Raptor Drives.
• Building a PC, Part III - Jeff digs into the magic and voodoo that is overclocking and pushes my system nearer to 3 Ghz. We're conservative overclockers, though. Remember this is a developer machine, not a Gamer PC.
• Building a PC, Part IV - Jeff adds some damping foam and greats a Basic, Premium and Deluxe Parts List.

If you've build a PC with these posts as your guide, or if you've "Gone Quad," let me know in the comments. If there's a topic around this that you want to start, why not try the new Hanselforums?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Tomorrow is my last day at Corillian/CheckFree and I like to keep things tidy and ethical (that means I'm not going to toast or format my hard drive on purpose.)

As you likely do as well, I had a number of "Assets" listed under my name at this company. That means Laptops, Desktops, Monitors, etc. For the ones that are strictly development and have only dev tools and mostly-fresh operating systems on them, I just made sure that everyone had passwords and access.

However, I did have a personal laptop, and these things tend to get reused in my experience at companies. Here's the checklist I used to get ready to leave.

All this assumes that you're turning in your hardware and your IT department either:

  a. might not toast/re-image your system immediately
  b . they'll stick it on a shelf and get to it whenever
  c. you're paranoid.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.

Remember that if you're a Domain User, someone can, and likely will, log in as you later after you've left. Every byte in your hard drive is theirs (and always has been). So, tidy up.

• RETURN: Turn in every piece of hardware that they ever gave you. I turned in Monitors, USB Hubs, everything. The last thing I need is someone from IT calling me looking for crap.
• REMOVE: Clean your Firefox Data - Use Tools|Clear Private Data.
  
• REMOVE: Clean your IE Browser History from Tools|Options|General|Delete...|Delete All...
  
• CLEAN: It never hurts to do things twice, so run ATF Cleaner and go through each top-level menu item, tidying up.
• CLEAN: I also like Crap Cleaner. Run the cleaner, and check everything. Also go to the Applications Tab and check everything and run.
  
• CLEAN: Then run Disk Cleanup in Start Menu|Accessories|Disk Cleanup. Before you do go get the DriveCleanup Registry Hack (called VolumeCaches) that will make your Drive Cleanup experience faster and more thorough. If the tools before did their jobs, there will be nothing left at this point.
• REMOVE PASSWORDS: Go into the Windows Wireless Network Connection Settings (or IBM's or whatever app is managing your wireless) and remove all the wireless networks, especially your home one. There's no reason to leave your system automatically trying to get on your home network.
  
• REMOVE PASSWORDS: Remove saved passwords from all Applications, including Live Messenger. This is a very important step and rather than clicking "Remember Me" you'll now get to click "Forget me." Click Sign out in Windows Live Messenger and click (Forget me). We don't want anyone else logging in as my later. You can certainly uninstall also if you like but you want to disable any auto-login stuff regardless.
   
• DEACTIVATE LICENSING: Deactivate any applications that have licenses over the Internet that are specific to your hardware. For example:
  • Deactivate iTunes from the Advanced menu.
  • Deactivate the Sony Connect Reader software.
  • Deactivate XmlSpy and anything else that keeps track of the number of computers it's installed on.
  • Deactivate licensing and remove saved keys from Windows Media Center.
• REMOVE: If you have any personal PGP Keys or Certs, remove them with certmgr.msc.
• BACKUP: Backup then delete all your TrueCrypt disks. Clean out your My Documents of personal stuff. Take all your personal stuff with you.
• UNINSTALL: Uninstall anything that you weren't supposed to have installed in the first place. I use MyUninstaller from Nir Sofer. It's AWESOME. You'll never use Add/Remove again. I removed Guild Wars and all the stuff I wasn't supposed to have on this box.
  • Uninstall FolderShare. FolderShare is a godsend, but it also synchronizes deletes and will auto log you in. It's possible that someone in IT could delete some files and FolderShare would "reach out" and delete them at home.
  • Uninstall Google Talk, IRC, AIM, Yahoo, whatever. Any and all chat programs.
  • Uninstall and delete your Password management app.
• CLEAN: Run Crap Cleaner one final time, specifically the "Issues" button which goes through the registry looking for unattached remnants. The IT department likely isn't looking for your Guild War save games and stuff, but again, it never hurts to be tidy.
• CLEAN: Empty the Recycle Bin.
• CLEAN AGAIN: Run QuickWiper if you really have something to hide. Again, this is a tidying-up operation rather than a "cover your tracks" operation, so it's up to you.
• STEAL: Take as many pens as you possibly can. And tape. And scissors. And paper*.
• LEAVE FRESH AND MINTY DEW: Logout and go home. You machine is clean and usable by the next guy.

It's the end of an era for me. This is only my third job, as I have stayed everywhere I've worked for at least 5, usually 7 years. I got a little misty-eyed when I clicked "Forget me" in Messenger. I'm nervous, a little scared even, but there's a whole new world waiting for me and my little family starting in September. I hope it doesn't suck. 

I'm scared! Hold me, blogosphere, hold me! ;)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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