Posted by: kurtsh | February 26, 2007

RELEASE: Mobile Phone Voice Mail gadget for Windows Vista

Wanna see your mobile phone’s voice mail on your Windows Vista PC?

CallWave Voicemail WidgetCallWave.com has a Windows Vista gadget that notifies you about the details of your voicemail.  It also receives a recording of the voice mail itself for you to listen to on your PC directly through the gadget.  Go to http://www.callwave.com for details.

I’ll throw these caveats into the mix:

  • Callwave will redirect your Verizon/Cingular voicemail to their service.  They will essentially receive all of your voicemail and store it, deleting it from your actual carrier’s servers so be careful with this if you receive a lot of customer calls because the audio content is no longer on your personal cell phone account.
  • Based on the Terms of Usage/Privacy Statement, you may start receiving a marketing email from the company and its partners.

Courtesy of Jason Langridge’s site, my boy in the UK:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonlan/archive/2007/02/24/vista-gadget-mobile-phone-voice-mail.aspx

I was reviewing an old Powerpoint that I did and I found an interesting list that I’d written on "Why Media Servers like Windows Media Services 9.1 are so much better at hosting Streaming Media than Web Servers".  Here’s the list:

  • BANDWIDTH SCALABILITY
    A Web Server sends as much data as quickly as possible.  This greatly reduces the ability of the server to serve great numbers of clients at the same time since bandwidth is saturated as a much faster rate.  Streaming Servers send data at predictable rates due to larger file sizes and concurrent demand for data.
  • UNINTERRUPTED CLIENT EXPERIENCE
    Media Servers intelligently regulate the rate at which data is being sent based on feedback from the player.  This allows players to always cache up just enough media to smoothly show video/audio and request "more content" if there was a hiccup and the cache is beginning to diminish.  This is balanced between the server’s desire to not use up the server’s available bandwidth to improve service scalability.
  • NO MULTI-BITRATE VIDEO
    Web servers do not support MBR video, which serves a specific bitrate media stream (depending on what’s requested from the client’s player based on the client’s available bandwidth) from a single file on the server that contains video streams for multiple bit rates.  A Streaming Server can store MBR video files which singularly serve any available video qualities to all bandwidth types, within a single file.
  • NO CONNECTIONLESS MEDIA
    Web servers are not designed to send data over UDP, which is the preferred method for media delivery because among other things, it is designed for low latency, forgiving applications.  TCP is a guaranteed, in-order protocol that must wait for lost packets that aren’t received – no matter how unnecessary the packet really is.  (One lost packet in a video stream is hardly the end of the world and most people won’t even know there was a hiccup if one got lost, however TCP must-must-must get that lost packet.)  Also UDP can use a single socket/port to transmit video from to multiple destinations, where as TCP must reserve a specific socket/port for each connection.
  • MULTICAST SUPPORT
    Web servers do not support multicast streaming.  Multicast enables streaming servers to transmit a single media feed to an unlimited number of clients "listening", not unlike a broadcast radio station or an over-the-air TV station.  This provides a huge amount of scalability for servers that are in scenarios that can leverage multicasting.  Web servers must transmit content individually to each client connection, even if the content is the same for each client.
  • FAST-FORWARD
    Web servers do not provide the VCR type playback function a media server does.  A streaming server can fast-forward to specific location in an on-demand stream and immediately deliver the content at that timecode to the client.  A web server can not:  The client must wait until that component of the media stream has been downloaded before they can view it which is extremely unproductive for long recordings like seminars & recorded presentations that may be an hour long and have a lot of content to download.
  • NO CLIENT LOGGING
    Web servers are not designed to capture rich client logging data that media servers can capture.  Streaming servers can not only tell "who" accessed a stream via IP address or actual credential, but how long they used the stream, how much data they downloaded, to what point they listened, what kind of bandwidth they had, the version of the player they used and it’s configuration, etc.  This information can be immensely valuable when delivering Distance Learning or Remote Education.

Recently, for a number of reasons I’ve been using an old tool from Roadkil called DiskSpeed that makes it easy to benchmark read/write storage devices like hard drives & flash drives.  (You can get it from http://www.roadkil.net/downloads/DskSpeed.zip)

One of things that has become readily apparent to me is how substantial the performance improvement can be for a Windows Vista machine that uses ReadyBoost.  ReadyBoost if you recall, is the caching technology that Windows Vista has for machines that have high speed Flash Media Drives connected to them.  What Windows Vista does is copy the most frequently used files on your hard drive to the flash-based cache, and when necessary, read those same files from the ReadyBoost cache instead of reading them from disk.  Dedicating a high speed Flash Media Drive to your desktop/laptop can potentially increase the performance of drive reads on your system by 300% simply by caching & reading commonly accessed files in this way.

Take for instance my Apacer 200X 4GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive:  It has an average linear read performance of 27.3MBytes/sec, a random read performance of 7.8MBytes/sec, and 2.1ms disk access time.  Compare this with my 7200RPM internal hard drive which has linear read performance of 42.3MBytes/sec, a random read performance of 2.3MBytes/second, and a disk access time of 10.1ms.

At first glance, you might think that my internal hard drive’s performance, based on linear read performance blows away my flash drive 2 to 1, (42.3 vs 27.3) but that’s simply not that case, and here’s why: 

  • RANDOM READS RULE
    Most accesses of disk consists of many little file reads – the equivalent of random reads, not linear reads.  This doesn’t bode well for linear read performance’s relevance since files are generally scattered across the disk.  Even with Windows Vista’s ability to sequentially order commonly read files (so that reads for commonly executed actions are done as linearly as possible), the magic number is random read performance, and for that flash has the hard disks number 3 to 1.  (7.8 vs 2.3)
  • ACCESS TIME AFFECTS EVERYTHING
    Additionally, access times for flash are always better because… well… there’s no moving parts, no moving drive head, no rotating spindle.  Everything on flash is addressed very quickly through electronic memory addressing.  And access time is a latent performance drag on both physical hard drives as well as flash drives. (to a much lesser degree of course)

In fact, the only time a physical disk could possibly prevail as the performance victor as a storage medium for Windows Vista would be if we were reading very large, very contiguous files.  Large multigigabyte workstation image files for example, could possibily be best served read from 7200RPM hard drives.  (Note however that this isn’t necessarily a certainty being that access times might also be lousy on the hard drive.)

Of course there’s a few caveats to be certain:

  1. Your flash medium must be HIGH SPEED.  A leftover USB 2.0 Flash Drive that you have lying around from a vendor’s presentation is probably not a good candidate for ReadyBoost usage and isn’t going to help your performance:  Most USB 2.0 Flash Drives have really lousy read/write performance and are sometimes even slower than today’s hard drives. 
    On the other hand, a cheap high-speed SDflash card plugged into the SDFlash slot of your laptop, like the A-DATA 150X speed 2GB Secure Digital Memory card, makes for a great "quick performance fix".
  2. If you have a lot of RAM, (like 2-4GB) the RAM cache implemented in Windows Vista will take care of most of these reads, rendering the ReadyBoost cache significantly less used and thus far less effective.
  3. Your performance may vary depending on the types of files you use.  If your day to day operation uses large sequential files, hard drive performance may be better than ReadyBoost cache… however Windows Vista itself consists of many little files making ReadyBoost effective at least for those files so it’s still probably a good idea to use it.
  4. Naturally, the I/O performance of your primary hard drive will greatly impact the difference in performance you see.  If you’ve got a desktop PC with a 7200RPM Western Digital high performance hard drive, you won’t likely see nearly as big a performance improvement as if you were a laptop user with a 4200RPM 2.5" Seagate portable drive using a ReadyBoost cache.
  5. ReadyBoost does some fascinating things at boot time.  No, really.  Because after a while, the Windows Vista operating system is likely to get it’s most frequently accessed files stored into the ReadyBoost cache, when you boot up your Windows Vista PC, you’re likely to see nothing going on on your hard drive’s lights… it’s kinda spooky.  Everything gets read off the ReadyBoost cache and you’ll find yourself good to go with relatively no actual sound eminating from your hard drive.

UPDATE:  NOVEMBER 1, 2009
I’m updating this because someone asked me to add this to help anyone that reads this post:

“The “list disk” command in DISKPART will help people find their flash drive without accidentally formatting the wrong drive.”

It sounds like some people out there nuked another drive on their system while using DISKPART.  Yikes.  Anyway, consider that a helpful hint from the community.

UPDATE:  MARCH 19, 2007
Wow.  I’ve discovered that this post has been viewed by a lot of people other than my customers which frankly was quite a surprise.  How do you guys find this stuff? <grin>  I thought because there seems to be a lot more people than originally intended reading this entry, I’d clarify a few points for prospective “installers”, particularly around the “time-to-install” that I’d blurted out at the end of this original post (which has since been edited out):

1) YOUR MILEAGE MY VARY
It seems that performance for USB peripherals within PCs vary tremendously between machines.  I’m not referring to the bandwidth of USB 2.0 mind you, but rather the performance of USB peripherals when working on different brands of PCs.  USB ports on PCs seem to be connected to I/O buses that have widely varying performance depending on the manufacturer.   For example, I have two different laptops and both of them boot off of USB Flash Drives, but one of them, when I tried the USB flash drive boot, installed Windows Vista relatively slowly whereas the other one was nice & fast.  Hence – YMMV.

2) NO REAL BENCHMARKS.
A “10 minute install” is not a real benchmark.  It’s a number I just guesstimated because I noticed that the install ran noticably much faster than when I did the install from DVD.  This was suppposed to be just a fun geeky thing for IT guys to try out and use for their test lab PCs.  After all, many of us have dreamed of doing this at one time or another for convenience purposes. 

I never intended on this being a really scientific analysis/time-test for installing Windows Vista so please don’t take any numbers I wrote as gospel thinking that your company’s Windows Vista deployment should use USB drives because you think you can lower your install time by x%, minimizing your cost of deployment by y%, and reducing your Windows Vista TCO by z%.  I haven’t run any real benchmarks.  This was supposed to be just something nice for my customer’s IT guys to try, okay?

—————————–

ORIGINAL POST
I’ve been thinking about writing a post about “How to install Windows Vista from a USB Flash Drive” for a while but just never got around to doing it.  What got me thinking about it was a post on Josh’s board (windowsconnected.com) about running WinPE from a bootable USB Flash drive and it seems to me like there’s be a lot of folks that would want to install Windows Vista entirely from a USB Flash drive as well.

WHY INSTALL FROM USB FLASH DRIVE?
Why would someone want to install a client OS from a thumb drive instead of a DVDROM or over the network?  One reason:  Performance.  Installing Windows Vista from a high speed USB flash drive is in my experience the easiest & fastest way to complete a Windows Vista install.  This is much faster than using a DVD, gigabit ethernet, or possibly even some external USB 2.0 hard drives, due to differences in access speed & transfer rate.  To put this into perspective, y’know how installing Windows on a Virtual PC virtual machine from an .ISO CD image is really, really, really fast?  Imagine something roughly just as fast, except for doing installations of the OS on to actual workstations.

STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS
Here’s some step-by-step instructions on how we do this, some of which was adapted from Josh’s instructions, again, kudos to Josh.

  1. Acquire an ultra-fast USB 2.0 flash drive
    The drive I and my coworkers recommend is the Apacer 4GB Handy Steno USB Flash Drive HT203, 200X Hi-Speed USB 2.0.  It’s the fastest USB 2.0 Flash Drive that we’ve found – it has a read speed of 25MBytes/sec. & a write speed-14MBytes/sec and also works great as a ReadyBoost cache.  You can get them from $56.99 each:  
               http://www.directron.com/ht2034g.htmlIncidentally, once you’ve got Windows Vista up and running, you may want to consider getting an ultra-fast SDFlash card, installing it into your laptop or desktop, and leaving it there as a ReadyBoost cache.  Why?  It can’t hurt and they’re so cheap that it’s worth getting.   I personally got a SDFlash card for every one of my machines – the A-DATA 2GB Secure Digital Memory Card, 150X Turbo SD Card has a read speed of more than 22.5MB/s and a write speed of more than 15MB/s.  You can get them for $19.99 each:  
               
    http://supermediastore.com/adata-2gb-sd-secure-digital-card-150x.html
  2. Format the Apacer Flash Drive
    Run CMD.EXE and type the following.  Note: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as “disk 1”.  you should double check that by doing a list of the disks (type “list disk”) before cleaning it.  If you have multiple hard drives, like an SDFlash drive or a Multibay drive, you could end up wiping your second drive using this command. 
    (This was a warning that Josh added to his post along with the following commands that I copied from him, so kudos to Josh)

    1. diskpart
    2. select disk 1
    3. clean
    4. create partition primary
    5. select partition 1
    6. active
    7. format fs=fat32
    8. assign
    9. exit
  • Copy Windows Vista’s DVD ROM content to the Flash Drive
    Simply issue the following command to start copying all the content from the Windows Vista DVD to your newly formatted high speed flash drive.

    • xcopy d:*.* /s/e/f e:
  • And that’s it.  Boot up the machine, have it boot off the USB drive, and watch how fast the installation completes.  If you thought Windows Vista installed quickly before then let’s see how you like it now.  The slowest part of the install will probably be the computer waiting for you to type in information in the setup fields, and even that can be automated using the Windows Automated Installation Kit.

    LaCie Ethernet Disk 1TBCool!  LaCie produced at 1TB Network-attached Storage device that using Windows XP Embedded!  This means that you could buy one for $700, slap it on to your home or small business LAN and instantly have 1TB available for storage on the network!

    Uh… so why is this cool?  There’s a million and one NAS devices out there that have 1TB capacities and are lower priced right?

    Well, because it uses Windows Embedded, it respects Active Directory and it can even JOIN A DOMAIN.  It permits share-level permissions as well as directory/file level permissions with specific user/group privileges… just as Windows does.  Besides speaking TCP/IP and SMB networking, it also supports Appletalk, FTP, and HTTP file transfers natively and it’s gota Gigabit Ethernet adapter built into it.  Linux SaMBA appliances don’t have anywhere near the support that this big fella does.

    Additionally, the appliance also has 4 USB 2.0 ports on the back of it so you can expand it even further with other drives and use the entire set up as a hub for all your storage.

    Check it out:  http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10645

    I recently got a really interesting tip from a co-worker of mine.  Sounds to me like a winner!  Below is the email he sent with some corrections and rewording:

    A systems engineer goes to customer meetings and when the customer eventually lets us into the meeting room, we start up our demo machine(s) and hopefully we have the time to let it "settle down" before we actually do the demo – whether it’s physical server or within a virtual machine. 

    The problem with this is that if it HASN’T settled down – i.e. loaded up all its services and gotten to a point where it’s ready to run smoothly – the demo goes dog slow.

    I came across a very cool command you can issue on a host server and/or demo machines after you’ve logged in for a minute or so.  It essentially forces the server services to load up at a high priority to get the "settling down" to happen much faster.  I’ve tested this on both my physical server demo machine (no VM’s used) as well as my ‘bare’ WS03R2+Virtual Server 2005 R2 machine that runs virtual machines… and it works VERY well.  (I tested it and it can be run in the VM as well)

    Before running anything, login and let the desktop settle down for a minute or maybe two.  If it’s a server then let the services have a minute or two.  Then run a simple CMD file you can create yourself on the desktop and let it run.  What this does is force all the background processes to complete quickly with a high priority.  Do this with Task Manager open on the Performance tab and watch it – it gets intense on some configs and then voila, nearly no activity.  Then do a trial run through of your demo and watch the performance difference.  I’ve done this on my nc6000 as well as my nc8430 and same improvements exist.

    Each system had a clean install of Windows XP Professional with service pack 2 and all updates installed. The hard drives were defragged prior to each benchmark session. Before we ran each benchmark, we executed the command

    • Rundll32.exe AdvAPI32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks (note the comma)

    This immediately executes and forces all background idle tasks to completion, including the Windows Prefetcher!

    Attention all college hoops fans:  March Madness is upon us!

    Sunday, March 11th is the start of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, beginning with CBS Selection Show, and if you can’t watch your alma mater’s team while in sitting in the comfort of your couch at home, maybe you can watch it on your Windows-based computer. 

    That’s right:  It’s back for another year… “NCAA March-Madness-on-Demand” is streaming the video of all Men’s collegiate tournament basketball games to your computer using Microsoft Windows Media Technologies over 300kbps connections.  (300kbps is full screen, TV-quality resolution, mind you.)
    (This is taken from the official NCAA MMOD frequently asked questions web page)

    Q. What are the minimum system requirements?
    A. To properly view NCAA March Madness on Demand, your computer must be able to support the live, streaming video. Click here for a detailed list of minimum system requirements.
    ·  Any Intel or AMD processor, 400mhz or faster
    ·  Windows 98 or higher (Windows ME, Windows XP, etc.)
    ·  256MB RAM
    ·  16-bit sound card and speakers
    ·  65,000-color video display card
    ·  Internet connection: at least 350K cable/DSL/network
    ·  Web browser (see below); cookies enabled
    ·  JavaScript enabled
    ·  Windows Media Player Series 9 or 10
    ·  Internet Explorer 6.0 (recommended)

    ·  Netscape 7.02 (supported)
    ·  Firefox 1.5 (supported)

    So tell your customers and tune in to http://www.ncaasports.com/mmod this March!  

    Did you know that Windows Server "Longhorn" will have:
    – Virtual Machines that can be allocated up to 8 CPUs on SMP servers with up to 64 processors on them?
    – Terminal Services that expose applications securely over SSL?

    – Virtualization "on-the-metal" below the operating system?

    Seize control of your Windows infrastructure with Microsoft’s biggest server release since Windows 2003. Get a live, under-the-hood look at Windows Server "Longhorn" virtualization, deployment, Web services, and core reliability break-throughs.

    Sessions will be presented in 3 tracks:

    • Virtualization

    • Accessing Remote Applications

    • Web Applications and Workloads

    This one-day event is designed for IT Pro’s to gain a deep understanding of Windows Server "Longhorn". Specific emphasis at the event is placed on Virtualization Scenarios, Terminal Services enhancements, Network Access Protection, and Internet Information Server 7.0. The day is filled with demonstrations as well as in-depth discussions of these enhancements.
    After attending you’ll be able to understand how Windows Server "Longhorn" provides:

    • Deep virtualization integration with a Hypervisor-based solution that is part of Windows
    • Terminal Services based applications that are essentially seamless to use from the end user’s perspective when compared to a desktop application deployment
    • A more secure network environment through customizable Health Policies and Network Access Protection
    • The ability to easily configure Internet Information Server 7.0 through a flexible, text-based configuration system
    • A highly modular release of Internet Information Server with new tools that let you easily manage web applications

    Who will attend?

    • IT professionals
    • Network and systems administrators
    • IT managers and directors
    • Server administrators

    What you get:

    • Free Windows Server "Longhorn"
      Beta 3!
    • A deep dive into Windows Server "Longhorn" in 3 tracks:
      Virtualization, Web Apps, and security/mobility
    • Windows IT Pro subscription
    • Breakfast, lunch and snacks
    • Info from technology experts
    • T-shirt/bag
    • Networking with your peers

    Register today for the rate of $99. ($150 at the door)

    More information, visit: 
    http://www.windowsitpro.com/roadshows/longhorn/?code=insiders222

    Register: 
    https://store.pentontech.com/index.cfm?s=1&cid=18000193&promotionid=18001251&code=insiders222

    We just released a press release around the final 6 tools we’ve made to grease the wheels of Windows Vista deployment:

    • Microsoft® Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007
      As long winded as the title is, BDD 2007 is a heck of toolset.  It provides 3 core technologies:
      1) Lite-Touch Deployment:  The ability to deploy Windows Vista through imaging by simply booting up a PC over the network or booting from a CDROM.  Everything else is automated:  User data migration, workstation driver updates, disk partitioning, etc.
      2) Zero-Touch Deployment:  The ability to deploy Windows Vista completely remotely over the network, requiring no actual visitation of the workstation by a human.  This is the most automated an painless methodology however it requires the automation technology behind Systems Management Server 2003, and as such requires that SMS2003 be installed prior to using BDD2007.
      3) Zero-Touch Provisioning:  Provisioning provides complete deployment of a user’s needs to the machines, such as new applications post imaging, configurations, etc.
      DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/desktopdeployment
    • Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0
      The ACT 5.0 is of course a tool that will tell you not only if the applications on a given machine are compatible with Windows Vista, but also tell you HOW TO GET THEM TO WORK through tweaks and other changes to the application’s deployment or to Windows Vista’s configuration itself during it’s deployment.
      DOWNLOAD:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905102.aspx
    • Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0
      This is a helluva tool.  It enables organizations to scan each machine on the network for Windows Vista hardware compatibility without the need to install anything on those machines.  It then gens a report that tells you the administrator what machines are okay, what functional levels you can expect from them, and what you need to do with the machines that still need upgrading.
      DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/wvha
    • Volume Activation Management Tool
      One of the two ways to distribute Windows Vista licenses to newly installed machine is the use a Multiple Activation Key, a single key that is assigned a number of activations for Microsoft Volume Licensing customers – folks that purchase Windows in "bulk" at a discount.
      This activation process normally, like retail activation keys, requires either Internet based communication between the workstation and Microsoft over the Internet to validate the MAK.  For some this is acceptable.
      For those that would prefer to have workstation activation occur entirely over the InTRAnet without the need for each machine to connect to Microsoft, it’s possible to instead use the Volume Activation Management Tool, to allow a company administrator to activate multiple workstations and "cache up" those activations on a server on the corporate network, then have Windows Vista machines connect to the server with the "cached up" activations to activate themselves.  This has the benefit of only requiring a one-time connection over the Internet to Microsoft’s Activation Center, managed and orchestrated by the administrator himself, instead of having workstations connect over the Internet individually.
      DOWNLOAD:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=77533
    • Key Management Service for Windows Server® 2003
      This is the second way to deploy Windows Vista licenses to machines.  The Key Management Service is, in a nutshell, a service that has historically run on Windows Server Longhron to respond to Windows Vista activation requests within a corporate environment, eliminating the need to have these machines activate over the Internet through Microsoft’s Activation Center.  This service allows machines to be deployed using a single key without concern over machines "getting lost", making the company "lose a Windows license" because if the machine leaves the corporate network and is unable to contact the KMS server in 180 days, the machine cripples itself, minimizing the functionality of the machine to just basic features.

      This Key Management Service is now available for Windows Server 2003
      DOWNLOAD:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=82964.

    • Virtual PC 2007
      I’ve discussed this in another post so I won’t go into great detail on this, suffice it to say that it makes it possible to run Windows Vista within a Virtual PC, and it allows people to run Virtual PC using Windows Vista as a host.  This provides the following scenarios:
      – Testing application compatibility within a Windows Vista virtual machine
      – Configuring Vista-incompatible applications for execution within Windows XP inside a virtual machine for running on Windows Vista
      DOWNLOAD:  http://www.microsoft.com/virtualpc
    Posted by: kurtsh | February 20, 2007

    TOOL: How to flush out the disk write cache to a drive

    While I was writing my post on Process Explorer, I stumbled on an updated tool that I’ve been using since 1997 when Mark Russinovich first created it for his original web site, http://www.ntinternals.com.  (I believe our lawyers might have forced him to change the name to Winternals.com because a decade ago our legal department went gonzo about hunting down people that used the term NT in their domain names, claiming copyright.  Whatever.)

    In any case, the tool used to be called NTFLUSH.EXE, which I still have.  It’s apparently now called "Sync 2.0", which is as the file name describes, a way to either "flush" the NT write cache ro "sync" the NT write cache such that changes made to the file cache in memory are "synced" with what’s actually on disk.

    See, when you write changes to the disk, those changes aren’t necessarily immediately written.  Instead they’re written to the file cache in memory for writing back to disk at a later time when there’s less activity and more CPU available.  And usually this isn’t a problem:  After all, the only way that you’d suffer data loss from NOT writing these changes to disk would be if the power went out, the user suddenly and unexpectedly turned off the computer, or if the disk got yanked out unexpectedly from the PC.

    Scenarios 1 & 2 aren’t likely.  Most people are smart enough to know that hard reseting a computer results in potential data loss, and the resulting performance benefit to the end user of having a write cache is so huge that it’d be terrible not to have it available.

    Scenario 3 however is very common:  If you have a SDFlash card, a USB thumb stick, a USB connected hard drive, a PC Card based microdrive, or any one of these scenarios, you can see how easy it would be to simply YANK the storage off the PC… the same PC that might have content in the write cache waiting to write it to the disk.  This is the reason why you’re supposed to "safely remove" the device before unplugging it.

    But the problem is that using the "safely remove hardware" feature in the Systray is a pain in the ass.  It takes 4 or 5 clicks of the mouse just to do what you used to do by just yanking the drive out from the USB port.  That’s why NTFLUSH/SYNC is interesting.  If you put it in your Start Menu or your Quick Link bar and run it right before you pull a USB drive or Flash card out, you can be sure that you aren’t going to suffer an data loss from latent writes.

    Anyway, the tools still on the Sysinternals site, and it’s certainly worth picking up.

    DOWNLOAD:
    http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Sync.mspx

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