Thanks, But No Thanks
Gary D. Köhler
From the January 1998 Monitor
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First, a recipe, which I have obtained surreptitiously, originally published in an in-house recipe book written by Microsoft employees.
Redmond Roast Pig
Clean and stuff one medium size pig. Burn down house around pig. Rebuild house. Serve on a bed of rice and pineapple.
The meaning of the above recipe will become all too clear in what follows.
Our software and the operating systems required to run it are becoming ever more bloated and slower, absorbing all the gains made from increased microprocessor speed. The software companies then attempt to make all of this "easier" and more "efficient" with various kludges that only make things worse. I don't wish to sound like a Microsoft basher, but since they are the ones who are trying to be everywhere we go today, it is inevitable that many of their programs and utilities are the source of the problem.
Exhibit 1: Findfast. Findfast is a utility that is installed by default as part of Office 97. This means that if you don't want it installed you must use the custom install option and remove the checkmark for it. But first, you have to know about Findfast to be able to make that decision, so most users of Office 97 will be stuck with it.
The intention of Findfast is a noble one: to speed up the search for words and phrases in Office 97 application files by indexing all the files Office is likely to use and then updating this index periodically as the files change and new ones are added. Clearly it would be a complete waste to index executables, dynamic link libraries (DLLs), and driver files. Findfast limits itself by ignoring a large list of file extensions such as EXE, DRV, DLL, and many more. If Findfast finds a file that is not one of the Office applications, it will attempt to determine what format the file is and use an appropriate filter, so that 1-2-3 and WordPerfect files and others may also be indexed.
Findfast first came to my attention when I noticed that the C: partition of the hard drive of my new computer at work was down to 67Mb free out of 1200Mb. Hmmm, yes Windows 95 and Office 97 are piggy, bloated applications, but they just should not be taking up that much space. The usual suspect in this case is the Windows Temp directory, and that's where the problem was: there were over 2,700 files in this directory, taking up 430Mb! Many of these files had just under 600,000 bytes (the lengths always differed), and close inspection of the most recently written files showed that a big temporary file was being dropped onto my hard drive every two hours. Three more days and the system would fail catastrophically!
I went out to the Microsoft web site and searched through their articles and eventually the two hour interval was mentioned in an article about Findfast. I learned about the log that it keeps and soon determined which file was at fault: it was an old WordPerfect file with the file extension DOC that had subdocument codes that referred to files that no longer exist. Using information in the article I disabled it, set it up to run at 4 in the morning so it would not interfere during the work day, and set up Autoexec.Bat to clean up after FindFast. Why not just remove Findfast? That same article gave several dire warnings about removing it, implying that Outlook could not run efficiently without it. If the user still insists on removing Findfast their recommendation was uninstalling Microsoft Office and then reinstalling it. I don't think so! Thanks but no thanks! Hence the little "recipe" at the beginning of the article.
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Updated: 06/04/98
gdkohler@execpc.com