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Re: Win'95 handing our directories over to MS?????
Subject:Re: Win'95 handing our directories over to MS????? From:"Arlen P. Walker" <Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 15 Aug 1995 07:28:00 -0600
This sounds so looney I thought it must be another example of the
Urban Myth, but I've heard it from several different people.
And they probably all got it from the same USENET post. It's source is probably
the same as the Prodigy alarm some years back. The Reg Wizard allocates space on
the HD and then writes its info into the space. The rest of the space allocated
will contain whatever was already there, such as a directory tree written out by
one of several utility programs using that disc area as scratch space.
Can anyone verify this? And if it turns out to be true, doesn't it
seem surprising that people are not raising h*** about it?
The only way to verify it would be to stick a 'scope on the line while logging
in to MS. No has done that, to my knowledge. But that hasn't stoppped a lot of
people from screaming about it.
Here's a thought: There are expected to be 50+ million sales of Win 95 in the
first year. How long do you think it's going to take MS to plough through all
those HD maps? If they printed one form letter per second, 24 hours a day 7 days
a week, aimed at each of those maps, it would take them almost TWO YEARS to
cover them all! Also, have any of you ever seen SPAudit in action? It's another
program which tries to determine what executables you have installed. Our
experience with it is that its reports miss over 50% of what is installed
(including MS Excel when not installed in the default directory) and report
several programs which were never installed (it "found" Leisure Suit Larry on
every machine we ran it on, from the VP's to the ones that had been running data
acquisition in the labs for their entire existence). Since MS helped in the
development of SPAudit, I've no evidence to believe Reg Wizard would be any more
reliable.
Have fun,
Arlen
arlen -dot- p -dot- walker -at- jci -dot- com
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In God we trust, all others must supply data
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