NO WARRANTEE EXPRESS OR IMPLIED! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
IF YOU CRASH AND WIPE OUT YOUR HARD DRIVE USING THIS SOFTWARE, THAT’S JUST TOO BAD. YOU ARE ASSUMING THE FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR USING IT!
On the other hand, I’ve run it on 36,000 files without incident. It’s pretty harmless. If it encounters any errors on files, it just ignores that file and goes on to the next.... (OK, geeks, it ignores files that return: -35; -37; -38; -39; -40; -43; -45; -52 and -54 errors...)
Crash Less Often (CLO) the WDEF fixer
What is it?
There is a common programmer’s mistake that is in many commercial and shareware programs that leads to occassional crashes. Crash Less Often fixes the problem.
More detail:
WDEF is a window definition; MDEF is a Menu Definition and CDEF is a control definition.
Neither WDEFs nor MDEFs should ever be marked as purgable. CDEFs is optional.
CLO examines a file to see if it has a WDEF resource, and if so, if that resource is marked as purgable. If it is, it marks it unpurgable. (If the WDEF is left as purgable, and it is purged, and then the system asks for it when a different resource file is in use, well....you Crash More Frequently.) I first pointed this out to the programming community nearly four years ago, but with the advent of 7.5.5, these crashes seem to be more frequent.
There are three versions of the software.
CLO WDEF : the original version which fixes only the WDEF problem
and
CLO Power : which fixes WDEFs, MDEFs and CDEFs. (This is the fixer I use on my own files.)
and
CLO reporter: which reports on WDEFs MDEFs and CDEFs, but does NOT fix them. It just produces the printed file.
All three files are 'fat.'
Crash Less Often works on individual files and on folders. Just drag a file or folder to the CLO icon, and it will go to work.
There’s not much to see: I made it fast, not beautiful. (Well, if you want to see the pretty picture, you can run the program and choose the About...box...)
It will perform it’s work.
It will also change the modification date of any files it fixes, so that your backup program will catch them, and you’ll not have to run this too often.
Finally, it will write out a file to your desktop telling you what was fixed. If you use the Power version, it will write out "W" "M" and/or "C" to let you know what was fixed in each file.
If your files or folders are damaged....
If you have some badly damaged files and/or folders when this is run, and you drop one of those damaged folders on Crash Less Often, it may not exit properly. You should hear your hard drive being accessed all the time Crash Less Often is running. If it gets real quiet, and CLO hasn’t quit, you’re locked in a loop, and the only way out is to press command, option, shift and escape, to force the program to quit.
(For those that are curious, this is an entirely different thing than the old WDEF virus. Marking WDEFs as purgable is just a simple programming error.)
Crash Less Often is shareware. (Isn’t it worth $5 to Crash Less Often?) The fee is $5 for your first machine, and $1 for each machine after that. (2 Macs = $6; 10 Macs = $14.)
What to do : INSTRUCTIONS
Since Crash Less Often is messing with your files, and even though it’s relatively harmless, here are the step you should take before using CLO.
1) Back up your files.
2) Run Disk Fix or Norton Utilities (or similar program.) You don’t want to be rewriting a resource on a disk that is corrupted in the first place!
3) quit all running applications
4) reboot with the shift key down.
You can then drop a file on Crash Less Often to have it fixed. Try Adobe Illustrator or Word 6 first. (See? It’s even the big boys that make the mistake...)
Feeling bolder? In a hurry? OK: drop a folder of files on it. There’s nothing pretty to look at here: no thermometer or other guage. CLO is just working as fast as it can.
Be careful running this on your system folder. If Aaron is running it will crash. (Remember I told you to reboot with the shiftkey down to turn off your extensions.) I’d recommend that you do system folder stuff one file at a time. (You can start with Aladdin’s Stuffit Engine.)
Don’t worry about the system itself: it is always available, so the WDEF there are fine, purgable or not.
Because of miscellaneous errors with folders and files, it is possible if you drop a folder which contains many other nested folders, on the program, not all files will be analyzed.
In this case, just drop the individual folders on Crash Less Often.
The power version marks all three DEFs as non-purgable. There is nothing to lose from doing this, and it might help prevent some problems. It is what I have used myself.
Here is a list of (some) known applications that were changed.
W Adobe Photoshop™ 3.0.5
M Adobe Dimensions™ 2.0
WCM ClarisWorks
WCM ClarisWorks
WC ClarisWorks File Converter
WC Nisus® Writer
W Microsoft Word
WC Graphing Calculator
W PlayerPRO 4.4.2 (FAT)
W OmniPage Pro 6.0
W Microsoft Excel
WC QuickHelp™ 1.5.54
WC Quicken 6
WC Mail Merge
W NCK for Developers
W NTK 1.5.2b2
W Object Master™ Universal 3.0.1
W DocuComp® 1.5
CM ResEdit
M ZoneRanger 1.1
WC Color It!™ 3.0
WCM QuickHelp™
W M Fontographer® 4.1.3 PM
W PC Font Access 1.0.1
W M KPT Bryce™ 1.0
WC GIFConverter 2.3.7
W Morph™ 2.5 PPC
W Glider PRO™
W PowerMovieEffects 1.0.5+ß (PPC)
W Remote Slide Show
W MIDI Museum 1.10
W Miracle® 2.0.1
WC Miracle.rsrc
W PM6.0 RSRC
M Spin Doctor
CM Delrina Fax PRO
W File Transfer Tools
W CU-SeeMe 0.83b3 (PPC)
W Enhanced CU-SeeMe™
W Listener
W HTML Editor 1.1.3
WC Scope1
WC Claris Help System
WCM Claris Help Viewer
WCM QuickHelp
W buttonWindow XObj
W buttonWindow XObj
W MemLeak XObj
W RearWindow XObj
WC X-Archive 3.4
WCM QuickHelp™ 2.1
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The latest version is available at :
http://www.linksware.com
where you can also find LinksWare, the world’s first and easiest multimedia program.
Crash Less Often is shareware. The fee is $5 for your first machine, and $1 for each machine after that. (2 Macs = $6; 10 Macs = $14.)
Compared to the hours and aggravation you’ll save if this prevents just one crash, that’s a pretty good deal.
