A little known, and even less used, feature of all Windows versions from XP and forward is that they support a property called 'Last Access' on all files. On the surface, this seems neat, if not so useful. You can see whenever a file was last accessed using this property.

But think about it. What does this mean? It means that every time you open a file for reading, Windows needs to write something somewhere on the disk! If you're in the process of enumerating, lets say 500 000 files, this is equal to slow! Does anyone ever use that property? Not that I know of.

I'm working with file based persistent storage in my solutions, not with a database, so file access is pretty important to me. By disabling this 'feature', I speeded up enumerating the file system by about a factor of 10! Generally speaking, you'll speed up any system with many file accesses by turning this feature off.

It's really simple too. At a DOS-prompt write:

fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

When you're at it, you might also want to do:

fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1

This last command disables generation of 8-dot-3 legacy file names, effectively halfing the size of directories in NTFS, which must be a good thing. Beware that there might be 16-bit software out there which actually need those 8-dot-3 names to find your files...

Finally! It's decided. I'm going to start spending serious time with AxCrypt and related services. AxCrypt and AxCrypt2Go will remain free and open source, and to finance it I'll also be developing and provide Internet-based services. These will be available for trial, to all registred AxCrypt-users, and later as subscription services. I've spent some time preparing for this, including developing the new site which looks fairly similar to the old one, but in fact is a full-fledged application whilst the old one was basically static HTML.

So, the good news is that in the summer time-frame, I'll be working more or less full-time with AxCrypt and AxCrypt2Go. The even better news is that I'll make Xecrets, the new Internet-based subscription service that complements the free software available. There'll never be a requirement to register or pay anything to use AxCrypt or AxCrypt2Go.

I am hoping to provide such great value for money that many of you actually will find the subscription service so useful that you'll be glad to pay a small amount for that, while at the same time providing financing for AxCrypt-development.

The philosophical view here is that encryption software is good to have open source, and software licensing is a slight evil, that unfortunately often is necessary to finance the product. I'll be trying for the best of both worlds here, providing free software (after all, there's absolutely no additional cost for me to provide a second copy of AxCrypt once the first is produced) but also providing services on the Internet, where a reasonable fee for the server and bandwidth cost feels fair and hopefully generating enough additional revenue to also support AxCrypt development.

The Xecrets subscription service will start as a safety-deposit for your secrets, such as logons, PIN-codes etc. Always available, and always protected. When you need them, you can logon to the Xecrets-site and search your secrets in a standard free-text search way. Your data is never stored decrypted on the server disk, nor is your decryption key.

Most, if not all, of us have a multitude of logon-codes and PIN-codes to keep track of. With Xecrets you have the possibility to have them available, protected and backed-up for a very low cost - $1/€1 per month.

There are endless possibilities and variations, but all things have to start somewhere, and this is what I'm planning right now.

These are the plans - please let me know your thoughts! I'm open for all suggestions that will help me keep providing the community with free software, while also being able to afford to spend sufficient time doing so. Mail me now!