Behave Windows, behave!

I am an avid Linux user at home. All systems in this house use Linux in one form or another. Even the laptops my 6 and 8 year old daughters use run this OS. It all works well.

There are some caveats however. One of them is that when you need to use a Windows system, your Linux formatted drives can not be accessed as Windows does not recognise the EXT4 file system. Come on!!! Linux has been supporting every file system Microsoft threw on the market since the beginning of time.
So when you have an external hard drive you tend to keep it formatted in the original NTFS file system so your windows can still access the data.

Recently I hooked up my NTFS formatted 3 terabyte external hard drive to a windows system and found out that over 50% of the files are fragmented. WHAT?????? I just copy data to the drive. It's not like there's a lot of data that gets moved back and forth. There's no temporary files being written to it.
That did it for me. I am converting my NTFS drive to EXT4. EXT-formatted drives don't fragment as much (if at all).
Doing this has been a real PITA. That's a whole separate writing. This bit is about accessing the EXT4 partition in Windows.
So I did a bit a searching and found a decent EXT4 Windows driver at http://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-windows/
The driver is free, you just need to register. YAY!

WHohoooo, one more thing that doesn't behave properly is out of the door. :-D