The one I posted with the string sort was written over 9 years ago and while it was fast enough for testing 32 bit code, with very big samples which you tend to use for timing sorts in 64 bit, it was far too slow. I have given it a heart, soul and R_SOUL transplant where instead of writing each random word to disk one at a time, it fills a 15 meg buffer then writes to disk before reading the next data. On big files > 100 meg etc .... it is at least 6 times faster as it dramatically reduces the disk write time.
There are 3 files,
ranwords.exe
testme.bat
timeit.exe
Run ranwords.exe without arguments to get the notation, timeit.exe is a simple toy for timing the called app's entire run time and the batch file runs it for you to see what it does.