Platformonomics – Sony and the Joy of Craplets — nice rant. The PC industry is so wrongheaded on this point.
Tag Archive for Windows
Architecture astronauts take over – Joel on Software
Architecture astronauts take over – Joel on Software — “It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.” Ouch.
Software notes — bloatware alternatives
- Crapware: Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software — i didn’t know about cdburnerxp
- Rsyncx on the mac — potential beyondcompare alternative
- Passpack password manager. I am not ready to give some service all my credentials but man do i need this
- Noiseware — I like this app, hugely helpful on my basketball gym shots
- firmware replacement for canon cameras — huh.
File System Mounting Tricks
- Featured Mac Download: Drag and Drop Upload Files to Google Docs with Gdocsuploader — Googledocs mounted on a mac.
- Flickr mounted under Linux
- Mount USB drives in a folder — to get around windows shell goofiness and to get around stupid arbitrary drive letters
NVIDIA makes up a manly slice of Vista Crash Pie
CrunchGear » Archive » NVIDIA makes up a manly slice of Vista Crash Pie — wow, the pc business bites msft in the ass hard. i don’t see how msft can let this stand long run.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Windows
Windows Utilities to try out
- TeraCopy — asynch copying with pause, resume, error handling
- Doublekiller — find and kill file dupes. And then RED to kill empty dirs
- Defraggler — individual file defraggler. UPDATE: faulted when I ran it. not going to use a defragger that faults
- Drivermax — backup all your drivers. UPDATE: pretty cool, MSFT should buy this thing.
- Xinorbis hard disk analyzer. Also windirstat. UPDATE: both nice and useful. Man do I have a lot of storage committed to FLAC
- Process Scanner or Taskpower3 to figure out what all those running processes are. UPDATE: process scanner doesn’t really provide any more detail than task manager, and taskpower wants money from me to try.
- Netsharemanager to manage network shares in bulk
- InFormEnter to complete webforms
- HD Tune for checking hard disk health
* Ed Bott’s list of 10 best utilities - Fix stuck pixels — does this actually work??
- Powercfg to control which devices can wake Windows. Or at least see which ones can
Connecting to Time Capsule from Windows
My time capsule was easy to setup to back up my macbook but I also wanted to use it a file share for my windows PCs. It was not obvious at all how to connect to it from Windows. The Time Capsule doesn’t show up in any of the network browsing UI. I finally downloaded the Airport utility for Windows and installed it, this let me look at the Time Capsule properties and I observed the default name of the Time Capsule — “John Ludwig’s Time Capsule” — is converted to a usable network name — “John-Ludwigs-Time-Capsule.local”. I was able to connect to this name in the Windows Explorer and map a drive to it and now all is well. There are also options in the Airbook utility to set the Workgroup for the time capsule and the WINS server, but in a home network, who knows where the freaking WINS server is??? I sure don’t.
Essential Windows Utilities
- Completely Uninstalling Windows Applications — sadly necessary
- svchost processes — this is very helpful.
- Google Docs Uploader — I am shifting all my doc storage up to google docs, this is helpful
Got Drobo working
A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: Not too happy with my Drobo — I did finally get a support call with Drobo and they got it working. I had to go twiddle a BIOS setting having to do with legacy USB support. The Drobo folks claim this is the BIOS manufacturer’s fault and assert that other mass storage USB devices will fail as well. However I have had no problems with a variety of generic USB housings and with a LaCie box so I don’t think the Drobo folks have this really figured out yet. Additionally the Drobo software decided to grab drive M for their use which was bad as I already had a network drive mapped to M. So that was chunky and painful.
The box seems to work fine now tho.
Grabbag of software links
- Switch Between Your Gmail Accounts — hmm this has been an impediment to spawning more accounts
- Paypal toolbar gens one-off credit card numbers — always liked the one-off credit card idea; at one point some ecommerce sites didn’t deal well with
- Generate blogrolls from google reader — need to reinstate my blogroll someday
- See if your windows box has stealth connections to the net — i’m clean
- Use Colr.org to plan out a color scheme — love color scheme tools
- AnyTV player – tried this one, actually seems to kind of work
- Visual exploration of medical terms — didn’t learn anything new but maybe useful
- Photomatix for HDR photography
Not too happy with my Drobo
Data Robotics, Inc. | Knowledge Base — these things are getting fab reviews but
- my PC won’t boot with it attached — apparently there is some bios tweak i can do — yuck
- and even when i can see it, the pc doesn’t recognize it as a drive
the hardware seems nice but this is too much trouble.
Recent software of note
- Remember the Googley Milk — major hole on iphone is lack of a todo list. this is my current favorite replacement. Nice PC UI.
- Flot javascript graphing library. or there is what looks to be a server-side google alternative. Now I am embarrassed I have never put a graph on my site.
- Price Advance. don’t know how well it works but seems worthy of a trial
- Crossloop. Remote screen control plus a peer to peer service to help others. I like the business model thinking.
- Resize any window. Sad that I even understand why I need this.
- Single file defrag. I bet I will need this someday
- Senuti iPod backup
- Ebay Desktop. Kind of nice tho late and really why is this an app and not just a better website?
- Mac disk usage utilities
Upgrading to XP — patchorama
Wow. Haven’t installed XP in quite a while. I installed the retail XP from a CD.
Then had to find my motherboard drivers on a different PC, burn them to a CD, since XP didn’t have the drivers on the retail disk. And the motherboard network chipset wouldn’t work until I got the new motherboard drivers.
Then I went to Windows Update. First I had to download and install a new Windows Update component. Then 16 security/critical patches. Then and only then was I allowed to download Service Pack 2, which takes a long time.
And after that reboot, another 85! patches waiting for me. And then I had to download sound card drivers, and nvidia drivers.
So … if you do this, be prepared for a lot of time spent babysitting downloads and installs.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Windows
Upgrading to XP
Finally have had enough of Vista64 bluescreening on me. Probably due to crappy 64bit video drivers. Also tired of being unable to print.
So I wiped the hard disk of my machine today and started the install of XP 32bit. First challenge — the XP install disk doesn’t have drivers for a huge amount of my system, including the network card chipset on the asus motherboard. Downloading all the drivers now on a separate machine to burn onto a CD.
Make sure you have an exact and detailed list of all your hardware if you go this route so you can, like me, track down all the drivers. If I’d been smart I would have downloaded and burnt all the drivers before I did the reinstall.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Windows
Software tips to remember
- Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – The Nuclear Option: Resetting The Crap Out Of Your Network Adapters in Vista
- Forcing google apps into mobile mode on the iphone — sure the iphone can display big web pages, but the edge network is so freaking slow that you don’t want to get the whole freaking page.
- Running multiple versions of the same program on windows — useful
- How to start an app in vista with elevated credentials
- Firefox user agent switcher
Microsoft Windows Search Indexer stopped working and was closed
Not sure why Vista decided it needed to tell me this, but this forum provides tips on fixing — Microsoft Windows Search Indexer stopped working and was closed – Tech Support Forum — basically you have to manually delete all the temporary working files for search. You’d think Vista could do that for you. Possibly related to the fact that my reliability index is 1.97 and I am getting multiple blue screens a day — thanks BioShock.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Windows
Vista reliability update
Installed this — An update is available that improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista — as I was suffering from several of the named problems:
⢠The computer stops responding, and you receive a “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” error message. You can restart the computer only by pressing the computer’s power button.
⢠The computer stops responding or restarts unexpectedly when you play video games or perform desktop operations.
⢠There are stability issues with some graphics processing units (GPUs). These issues could cause GPUs to stop responding (hang).
⢠Visual appearance issues occur when you play graphics-intensive games.
My machine didn’t croak on install. So far, so good
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Windows
Software links
- WikiMatrix – Compare them all — lists and compares all the wiki implementations
- Forummatrix — same dealy for forums
- MonkeyGTD — the fusion of wikis and GTD ideas is a strong draw to me. i religiously use my blackberry todo list, i wish it could be richer and embody more GTD functionality
- Pictobrowser flickr viewer. nice way to view a flickr photo album
- WIndows codec installer. Amazingly sad that you need tools like this on windows.
- How to use photoshop to create a mosaic effect
- Bust a name — better way to find domain names
- I never knew the value of CTRL-SHIFT-ESC. ANother sad commentary
- Turok – maybe I will need to get a PS3
Vista still troublesome
Vista Still Sucks, Pirillo Pissed — in my case, my reliability index hovers at about 5 and I can drive it down arbitrarily low by running games. I have seen some slight improvement but if I had the time I’d be sidegrading to XP.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Windows