If you run an older version of Microsoft Windows (Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 for instance) and you don’t use Outlook Express, or you’ve replaced it with Live Mail (or another program), you can remove it by typing the following command (all on one line)
“%ProgramFiles%\Outlook Express\setup50.exe” /APP:OE UNINSTALL /PROMPT
Or download a batch file (in a 7z archive) via remove_outlookexpress.7z
Around the end of last November I ordered a Kingston DataTraveler 150 32 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive (DT150/32GB Orange/Black). When it came in it seemed to work, and I didn’t really think anything of it, but when I started to try and copy large files to it, or put a significant amount of information on it (which actually wasn’t until around the first of this year) I continually had issues with it.
I contacted Kingston the first week of March to try and get a handle on the problem or an RMA to return it for a replacement. Kingston then requested that I send them some identifying markings from the metal USB plug — well my unit didn’t have any of those identifying markings, and since those marking would have been covered by the cap I couldn’t have told whether a new product I was interested in purchasing had them or not without opening the package in the store and taking off the cap (and of course mail order there’s no way to do it).
What was really alarming is I had a few other Kingston USB flash drives, and I took a look at them — they also didn’t have any markings on them. So from that I would have to conclude either Kingston just implemented this and the units I have are from before that time, or all the units I have are counterfeit. The truly alarming thing is I’m 99.9% positive that all of these units came from Fry’s Electronics, Microcenter, and Amazon.
This indicates to me that there’s a severe problem with the distribution channel of Kingston products, and that the Kingston name brand (and the Kingston warranty) is worthless. Which means, the purchase of Kingston products should be avoided since they are frequently counterfeited and Kingston appears to be only interested in protecting themselves, not the consumers of their products (since consumers really have no way of knowing if a product is counterfeit).
As Nancy used to say “JUST SAY NO” to Kingston products.
If you run an older version of Microsoft Windows (Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 for instance) and you don’t use Net Meeting, you can remove it by typing the following command (all on one line)
%SystemRoot%\System32\rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection NetMtg.Remove 132 msnetmtg.inf
Or download a batch file (in a 7z archive) via remove_netmeeting.7z
I’ve been using Microsoft MyPhone for several months now; and I switched over to it not because it’s something I felt I really needed, but because Windows 7 doesn’t synchronize with Windows Mobile 6.5 devices using the new Windows Sync Center; it requires that I install the Vista (abomination) Device Center which replaced Active-Sync.
Why do I hate Device Center? Well, I couldn’t really care whether I use the-man-in-the-moon or what ever to sync my phone, all I care is that I not have to use Outlook! And you guessed it, Device Center will only synchronize with Outlook, Windows Sync Center allows synchronization with a number of sources (including Outlook if you use that POS).
The options I had were use third party synchronization software (which I was forced to use back when I had a Motorola KRZR — and I really didn’t want software to limit what I could sync), use Google (I really don’t want Google to have more of my personal information than they already have, or try MyPhone (not that I’m wild about Microsoft having my personal information; but I know that they’re a clueless company who wouldn’t know what to do with the information even if they realized they had it).
There are many things that MyPhone won’t do, and we might as well get those listed first:
Things it will do:
If you’re willing to pay for enhanced services:
Presumably these last services are targeted at lost phone (so you might wait until you’ve lost your phone to pay for the service, and I guess if it can’t do it you might be able to get a refund).
Currently MyPhone only supports Windows Mobile devices (so you can consider it’s something you get when you purchase a Windows Mobile phone), and most current Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 phones already have it pre-installed (but you can easily download it and install it on any Windows Mobile 6, 6.1, or 6.5).
To effectively use MyPhone you should have an unlimited data plan (or it might end up costing you quite a bit of money to do the synchronizations).
I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I think MyPhone is the best thing since sliced white bread (who came up with that expression — white bread is horrible), but it works, and it works well — and it provides a service for owners of Windows Mobile 6.x that Windows 7 doesn’t (so much for Microsoft’s flagship products, makes you wonder why you have to pay the big bucks for things that don’t work well, and don’t work together).
One of the nice features of MyPhone is that you can use it to sync information to you phone regardless of what desktop operating system you run (I believe synchronizing to Windows Mobile devices still requires a third party [extra cost] product on OS-X; Sync Mate or Missing Sync).
NOTE: I believe Microsoft considers MyPhone to be part of the Windows Live offerings, but since it doesn’t inter-operate with Windows Live (at least in the current version) I don’t see how anyone can make that claim with a straight face (where do they get these programmers and program managers).
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
That’s what the GIMP site says; but what GIMP is is a free Open Source alternative to programs like Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro that runs on Linux, OS-X, and Windows.
GIMP is reasonably easy to use, powerful, and rock solid.
If you understand the principles of image/photo editing you’ll be a pro at using GIMP in no time — far easier to use than Photoshop, far more functional than Paint Shop Pro. And it’s free — totally free — just download it an install it. There’s lots of plug-ins for it as well (so make sure you take a look at some of those add ins). Be sure and review the online documentation, tutorials, and FAQ; plus there are a number of well written books on GIMP available for purchase.
I wrote this little batch file to make Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 have a user directory structure more similar to Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7.
You simply need to run it as a user with administrative privileges and it will create the “User” directory in the root of your drive along with all the other more “sane” directory structures that the newer Windows use — don’t worry, it uses links so that you won’t have two copies of the information, and applications that expect the old structure will continue to work.
There is an older BLOG post that describes how it works: Revise Windows XP “Home” Directory Structure if you’re interested in the details.
I use a lot of virtual machines, and I often RDP to my servers to manage them; sometimes I’ll have several windows open at once and it becomes fairly easy to get a little confused as to what window is associated with which machine.
Long long ago (in a galaxy far far away) I started making desktop background images that contained the machine name and installing them on each machine. That was a fair amount of work, and require configuration on each and every machine.
Then I found BgInfo (from SysInternals, now Microsoft), and that was a great solution — but it did still require a moderate amount of configuration on every machine…
So, I created an “installer” for BgInfo that puts all the files in the right places, and creates the startup link so as to almost completely automate the configuration (OK – you have to run a single command on each machine; but if you map to a share or put this on a thumb drive it’s really simple).
BgInfo (my installer; includes an older version of BgInfo)
About two years ago I wrote a program that created a sitemap from a local copy of my web pages (I also wrote an automation wrapper so that I could do all my web sites along with other mundane tasks reliably).
When I installed Wordpress over a year ago I really liked the fact that the sitemap plug in was capable of dynamically creating a sitemap when a request was made; and I set it as a goal to implement that on my web site.
Well, yesterday that goal was realized.
I wrote a simple PHP script that takes some meta information and creates a sitemap, either uncompressed or compressed based on what is requested. I used a rewrite rule in my .htaccess file to allow search engines to continue to request the familiar sitemap.xml and/or sitemap.xml.gz file.
Now I don’t have to worry about creating and deploying a sitemap file when I change a file; I only have to make sure that the meta information is updated when I add or remove pages. Plus, I incorporated the concept of dynamic pages, so that the sitemap can accurately report fresh content.
At the moment I haven’t decided if I’m going to “publish” this code or not. It’s likely I will once I clean it up and actually test it more completely. Like I said, it isn’t rocket science – it just takes a little knowledge of what a sitemap is, and you can get everything you need from sitemaps.org; a little ability in PHP, and a basic understanding of how to write a re-write rule for Apache.
We really haven’t done everything we could to protect our customers. Our products just aren’t engineered for security.
· Brian Valentine – Senior Vice President for Windows Development, Microsoft Corporation
There are many people out there that say that *nix and Mac file systems don’t fragment — only Windows does.
They’re dead wrong.
[I know I've said this before, but it's worth saying again]
All three file systems (and in Windows we’re talking about NTFS, not FAT) derive from the same basic file system organization, and all three have pretty much the same characteristics (there are differences, but those really have nothing to do with the likelihood of fragmentation).
Fragmentation is just a by-product of the way a file system works. The file system must make decisions about how to lay files down on the disk, and since it doesn’t have a crystal ball it cannot see the future. Thus is a file is pinned between two other files and it must grow, the file would either need to be moved (creating an empty spot of a maximum size) or extended in another area (thus being fragmented).
There are various schemes for handling file allocations, but most of them rely on an application that is creating the file giving the operating system (and thus file system) sufficient information on the files maximum size and hints as to whether it is temporary, may grow, etc.
Given that file systems will fragment, the need for fragmentation is real. Windows recognizes this (mainly because Windows used to use a FAT file system where fragmentation caused severe performance issues).
If you have a *nix or Mac based system, I’m sure you can locate a reasonably good defragmenter (not every one is in denial about the need for periodically defragmenting the system). If you have Windows based system you already have a reasonably good defragmenter that came with the systems (a “lite” version of Executive Systems Diskeeper, which now just goes by the name of Diskeeper Corporation). You can, of course, purchase a number of commerical products, like the full blown Diskeeper, O&O Defrag (my personal favorite), or download a host of free or inexpensive products.
The key to defragmenting your system is knowing when you should invest the time (and wear on your disks). The most accurate answer would be when system fragmentation reaches a point where it adversely effects performance. That seems a little vague, but most of the defragmentation tools actually will do an analysis and advise you if they should be run. Some of them have active defragmentation (but like the file system, they don’t have a crystal ball, and will often cost performance, not enhance it — so I would just say no to active defragmentation).
A good rule of thumb is that right after you install you system, or any time you install major updates or service packs you should defragment your system. It’s a good idea to clean off temporary files (like your browser cache, etc) before you defragment. And you might even want to clean off old restore points (if you have them enabled).
There’s certainly no reason to defragment your system daily or weekly; but an occasional night of running your defragmenter of choice will likely decrease boot time and increase overall system performance.
One other little tid-bit — remove your paging file before defragmenting; then after you’re finished, create a new paging file of a fixed size (ie set the minimum and maximum to the same thing). That way you have a nicely defragmented paging file that will not cause fragmentation or fragment itself (leading to better system performance). Of course, if your system has enough memory to run without a paging file, you don’t need one at all.
