Onlydarksets » Vista

Free Windows 7 for Vista users?

onlydarksets — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:09:38 +0000

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/zd/20090212/tc_zd/237037

Rest assured, the next iteration of Windows is on its way, but when and how? The latest rumor making the rounds in the blogosphere is that Microsoft will provide Vista users with a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available.

Yeah, right. If that happens, I’ll eat my hat.

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Media Center and Vista need a divorce

onlydarksets — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:04:22 +0000

Long Zheng posted a link on his blog to a Microsoft-produced retrospective of the last decade of Media Center versions (also posted by Brent at GeekTonic, which reminded me to write on this). It’s time for Microsoft to uncouple Media Center from the OS.

I jumped ship from Vista Media Center almost 6 months ago, and one of the biggest reasons was a persistent bug with an identified cause resulted in many of my recordings having an incorrect duration, which made it difficult (although not impossible) to use the files. To date, the problem has still not been resolved, because Media Center updates are tied to the OS release schedule, which does not permit quick release patches for non-critical bugs. If they get it wrong, it’s a whole new cycle before they can send out another patch.

Microsoft already realizes that baking everything into the OS is not always the best idea, because it creates a bloated OS and reduces flexibility and limits the options for the individual apps (see here, here, and here). Given the much richer experience I have had with SageTV since August, I think that applies to Media Center, as well.

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Manipulating arguments to a batch file

onlydarksets — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:59:29 +0000

I am creating a batch file for the command line, and I needed to parse out the arguments (e.g., get the filename, change the extension, remove the quotes, etc.). I always forget these (and where to find them), so I’m copying them here.

%~1 - expands %1 removing any surrounding quotes (")
%~f1 - expands %1 to a fully qualified path name
%~d1 - expands %1 to a drive letter only
%~p1 - expands %1 to a path only
%~n1 - expands %1 to a file name only
%~x1 - expands %1 to a file extension only
%~s1 - expanded path contains short names only
%~a1 - expands %1 to file attributes
%~t1 - expands %1 to date/time of file
%~z1 - expands %1 to size of file

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Mounting multiple ISOs

onlydarksets — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:33:26 +0000

When installing Office, etc. from our Microsoft Partner MSDN library, I usually take the lazy route and use 7-zip to unpack the ISOs. ISODisk lets you mount up to 20 ISOs simultaneously, and it seems like a more efficient path.

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Vista’s “Shrink Volume” feature

onlydarksets — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:29:55 +0000

The wireless stopped working reliably on my laptop, so I needed to reinstall Vista. Instead of doing it all at once, though, I decided to resize the partition and install Vista to a new partition, which would allow me to access the old install. This way, I can still access the programs, settings, and data from the old install until I am sure I have everything.

I tried using Vista’s “Shrink Volume” feature, but it only let me free up about 40% of the actual free space on the disk. Turns out that “Shrink Volume” isn’t really all that intelligent. It takes the last available sector reported by the disk as the limit of the free space it can create. So, if you have 70GB out of 120GB free, but there is a certain type of data written to the sector at the 90GB mark, you can only free up 30GB, not the full 70GB (image worth a thousand words).

There is a workaround (see here to disable hibernation), but this is something that Vista should handle invisibly.

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Phone-based two-factor authentication for LogMeIn

onlydarksets — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:42:26 +0000

I haven’t setup LogMeIn because I’m skittish about security. PhoneFactor looks like a promising addition to the chain that could alleviate my concerns. It provides a second-factor authentication (the first being your username/password) by requiring you to answer your phone before it lets you in. If you (or, more likely, a would-be hacker) don’t have the phone, you can’t get in.

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Disable loud beep in Remote Desktop

onlydarksets — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:17:19 +0000

Ugh – what a stupid “feature”. I’m testing some AtomicParsley settings in Remote Desktop, and every time it fails, a ridiculously loud Beep comes out of my local computer. I’ve muted the speakers and disabled every setting in RD, but it still happens.

Enter the interwebs. Or, more specifically, a site called Weyland.be.

Turns out there is a system device called “Beep”. Seriously. Stop it and disable its startup, and the Beep goes away. You can find it under “Non-Plug and Play Drivers” after enabling “Show Hidden Devices” in the Device Manager. Full instructions at Weyland.be.

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Free PDF markup tool

onlydarksets — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:18:54 +0000

I had to markup a file I had in PDF-only format, and a quick search turned up an incredibly powerful and FREE (even for commercial use) tool called PDF-XChange Viewer. In addition to being a lightweight (4MB) and fast PDF viewer (with a portable version and with IE and FF plugins), it also provides markup tools like highlighting, text boxes, comments, and drawing.

For Windows, of course.

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Turn off iPhone backups in Windows iTunes

onlydarksets — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:24:43 +0000

When the iPhone syncs, iTunes will often perform a backup that is excruciatingly slow. Mac users have an “easy” (i.e., available to anyone) way to prevent iTunes from doing backups. A less publicized version of the same method exists for Windows:

Quit iTunes.

Press Win+R (opens the Windows Run dialog)

Type or copy the following command:
“%CommonProgramFiles%AppleMobile Device Supportbindefaults.exe” write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

Open iTunes.

Connect the iPhone.

Make Sync without backing up.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to use the command line, a company I have never heard of has released an application called “iPhone Backup Switch“. As the name implies, it simply turns off or on iTunes’ iPhone backup process.

If neither of those work, there is also a method that involves editing the iTunesPref.xml file.

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Vista BitLocker – installed right

onlydarksets — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:59:51 +0000

Last night my laptop crashed for good, and I had to reload Vista. The culprit was BitLocker, which I had previously enabled after installing the OS. At the time, I couldn’t access the BitLocker Drive Preparation tool through our enterprise account, so I did it manually with Partition Magic. However, at least once a day after that I would have to reboot and perform some magic to get the laptop to boot. After 9 months, my laptop gave up.

This time, I did it right, and it seems to be working.

If BitLocker is foreign to you – here are a few good links and a couple of gotchas.

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