Author: Jim Cofer

By now you’ve probably heard of software like VMWare and Virtual PC – two programs that let you install “virtual computers” on your system. If you have some old program that only works in Windows 98 or NT 4.0, you can install either VMWare or Virtual PC and boot into a “virtual machine” to do what you need. Likewise, many people that want to learn Linux but need a working computer for day-to-day work have used virtual machine technology to get their learn on without the fear of screwing something up their machines.

But while virtual machines are nice and all, they’re not perfect. No matter how fast your computer is or how much RAM you have, you still have to wait for the virtual machine to boot up before you can use it. And moving data between a virtual and physical machine can sometimes be problematic. And let’s face it, virtual machines are simply overkill for a lot of applications. After all, needing Windows 98 for one particular program is one thing, but why install a virtual copy of Windows XP on top of a real version of XP?

Continue reading “More Virtualization Stuff”

OK, so the other day I was surfing around and came across this old chestnut at Download Squad: if you open Notepad and type .LOG at the very beginning of a new text document, then save the file, Notepad will automatically append the time and date to the file every time you open it. How is this useful? Well, I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps you’re a contractor and need to keep track of the time spent at a client’s site. Just open the file and type “Began work” underneath Notepad’s time stamp and you can use it as a log. Maybe you’ve got a noisy neighbor and you need to keep track of the racket they make. I dunno. The only thing you need to remember is that the .LOG bit is case-sensitive, so .Log or .log won’t work.

If you’d like to add the time and date to a Notepad file manually, just press the F5 key.

One of the most annoying “features” of Service Pack 2 for Windows XP is the seemingly endless stream of pop-up reminders to reboot your computer after installing patches from Windows Update. It’s a well-intentioned feature, and casual users should take Microsoft’s advice and reboot their computers when asked, since many patches cannot be applied while system files are in use and thus cannot be updated until the system restarts. However, for power users that are aware of the consequences of not rebooting immediately, the pop-ups can be incredibly annoying. Yes, we know we need to reboot our computers, but we’ll get around to it when we can – we have other things to do in the meantime. For instance, you might be troubleshooting a server or some code and want to wait until lunch to reboot your computer. If it’s 8AM when the first reminder pops up and 11AM is your scheduled lunch time, you’re going to have to click “Reboot Later” eighteen times until lunchtime. Not fun.

Continue reading “Killing WU Reboot Reminders”

Did you know that Firefox bookmarks have a cool feature called keywords? If you right-click any bookmark in Firefox and select “Properties”, you’ll see an entry called “Keyword:” with a blank text box next to it. You can enter any word you’d like to use as your own personal keyword; for example, the address for the Ars Technica “The Lounge” forum is:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/34709834

However, I have made lounge my keyword for that shortcut, so all I need to type is lounge into the address bar and the above page will load! Some of my other keywords include:

me – this site
yellow – http://www.realpageslive.com
damn – http://www.damninteresting.com
feed – http://feedvalidator.org
goof – http://www.myspace.com/jimcofer

Remember, Firefox keywords can be just about anything you wish. You can also use %s as a wildcard for searches if you’d like; for example, I could bookmark the myspace.com home page, then edit the bookmark to read http://www.myspace.com/%s with a keyword of msp. If I then typed msp jimcofer into the address bar, Firefox would put the jimcofer where the %s is in the keyword, so it would go to my profile (http://www.myspace.com/jimcofer). Typing msp someoneelse would take me to http://www.myspace.com/someoneelse and so on. In fact, there’s a whole slew of little tricks you can use with keywords; a good list of them is here.

Back in the Windows 9x days, it was often easier (and faster) to simply reinstall Windows on a non-booting computer than to actually diagnose the problem. Corporate IT departments still do this to a large degree – after all, it’s usually cheaper to just re-image an employee’s desktop than to pay an IT guy four hours of labor to troubleshoot some arcane issue. But for many home users it’s just not an option. Reinstalling XP itself doesn’t take that much time; installing the dozens of programs and “system tweaks” does.

Thankfully, Windows XP is pretty bulletproof; aside from basic “newbie problems” and self-inflicted issues (like spyware), you really have to work hard to take down an XP machine. But it does happen – in fact, it happened to me twice in just the past week! I decided to play around with various flavors of Linux. I decided to try the most “user friendly” version, Ubuntu, first. After playing around with the “live CD” version of the operating system, I decided to actually install it on my hard drive. Which was easy… but the Ubuntu installer overwrote the Master Boot Record (MBR) on my hard drive and Windows wouldn’t start (Ironically, in an effort to make Linux “easier” to use, they apparently removed the option not to install a bootloader… which made it impossible to boot into Windows!).

Continue reading “The Recovery Console”

I usually use the “Windows Scanner and Camera Wizard” to import pictures from my digital camera to my desktop PC via a card reader. However, my computer recently developed an annoying problem: although Windows autorun detected that a Compact Flash card had been put into the reader, and although it asked me if I wanted to use the Scanner and Camera Wizard to import my pictures, once I clicked “OK” to so… nothing happened. The wizard worked perfectly if I attached the Canon PowerShot directly to the computer, but nothing happened at all if I put the same memory card into the card reader.

This really bothered me, even if I had an easy workaround available (attaching the camera to the computer instead of the reader). Thankfully, I was quickly able to find that others have had similar problems, and that the good people at the Neoseeker.com forums had a quick registry fix that solved the problem. So if this ever happens to you, simply download this registry file. All you then need to do is unzip it and double-click on the .reg file and select “OK” to import the settings into the Registry. A reboot is not needed; after importing this file, the wizard immediately started working properly on my system.

There are literally thousands of computer problems that could be fixed remotely, thus saving your beleaguered helpdesk guy (or son… or husband) a long car trip just to click on a few icons. One of the main reasons why remote assistance hasn’t taken off even more than it has is due to a problem of access. Microsoft’s “Remote Desktop” would be an ideal solution to this problem, if not two significant issues: Remote Desktop is only available in Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003, so if your client or loved ones run Windows 2000 or Windows 98, you’re out of luck. Remote Desktop also locks the console session (the session displayed on the monitor) as soon as someone logs in remotely. This isn’t a total deal-breaker, but it is sometimes convenient to have both the local and remote users looking at the same thing, so the helpdesk guy can see exactly what the end user is doing to get an error message.

Symantec sells a program called pcAnywhere that works on every Win32 platform and allows both users to see what’s going on. However, the program is a bit expensive, has a lengthy and non user-friendly setup process, and requires the end-user to make changes to his or her router configuration before someone from the outside can connect to the computer.

Enter VNC. It has all of the advantages of pcAnywhere but is completely free of charge. It also has all of pcAnywhere’s disadvantages too, but some enterprising folks on the ‘Net have come up with an interesting work-around: a way to “package” VNC so that all the end user has to do is click their mouse a couple of times to allow you to connect remotely. Although you’ll find complete instructions at the link below, the set up basically works like this:

Continue reading “Packaging VNC”

One small annoyance for a lot of people is having to click on the same five or six icons every morning to start their workday. For example, someone might need to open Outlook, Excel, QuickBooks, Calculator and Internet Explorer every single morning. That’s five mouse clicks to accomplish one task, and that can get annoying. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a single shortcut that can open all of these programs? You can easily do this via a batch file and five minutes of typing.

Try this: open Notepad and paste all of the yellow text below into the Notepad window. Save the file on your desktop as “sample.cmd” (make sure that “Save As Type:” is set to “All files” and not “Text Documents”, or else the file will be saved as sample.cmd.txt):

start calc
start /min mspaint
start charmap
start /max wordpad
exit

When you double-click on the batch file, the programs listed will open exactly in the order listed in the batch file. You’ll probably also notice that Paint has started but is minimized, while WordPad has been started in a maximized window. You might guess that this is because of the /min and /max switches in the batch file, and your guess would be correct.

Continue reading “Multiple Programs – One Shortcut”

So – you’ve downloaded a Bittorrent client, and you’ve even managed to find some public BT search engines or have gotten yourself accepted into a private BT tracker. What to download? What’s the difference between a TELESYNC and TELECINE version of a movie? Which one’s better? What’s an SCR, and why are they so popular? Use this handy guide to find out which version of a movie is which!

Continue reading “The Quick Guide To Movie Types”

Just about everything in a Windows NT\2000\XP\Vista environment is assigned a unique “security identifier” (SID). Every user on a machine and every computer in a domain has a long string of numbers and letters that make a each account or machine unique. This is great for security – for example, it prevents someone from installing Windows Server 2003 on a laptop and creating a “ghost domain” with the same users as your work domain. Because the SIDs are different between your work’s real domain and the hacker’s ghost domain, the fake accounts cannot get into the CEO’s email account or sensitive network shares.

However, this has long been a problem for IT folks when it comes to changing network configurations. If a company’s workstations need to be moved from a workgroup to a domain, or from an old domain to a new one, or even if the old domain controller crashed and had to be replaced… all of these instances cause the computer’s SID to change. And any “new” accounts will get a new SID. So this means that when you convert John Doe’s computer from a workgroup to a domain, he will have a new domain account and SID… which means that he will get a new profile on his computer… which means that all of his documents, bookmarks, settings, Start Menu entries, email, wallpaper(s), browsing history, saved passwords, and even his desktop will be different.

Continue reading “Recycling User Profiles”