Category: Geek Stuff

Ever since Chrome updated to version 46.0.2490.71, it’s been slow as molasses on my Windows 10 computer. Last night was the last straw: at one point, pages were taking anywhere from 2-6 minutes to load! And lest you think there’s something wrong with my internet connection, Edge and Firefox work just fine, thank you very much. Another sign that something’s wrong with Chrome specifically: it’s also taking the browser an extraordinarily long time to open local resources, like the bookmark manager and settings page. You know something’s wrong when you click “Settings” and it takes 2 minutes to open!

I don’t know exactly what’s happening here, but I have found a way to fix it: go to Settings, click “Show advanced settings”, uncheck the “Use hardware acceleration when available” box, then restart Chrome. You should find Chrome is much faster than before, and pages will no longer take minutes to load.

As I said in this post, I own a cheap Android phone. If you don’t want to go back and read that article, I’ll give you the short version: I owned three Android phones – each costing between $179 and $299 – and all of them were junk: they locked up, they spontaneously rebooted and stock apps crashed. So I bought a $79 LG Tribute phone just to “tide me over” until I could switch carriers, or until my carrier got some new phones. But I ended up really liking the Tribute: it does everything I want an Android phone to do, and it doesn’t crash or reboot or give me much trouble at all.

In fact, the only two things I don’t like about the Tribute are the subpar camera and lack of storage space. I can’t do much about the camera, but I can fix the storage space issue. Here’s how. To add space to your Tribute, you’ll need a large (16 or 32GB) micro SD card, a few free apps, and about 30-45 minutes.

But first, a warning: THIS PROCEDURE WILL ROOT YOUR PHONE. Although I have done the following procedure on my phone 4 times now without incident, there is a NON-ZERO chance that you could screw up something that will render your phone unusable. Please read the instructions below fully before trying this on your own phone. If you don’t understand something, please read the instructions until you do, or leave a comment so I can help. Having said all that, I am not responsible for any damage to your device!

What we’re going to do is root the phone, then install an app which divides your SD card into a FAT32 (Windows) partition and an ext4 (Linux) partition. We’ll then install an app which moves your apps to the ext4 partition on the SD card and creates symbolic links (symlinks) on the phone’s storage, which “tricks” Android into thinking the apps are installed there instead of the SD card.

STEP 1: BACKUP THE SD CARD

If you already have a 16GB card in your phone, go to Settings > Storage > SD card and see how much free space you have. What we’re going to do is shrink the existing partition by half. If you’ll still have plenty of free space left over after shrinking the partition, then you’re good to go. But if going from 16GB to 8GB will only leave you with a few hundred megabytes free, you’re going to need to either move some stuff off the card or upgrade to a 32GB card.

Either way, you need to back up the contents of the card just as a precaution. You can do that by attaching the phone to your computer and copying the files, or turning the phone off, pulling the SD card and putting it in an adapter and card reader. Whichever way works for you.

STEP 2: PREP THE PHONE

The first thing you want to do is enable USB Debugging. Click on Settings > About Phone > Software Information and tap “Build Number” seven times. You will know this is working because the phone will say something like “Tap 3 more times to get Developer Options”. Once you tap the full seven times, go back to the main Settings screen. You’ll now see an “Developer Options” menu. Click that, then click “OK” to the warning message. Lastly, scroll down and tap “USB debugging” to enable it.

Next, go back to the main Settings screen and tap “Security”. Scroll down to the “Unknown Sources” option and tap it to enable it. Click “OK” to any warning messages you may get.

STEP 3: ROOT THE PHONE

Using your phone’s web browser to go this page and download the latest version of KingRoot. This is a well-known rooting app, and it’s hosted on XDA, one of the largest Android enthusiast sites. It’s safe and legit, I promise. The download links are near the top, just under the introduction section. Download the file and save it to your phone (click “OK” or “Allow” if you get a “this file may harm your phone” warning).

After downloading, open File Manager and go to your Downloads folder. Tap on

NewKingrootV4.52_C127_B227_xda_release_2015_09_28_105243.apk

(the file name might vary according to version). Android will ask if you want to install the app. Tap “Yes” or “Allow”.

Once the app is installed, run it. You will see a screen that says “Root access is unavailable” and a big blue “Start Root” button. Tap the button, and a round progress meter will appear. It will probably go very slowly at first, but once it gets to around 24% it will move very rapidly. You should get a “root successful!” message. If so, reboot your phone, if the app asks you to. Also, note that KingRoot might reboot your phone while trying to obtain root. It never has on my phone, but you’ll see an on-screen message that it might need to.

STEP 4: INSTALL APARTED

Go to the Play store, search for “Aparted” (web link) and install it. Reboot your phone if the installer asks you to.

Next, go to Settings > Storage > SD card and choose “Unmount SD card” – this step is crucial!

Next, open Aparted and tap “Tools”. check the box for your existing FAT32 partition (this will most likely be “Part. 1: FS: fat32”. Scroll down and choose “Resize” from the drop down box. Drag your finger across the blue partition from right to left to shrink the partition. You want it to be roughly half the size it is now, but don’t worry about getting it exactly half the size: you almost certainly won’t get it exactly half. When you’re ready, tap “Apply”. Aparted will then shrink the existing FAT32 partition to the size you chose.

Next, tap the checkbox for the first available empty space – it will likely say “Part 2: FS: empty Size: 7989MB” or something similar. You’ll know you’ve chosen the right one when the the empty space to the right of the existing FAT32 partition is highlighted. Once you’re sure you’ve chosen the right one, select “Create” from the drop-down box. You’ll then be presented with a list of file system types. I know ext2 is normally preferred for external storage like this, but I tried it twice and it did not work. I have never had a problem with ext4, so select that, then tape “apply”. When Aparted is done, you should have an 8GB FAT32 partition (for camera pics and external storage for your apps, like downloaded Spotify music) and an 8GB ext4 partition for your apps, Reboot your phone if Aparted asks you to. If not, exit the app, then go to Settings > Storage > SD card and choose “Mount SD card” is allow Android access to the SD card again.

STEP 5: INSTALL LINK2SD AND MOVE THOSE APPS!

Go to the Play store, search for “Link2SD” (web link) and install it. As always, reboot your phone if the installer asks you to.

Open the app. Click the upside-down pyramid next to “Link2SD” at the top of the screen and choose “User”. Although it’s possible to move almost any app to the SD card, at this time I do not advise you to move system apps, just user apps (apps you have installed on the phone). It possible that moving a core Android app to the SD card could crash the phone, and besides, moving the user apps should free up plenty of space.

After choosing “User”, you should see a list of apps on your phone. Tap one, then scroll down and tap “Link to SD Card”. You should then see a screen that allows you to choose which types of files to move: the application file, the dalvik-cache file, the library file (which may be greyed out if not applicable) and the internal data (which is only available in the paid version of the app). Choose the first two (or three, if library is available) and click “OK”. Link2SD should move the app and create symlinks on your phone. If you get a “cannot find entry point” error, go back to Link2SD’s main screen, click the three lines at the top left and choose “Recreate Mount Scripts”.

If the first move was successful, continue on to other apps. Note that some apps, like Spotify, do not like being moved at all. I tried moving it, and Spotify would take FOREVER to load and eventually hang. So I moved it back to my phone’s main memory. But most apps will work just fine, and if you move enough of them, you’ll end up with tons of free space on your phone. After moving most of my apps, I had room to install the regular Facebook app (not Facebook Lite, as I was using before), Facebook Messenger, MyVegas slots, Firefox, Accuweather, and a lot more!

I also bought Link2SD Plus, my first-ever paid-for Android app. As mentioned, the paid version lets you also move the app’s internal data. This can free up even more space on your phone, but be careful with this. Your phone’s internal storage is much faster than an SD card. For an app like Facebook (which often has 150MB of internal data on my phone), moving the internal data to the SD card can make the app very slow to start, almost to the point of being unusable. You’ll have to experiment with this on your own, as I don’t know which apps you use and how much internal data they have, and what your personal threshold of “takes too long” is. But know that moving the data around isn’t an “all or nothing” proposition: you can always move an app, test it out, then go back to Link2SD and click “Remove Link” to move all of it (or just the internal data) back to the phone if you’d like.

Lastly, note that Link2SD keeps an eye on app updates. If you link an app to the SD card and it later gets an update via Google Play, Link2SD will automatically move it to the SD card for you after the install. It can take anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes for Link2SD to see the change and initiate the move, so don’t download an update to Instagram and immediately open it: wait for a blue SD card icon to appear in the notification area. Once you get the “Link2SD has moved the application ‘Instagram” to the SD card”, the app is safe to use.

Hey, IT folks… how many times have you needed the service tag off a Dell computer but: a) the original image had been wiped, and the Dell Service Tag applet wasn’t re-installed; or b) you were remotely connected to a machine that didn’t have the applet for whatever reason; or c) there was a gigantic pile of papers, framed pictures, staplers, and other office paraphernalia that made moving the computer a big pain in the ass?

I used to use this trick on a regular basis a few years ago, but forgot about it until yesterday, when I needed the service tag off a Dell I was remotely connected to.

In Windows, open a command-prompt and type

wmic bios get serialnumber

In most flavors of Linux, you can type this at the command-line:

sudo dmidecode -s system-serial-number

Hope this helps!

As an IT guy, I often have to deal with a group of folks I call “‘a little knowledge is dangerous’ users”. These folks usually know more than a typical user, but often don’t understand the complete picture. It’s common for them to have more than one anti-virus app on their system, or route their Internet connection through multiple firewalls “because security”. It’s common for these users to be set in their ways: they’ll jump through gigantic hoops to install WordPerfect 3.0 on their circa 2013 desktop because: a) they don’t like change; b) “I paid for this back in 1983, and don’t see any reason to pay again”; and\or c) they want to “stick it” to Bill Gates, even though Gates has little to do with Microsoft these days. They’re also the first to complain when the jiggery-pokery they did to install the ancient software – the registry edits, the hacked DLLs and Compatibility Mode tweaks – borks their system.

If you ask these folks to recommend a new computer, they’ll INSIST on one with 32GB of RAM for a long list of spurious reasons, like “you won’t need a pagefile!” or “you can make a RAM disk!” or, my personal favorite, “Windows memory management sucks” (because you, a real estate agent in Dallas, North Carolina, knows more about how memory works than Microsoft engineers. Sure.)

Well, the guys at TechSpot did a bunch of tests, and here are the results in black and white: for most people, in most circumstances, the optimal amount of RAM is 8GB. There are circumstances where 16GB is better, but they don’t come up often, not often enough to justify the expense of the additional 8GB of RAM. And, of course, virtualization is a different matter altogether: if you like running a bunch of virtual machines on your system, more RAM is absolutely better. But for most users, most of the time, 8GB is plenty. Click the link to find out why.

I own a cheap Android phone. Here’s why: I owned three Android phones before my current one. These phones cost between $179 and $299 each. And they were all pieces of junk. Random reboots, lock-ups, stock apps crashing… you name it. My carrier was nice enough to replace every single one of these phones at least once… they even replaced my third phone three times! But the phone kept locking up and rebooting several times a week.

I was nearly at my wit’s end. One day I noticed that my carrier had a $79.99 Android phone. I bought one out of sheer desperation, thinking I’d just use the crappy little phone until I could switch carriers or until my carrier updated their phone lineup, or something. But guess what? Aside from having a really subpar camera, this “crappy little phone” does almost everything I want an Android device to do, and it almost never locks up or reboots… and, unlike my previous three phones, this one easily lasts a whole day on a single charge!

Aside from the lackluster camera, my only other beef with the phone is that it comes with a meager 4GB of storage space total. And since Android itself takes up around 2GB of space, there’s only around 1.9GB of space to install my apps. It’s not as bad as it sounds, though. I’m not one of those people who would have 600 apps on his phone, even if I had the space. Most everything I actually need fits on the phone.

Except for you, Facebook. Facebook is an unholy monster of an app, eating up as much storage as you can throw at it. There were times I’d get “insufficient storage space” errors when updating apps, and sure enough Facebook would be taking up over 250MB of space. Hell, the app itself takes up around 75MB, which is a ridiculous amount of space for a mobile app, and that’s not even taking into account any data or cache!

To its credit, Facebook realizes this. But instead of, ya know, working to make their app smaller and more efficient, they chose to create an all-new app for developing markets like India and China, places where my phone would be middle-of-the-pack rather than low-end.

It’s called Facebook Lite. I’ve had the app on my phone for a couple of weeks now, and the app itself takes up just 1.72MB. The entire install – including data and cache – takes up less than 5MB on my phone!

If you can get past the dated look of the app, there’s a lot to like here. It’s sleek. It’s fast. And – this is a huge plus for me – Facebook messaging is included in the app. Maybe you’re one of the people who likes Facebook and Messenger as two separate apps. I’m not. I don’t use it enough to care, so having it all as one unified app works better for me.

Like all changes, not everything is roses and champagne. The UI is clunky (at best), and it might take a while to learn where everything is in the app. The app doesn’t seem to have a location feature, or if so, it’s badly broken. If you like “checking in” to places, you’ll have to make do with making a regular post then adding a location, which you have to search for manually. And I don’t know why this is, but Facebook Lite doesn’t seem to have any idea where I am. Sometimes I’ll check in at a local place, and Lite thinks I’m 10 miles away (no biggie), but other times it thinks I’m hundreds of miles away. If I search for the name of a place with my city’s name in it (say, “Charlotte Pub”), it’ll sometimes return hits for Charlotte, NC… but other times it’ll return Charlotte, Alaska or Charlotte, Virginia. There’s just no consistency there.

But the worst thing about Lite is that it’s unavailable in the United States. If you fire up Play on your phone and search for “Facebook Lite”, you’ll get zero results. You can find it on the desktop version of Play, but you’ll be told that it’s “not compatible with any of your devices”. That’s because you’re in the US or Europe. You’ll have to sideload the app. Which is fine for nerds, but if you don’t know what “sideloading” is, read this first. Then head over to APK Mirror and download the app to your device and install it.

I used to consider myself “cutting edge” when it came to IT stuff. I joined Microsoft’s beta program so I could always have the newest operating system and office suite. I’d repartition my hard drive in the blink of an eye to try out a new Linux distro. I’d obsessively check FedEx’s tracking page every 10 minutes to see if a new gadget I’d ordered had arrived. And, once it did, I’d often flash the gadget with some kind of “alternate firmware”… or tweak it in some other way the manufacturer hadn’t intended.

A few years ago, though, I stopped doing all that. I just wanted a computer that worked day-in and day-out. I got burned buying so many crappy first-generation gadgets that I decided to let someone else try the latest technology. Also, most of my clients are small businesses that don’t have the money to upgrade to the latest and greatest “just because”. And why would they? End of support issues aside, if your company has a Small Business 2003 server and a bunch of XP desktops and everything works… why mess with it?

The point is, I’m kind of stuck in yesterday’s technology. So when I see something and think “why are they still doing that?” you know it’s gotta be old technology. And one thing that really strikes me as “old technology” is the bootable optical disc. Yes, Windows and Linux often come as ISO files that need to be burned to disc before use, but so do many run-of-the-mill utilities, like DBAN, the NT Offline Password Editor, and most disk imaging apps. I know why software companies distribute files via ISO… I just don’t know why, in 2015, people still want to burn them to disc. More importantly, why isn’t there some kind of app that can take any ISO and put it on a flash drive?

IT folks, meet Rufus:

It’s an app that can take almost any ISO and make a bootable flash drive out of it. Want to put the Windows 10 ISO on a flash drive? No problem. Need to put DBAN on a flash drive? No problem. Need to put Macrium Reflect or Acronis True Image on a flash drive? No problem. Just insert a flash drive into your USB slot, start Rufus, and make sure the correct drive is listed under “Device”. In most cases, all you need to do next is check the “Create a bootable disk using” box, make sure “ISO image” is selected, then choose the ISO file. Then click Start and wait a few minutes… and you’re done!

I have yet to find an ISO file that Rufus can’t use, and while Microsoft offers a “ISO to USB tool”, Rufus is much faster, and is more platform-agnostic. Try it out and tell us what you think!

When big companies duke it out, it’s supposed to be consumers who win through lower prices and better products. But it doesn’t always work that way.

Consider the “Google vs. Microsoft” fight. Google makes Android, a popular operating system for smartphones. Microsoft traditionally made desktop software, like operating systems and office suites. But Google wants you to use their email service, Gmail, with Android devices. This is great if you’re starting from scratch, but what about people who have decades of information stored in Outlook? Couldn’t Google make some kind of free app that would sync calendar data between Outlook and Gmail? Well, they did, but they killed it on August 1, 2014.

Since then, people like me who use non-Gmail email accounts with Outlook have been scrambling to find a good replacement. It ain’t easy. Some of these apps are expensive: $49.95 for something that used to be free? Really? And some of them just plain suck: I tried one sync app that worked as an Outlook plug-in, and it added 37.7 seconds to Outlook’s start time, and often slowed the app to a crawl. There are a few webapps for this, but I’ve found them to be unreliable (either the software doesn’t work, or the whole dang company shuts down). And the webapps are often more expensive than desktop apps: instead of a one-time $49.95 fee, these jokers want me to pay $5.99/month for the rest of my life! Sure, most offer a discount for annual payments, but whatever.

But if you’re looking for alternatives to the old Google Calendar Sync, you should know that there are options out there.

One is Calendar Sync Free. As the name suggests, it’s a free program that comes either as a standalone app (with installer) or portable app (unzip and run). The app is not an Outlook plug-in, so it shouldn’t slow Outlook down when you’re not using it. It works, and works well for the few weeks I’ve used it. The downside is that the free version only syncs up to 30 days in the future. A $9.99 “Pro” version is available which can sync a customizable date range and can delete appointments with 2-way sync.

There’s also an app called Outlook Google Calendar Sync. This app is totally free, and aims to have all the great (non-crippled) features commercial apps have, like two-way sync, customizable date ranges, and automatic sync. It’s a little more difficult to set up – you have to authorize the app in Gmail, then enter a key Google gives you into the setup wizard. There are more options generally, and certain debugging features are turned on by default. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it works (the current version is a fork of an abandoned app, so there’s a lot of “housecleaning” going on at the moment). I like it, and hope to see big things from it in the future!

 

For some time now, Google Chrome has had a nifty feature: a little speaker icon appears on any tab that’s playing sound. That way you can easily figure out which tab is playing music, or an auto-play video, and kill the noise.

But it’s like Google didn’t think that feature all the way through. What would be really cool would be the ability to click on that little speaker icon and mute the tab completely. Well guess what? It’s now a hidden feature in Chrome!

Just open a browser tab and paste the following into the address bar:

chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting

Click the Enable checkbox and restart Chrome. Now you’ll be able to click on the speaker icon to mute a tab:

Pretty cool!