Messages

7526

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Drive Backup 9.0 Personal Freebie Today Only

« on: April 08, 2009, 03:08 PM »

However, once it's on the system, if your HD should crash, you boot from CD and restore the image from USB external or whatever.. so you don't have to reuse the serial number.  It's already "installed" when restored just like all your other programs.

-MilesAhead (April 08, 2009, 01:34 PM)

Unless you do something like reinstall your OS or upgrade to Windows 7 in a few months.

I'm not sure if it is legal to reinstall it at a later date if you did the first time on the GOTD date. Sometimes you can capture the install code using an install logger like Zsoft or Total Uninstall.

-edbro (April 08, 2009, 01:43 PM)

So if you want to be able to reinstall, pay $40.  What's the issue?
Geez.

If you're determined to be able to get to factory condition reinstall,
then do a reinstall with the restore set from your PC and make an image.
To me it's not an issue.  by the time W7 is released you'll prolly want to get
a PDBU v. 10 that will undoubtedly have more features in the personal edition.
This way you can wait 'til then.  When I got the v. 8.5 it was %$50, v. 9.0 was $40, so v. 10 will likely be $35 or less.

7527

Found Deals and Discounts / Paragon Drive Backup 9.0 Personal Freebie Today Only

« on: April 08, 2009, 01:34 PM »

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

The Paragon drive backup they are giving away is the same Personal Edition v. 9.0 that I have.  It has Folder Exclusion, so you can opt out of backing up large dispensable folders, like DVD images etc..

It's the same edition I paid $40 for with the exception that there's no support or free update.

Paragon tends to only have one update anyway, then they come out with a new major version number(at least that's been my experience with this product.. been using it since 8.5)

I've restored with it from USB external drives 4 or 5 times so I can say it does work, at least on HP desktops I've owned.

You need fast internet.  The download is 241 MB and includes both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.  Also the product has an .iso CD image for the boot CD.  You need to download and install before the deadline.  However, once it's on the system, if your HD should crash, you boot from CD and restore the image from USB external or whatever.. so you don't have to reuse the serial number.  It's already "installed" when restored just like all your other programs.

7528

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Drive Backup 9 Special Edition For Free!

« on: April 08, 2009, 12:35 PM »

I installed this program [DB9] today and right away it gave me my second Blue Screen of Death ever!!

Comment by Curt — April 8th, 2009 at 9:07 am

-giveawayoftheday forum comment

-Curt (April 08, 2009, 08:15 AM)

Was that you Curt, or some other lucky Curt that's only ever had two BSOD's

-tomos (April 08, 2009, 08:22 AM)

Since now they are likely to be much more frequent, at least he has a database to track them.

7529

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: MouseLocater - automatic highlight cursor when mouse is moved again

« on: April 08, 2009, 12:32 PM »

Yes, yes, yes... AutoIt is better. No doubt. But instead of explaining a working script would've been fine. 

-wr975 (April 08, 2009, 07:28 AM)

The OP wanted or at least attempted to program it.  I provided some pointers in the right direction.  I don't see how doing it all for the person gets them there.

7530

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Shell extension which would let you choose which browser opens a hyperlink

« on: April 07, 2009, 07:29 PM »

Looks like this may be subsumed into this utility:
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=8979.0

7531

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Select text then drag to instant txt file

« on: April 07, 2009, 02:42 PM »

Another approach, if you install EditPad Lite I believe it adds an explorer option to the New menu for Text File.  When created the name before the extension is already highlighted for renaming.  Rename, hit Enter, now editor is open and just paste the text.  (There's probably a way to add Text File type to the New menu without being forced to use EditPad lite but I'm not sure what it is.)

7532

General Software Discussion / Re: DC support images for web sites?

« on: April 07, 2009, 02:38 PM »

I have this one Mouser just put up

https://www.donation...om/About/linkimages/

7533

General Software Discussion / Re: Favorite Firefox Theme(s)

« on: April 07, 2009, 02:35 PM »

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with this one.  Kinda' goes with my wallpaper.

7534

General Software Discussion / Re: Favorite Firefox Theme(s)

« on: April 07, 2009, 02:31 PM »

I dunno'. I tried going back to FF 3.1 beta 3 and installing the last 3 or 4 versions of this theme and if they installed at all, they did the same thing.  I give up.

7535

General Software Discussion / Re: Favorite Firefox Theme(s)

« on: April 07, 2009, 02:21 PM »

I'm getting download errors, and trying to install manually from a Softpedia download it won't even install.  I think the package has problems.

7536

General Software Discussion / Re: Favorite Firefox Theme(s)

« on: April 07, 2009, 02:12 PM »

Here's a screen shot if I can get it to post

7537

General Software Discussion / Re: Favorite Firefox Theme(s)

« on: April 07, 2009, 02:06 PM »

I never saw it before or since, but that's how it was. I didn't see any mechanism to drag & place it somewhere else either.  Weird.

7538

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: MouseLocater - automatic highlight cursor when mouse is moved again

« on: April 07, 2009, 01:03 PM »

Josh and Phil,

thanks for the posts, but as I explained in my original posting I know both solutions you mentioned, but I'm looking for an automatic solution. Also the windows function will conflict with some autohotkeys I've defined.

I tried to write my own script, but was not successful. I find Autohotkey in some way easy to learn and on the other side there are some places where it's not consistent (%varname% for example).

-rpnfan (April 07, 2009, 12:29 PM)

You may want to try it in AutoIt3

The syntax is easier and very close to Basic.  It has For While and Do loops and Select Case like basic.  Strings are double quoted and concatenated using the '&' operator.  It has combined operators like C++.  Variables are denoted with a dollar sign as first character.

$myName = "Miles"
$myName &= "Ahead" ; concatenation with assignment of result

The user defined library included has Timer functions and you can set handlers for Windows Messages, such as WM_MOUSEMOVE

You can use the Tooltip() function to show a ballon tip with optional icon at x,y coords, so it's easy to put it at the mouse cursor position.


Also if you download the Scite package it has Compile With Options so you can use custom icons for your executable and the Scite editor has syntax checking and automatic indenting with Tidy.  Also intelli-sense shows keywords and built in functions as you type.

I know what you mean about AutoHotKey.  You can do a lot in a few lines but sometimes I'd never be able to get a MsgBox to work if I didn't use the tool that creates it for me.  Mainly the frustration is wrapped around the fact that strings aren't usually double quoted. Every time I want to put a message that happens to have a keyword in it I feel like the thing is going to try to fire a function or something.  But it's learning curve. 

7539

General Software Discussion / Re: Favorite Firefox Theme(s)

« on: April 06, 2009, 09:34 PM »

Here's one that's kind of sharp that works in Minefield
Gradient iCool

7540

Post New Requests Here / Re: move mouse to active window

« on: April 06, 2009, 05:43 PM »

I added a call to EmptyWorkingSet to reduce the memory footprint on startup, in v. 1.2 .. avail for download.

7541

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Everything plugin for FARR

« on: April 06, 2009, 04:30 PM »

btw anyone else getting invalid argument to date encode causing FARR to crap out? If I type: ev favess   not only do I get an error but I have to click on 6 dialogs to kill FARR off.  Strange.

Edit: If it's any help it only seems to fire the error on Vista64 Home Premium SP1.  My Vista 32 bit without the service pack hasn't tripped any errors yet.

7542

Living Room / Re: partitioning first time - checklist (cleaning, backup, tools, etc)

« on: April 06, 2009, 02:47 PM »

Also, always put your pagefile/swapfile on your fastest drive whenever possible (for obvious reasons). Or better yet, add more RAM if you can

-40hz (April 06, 2009, 02:22 PM)

One of the fun things about Linux is you can turn swap on and off without rebooting.  The only machine I had with 2 physical drives, unfortunately one was a lot faster than the other.  Still with Linux I could experiment with the swapping strategy.  I found that even though the slow drive was a lot slower, having a swap partition on the fast drive and the slow drive and using round robin swap, smoothed out the primary drive quite a bit.  I didn't really get any speed increase, but it cut way down on seeks on the primary drive.  One "advantage" about having a really slow machine(at that time a 486 with 12.5 MHz bus and 16 MB ram) was I didn't really need to run benchmarks.  The thing was so slow that any effective optimization was both audible and visible!!

7543

Living Room / Re: partitioning first time - checklist (cleaning, backup, tools, etc)

« on: April 06, 2009, 01:31 PM »

Steven I don't get what you mean to "dual disk placement" but afa the data on a separate partition of the same physical drive, esp. for db access, that's pretty much a formula for thrashing.  A separate physical disk avoids that since you have 2 disk head mechanisms seeking independently.  Even if you have enough ram to run with no swap, executables also get paged in, so that provokes jumping back and forth to fetch some code, fetch some data etc..

Separate partitions look neater but actually the more you fence stuff off the more work you make for the drive.  Better to clump all you can near the outer edge of whatever partition holds the code.

7544

Coding Snacks / Re: Overlay Folder Icon with Exe icon

« on: April 06, 2009, 01:24 PM »

I tried NiceFolders and once I figured out how to use it (despite what the web page says, it is not intuitive) it did exactly what I wanted. 

-robinsiebler (April 06, 2009, 12:53 PM)

Ah, it does use layering techniques. I was just wondering if that's what you were talking about.

7545

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Everything plugin for FARR

« on: April 06, 2009, 01:19 PM »

Vrokolos that's very cool.  Only takes a minute to set up.  Looking forward to the next iteration.   

7546

Living Room / Re: partitioning first time - checklist (cleaning, backup, tools, etc)

« on: April 06, 2009, 11:46 AM »

* Decide on number of partitions and sizes and their file types

If you install more than one flavor of Windows and all NTFS partitions(as in where programs are installed) are visible to each other, you may get some unpleasant interactions. Also older versions of Visual Studio used to be quite the pita when trying to run with more than one Windows.  Don't know if they fixed it since the instances of VS 2008 that I have installed are on C: partition only.


Having a separate application partition can give similar hassles depending how they store their settings.

Aside from OS considerations, registry etc.. if you have a gulf between executables and data on the same physical drive you can get thrashing.
I'm not experienced with RAID but with standard type disks a good rule of thumb, where possible, is separate physical drive for OS and executables, swap, and data.  That way disk seeks go concurrently on separate physical media, no thrashing. If you have sufficient memory to run with no swap, then you can follow that scheme with only 2 drives.  It assumes that one drive isn't vastly faster than the other(s) of course.

Also you may find the more interactions between the various OS, the more that's likely to get broken when stuff happens.  Pull out the block on the bottom, the whole pile topples.  Although that's less of a concern these days with cheap external drives and disk imaging backup.  Still, it's a consideration.

I did the bit before with OS separated from apps on the same drive and it was always touch and go how small to keep the OS partition to avoid thrashing when seeking to the app partition, while still allowing for Windows sneaky expansion of the system partition when you install stuff.

The other thing is how stable is your setup?  Are you going to play around with installing a different flavor of the month OS?  Install lots of doodad and trinket apps all the time?  Or is it a dedicated setup to particular stable tasks?

For me, unless I'm going to put another OS on the disk, I just run it lean as a single partition with no swap.  Keep it defragged, clean off the junk frequently. Put large junk I want to save over to external drives.

7547

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Total Defrag 2009 For Free - Powerful but controversial

« on: April 06, 2009, 11:19 AM »

f0dder I only use Windows defrag to defrag boot files, as I noted.
defrag C: -b

That's all it's good for.

7548

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Total Defrag 2009 For Free - Powerful but controversial

« on: April 05, 2009, 07:08 PM »

There's a lot you can do just by using the windows command line
defrag C: -b
on ocassion to defrag boot files (still works in Vista or at least it does something with no error even though it's no longer documented) and a quicky like Auslogics.

Thing is if you can keep a lot of free space, it's not a burden.  Esp if you can delete a bunch of large files right before the defrag(like DVDs you've just burned) then a defrag can take 10 to 15 minutes.  I wouldn't defrag 10 times a week if it took me an hour each.

My scheme has always been to do a thorough defrag once in a blue moon to position files, then the quicky defrags tend to clump onto what's already in place.  When running with mostly free space the thorough defrags aren't really needed.  Esp. with boot file prefetching in Vista once you have a stable boot setup defrag boot files and it comes up pretty quickly(compared to Vista not defragged that is, not compared to XP.)

7549

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Paragon Drive Backup 9 Special Edition For Free!

« on: April 05, 2009, 04:31 PM »

I just added a Gigabit wired card to my old PC(I have a 2 PC network with belkin kvma switch) so now I've come up with a scheme to tie up the PC the least amount of time doing image backups.  I back up over the network to the other PC's HD.  Later on, I just copy in the background to the external USB.  Takes longer to get there but at least I can use both machines during the file background copy.

You would think these days stuff would be so cheap they'd give you an esata connection on the tower.  Don't understand why they don't.

7550

Post New Requests Here / Re: move mouse to active window

« on: April 05, 2009, 03:36 PM »

After experimenting I see that my script doesn't take account of minimized windows, which is a main reason to use AltTab in the first place.. Duh!! 

So now I get the window position and if either the x or y is < 0 then it's minimized, so I wait a short number of loops with a 1/10th second sleep for the window to open, then put the mouse cursor near the origin.  Here's the revised section of code:

[Select]

~!Tab::
KeyWait, Alt
KeyWait, Tab
WinGetPos,x,y,width,height,A
While (x < 0 Or y < 0)
{
Sleep,100
WinGetPos,x,y,width,height,A
IfGreater,A_Index,2,Break
}
MouseMove,16,16
return

The rest of the code just does Tray menu stuff.

A compiled version is on my hotkeys page.