Messages

451

Living Room / Optimal mp3 quality/filesize for voice recordings?

« on: June 20, 2010, 07:28 AM »

Looking for advice this time, not software

I need to prepare mp3s of speeches/presentations, recorded to wave with a high quality voice recorder. No matter what mp3 compression app I use, I'm finding that the lowest acceptable bitrate is 160 kbps. When I go below 160 kbps however, I'm getting a lot of artifacts in higher frequencies, the characteristic, infamous "underwater voice" distortion sound in mp3. The problem is that using 160 kbps yields files that are way too large for easy downloading (over 70 MB for a 60 minute recording).

At the same time I download a lot of podcasts which do not exhibit these artifacts, even though the bitrate used is 64 or even 32 kbps, and they have perfectly acceptable sound quality and definition. They typically fit 1 hour of speech in 20 MB or less. So what's the secret?

I'm guessing I should preprocess the wave file somehow, maybe use EQ to drop the high and low frequencies? Does anyone know what's the best way to go, or maybe there's a primer/how to for tnat sort of thing?

452

General Software Discussion / Re: Audio editor better than Audacity?

« on: June 11, 2010, 05:24 AM »

Let us know how you make out and what you ultimately select?

-40hz (June 09, 2010, 05:05 PM)

I tried a few of the free editors, but when I installed the Sony release of Sound Forge, I was sold. It's a pleasure to work with, all the commands are where you expect them, it's fast and (unlike, say, anything by Adobe) it's even relatively lean. In other words, Sony managed not to spoil the good piece of software that SF was, which is a rare occurrence as corporate takeovers of software go

(Of course I went for the $60 studio edition. Comparison table is here:
http://www.sonycreat.../audiostudio/compare

And quite by accident I managed to find another reason to drop Audacity I had a wave file, about two hours long, from which I needed to clip the first hour. I did that in Audacity, since as I was very familiar with it. Audacity cut the file, but when it exported the remaining part, it created a 60 minute loop of a three-second snippet, repeating over and over. In other words, it clobbered the recording. From then on, it was Sound Forge all the way.

453

General Software Discussion / Re: Audio editor better than Audacity?

« on: June 09, 2010, 02:28 PM »

Thanks 40Hz! I was looking for Sound Forge but only found the Pro version, at $500 a pop. The Studio version is much more reasonable, and Sound Forge used to be great way back when.

454

General Software Discussion / Re: Audio editor better than Audacity?

« on: June 09, 2010, 01:29 PM »

I use Total Recorder Pro for recording and editing audio files. They also have a free version, but I am not sure how stripped down the free version is in comparison to the professional offering. Perhaps that or a program such as GoldWave will work for you. I have tried out the trial version of GoldWave out of curiosity and was generally pleased with the feature set.

-mwfuss (June 09, 2010, 01:18 PM)

Thanks ,wfuss. I use TotalRecorder Pro as well, but it doesn't have any editing features to speak of, except trimming.

I'll try GoldWave, I quite forgot about it.

455

General Software Discussion / Audio editor better than Audacity?

« on: June 09, 2010, 12:52 PM »

I need to do basic editing of wave files: trim, fade, amplify, normalize, but with the ability do do these for each channel separately. Unfortunately Audacity does not seem to satisfy that last requirement, or I cannot find out how to make a selection in one channel only. (E.g. I have a stereo recording of a press conference, with the right channel very weak, and I need to be able to amplify channel R more than channel L).

Someone who works in a recording studio recommended Reaper, which is billed as a "audio recording and editing" software, but it seems to only do the former. After I figured out how to select a part of a track with the mouse (dragging doesn't) I realized it has no commands to fade in, fade out, amplify etc. It seems to be a powerful multitrack recorder, but I can't find a single editing feature except maybe Cut

I checked Cool Edit Pro, found out it became Adobe Audition and sells for 422 Euro plus VAT, ok, next.

So what else is there? Doesn't have to be free; I was fully prepared to pay the $60 for Reaper, if it did the things I need.

456

General Software Discussion / Re: The evil of the horizontal scrollbar - and what we can do about it

« on: May 08, 2010, 06:41 AM »

Why couldn’t the list view look like a spreadsheet, where one cell may span many lines?  That way it would still sort properly, but the view would still look and act more or less like the standard list view. There could be options to turn on and off grid lines, as well as whether to show multiple-line entries or truncate them.

-hgondalf (May 07, 2010, 11:55 PM)

If I understand your suggestion, that would still require horizontal scrolling, since in a spreadsheet-type view, each "record" is still contained within a single row.

Merging cells is not really a problem, most grid components can do that. What I wanted to avoid was horizontal scrolling (or worse, obscuring data that doesn't fit in the viewport horizontally). In order to get that, we have to do away with the limitation of one row per record, as seen in the screenshots of the controls I posted.

457

General Software Discussion / Re: Clipboard Managing-Which one?

« on: May 06, 2010, 02:58 PM »

When I looked, I found ClipMate the best, and I've never seen anything to give me any cause to reconsider.
I found Dittoto be the best free program at the time, and would be very interested to know if anyone thinks there a a better free alternative to it now.

-Dormouse (May 06, 2010, 04:52 AM)

ClipMate and Ditto are both "clipboard managers" or "extenders", but I think they have very little in common. Someone comfortable with one may find the other unhelpful.

I suppose the free alternative to ClipMate is Mouser's Clipboard Help and Spell. Both are great if you need to categorize your clips, but in my experience the price for this is some encumbrance in accessing individual pieces of text.

Ditto is awesome if you don't care about categories, but just want to bring back previous clips with minimum keypresses (and no mouse). The instant incremental search really shines, especially in that it works transparently with substrings (while ClipMate scans only from the beginning of the string IIRC). It is probably not too helpful with non-textual content, e.g. images, but if you write a lot and use a lot of repetitive phrases, Ditto might be the one to try.

On edit: I only wish someone would recompile Ditto (C++) to remove the networking feature and to enable choosing font for the incremental search display - the text at bottom is entirely too tiny for my 40+ eyes.

458

Living Room / Re: Pure Boredom Post: The 3 Word Story Game

« on: May 01, 2010, 04:03 AM »

rescued only by

459

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your favorite launch bar? Your favorite features? Missing Features?

« on: April 20, 2010, 04:58 PM »

I use Fences (not Pro) and ObjectDock Pro without Impulse running.  I also installed both without having to install Impulse, but that was a while ago (October 2009) so I'm not sure if this has changed.

-wraith808 (April 20, 2010, 04:33 PM)

Yeah, Fences (not Pro) is still a standalone application. I base my suspicions on this post by IainB:

Unfortunately, Fences is set up so that it will not run unless Stardock Impulse is present and properly starts (presumably before it can issue an Error return). No amount of Autoruns tweaking or deleting of Stardock Impulse seems to alter this ...

-IainB (April 20, 2010, 09:16 AM)

460

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your favorite launch bar? Your favorite features? Missing Features?

« on: April 20, 2010, 04:13 PM »

Fences 0.99 controversy
In response to criticism on its forum, Stardock added a statement informing customers of the additional software bundling and requirements on the Fences website.

 

-J-Mac (April 09, 2010, 11:05 AM)

Sorry Wikipedia, this part is not true. I have just bought Fences Pro, and saw no information about Impulse before or during purchase. They only give you the download link once you've paid. If it's in small print somewhere, I couldn't see it while making the purchase, and I still can't find it when returning to the product page and going through the purchasing motions, so IF that information is there, it's really hard to find.

And, the Impulse thing isn't just intrusive, it's borken. Trying to register Fences Pro, it tells me the serial or email address is wrong, although both are correct. Stardock have known about this for at least a year, and yet they haven't fixed the issue. I've sent them a really scathing email asking for immediate refund.

(It's the first time I've ever asked for a refund. I refuse to buy Steam games, too, but this is worse - especially that it seems Fences will not even run without Impulse running, too. Is that right, could anyone confirm?)

461

General Software Discussion / Re: Boxer editor 14 released - paid upgrade, $29.00 - text wrap at last

« on: March 03, 2010, 07:21 PM »

I think what's being described must somehow be different from wordwrap.  I used Boxer for many years before switching to UltraEdit, and I'm 100% sure that Boxer had wordwrap then.  I wouldn't have been able to tolerate a text editor without that very basic feature.

-cyberdiva (March 03, 2010, 06:49 PM)

The feature is described as new in the quoted part of rjbull's OP, and indeed it seems to be plain old word-wrap. Could it be that Boxer only did hard-wrapping before, i.e. inserted linebreak characters where lines wrapped? (That would break a lot of file formats, and in the scary old days there used to be editors that did that.)

462

General Software Discussion / Re: Software for adding subtitles to an AVI, FLV or DVD movies?

« on: February 02, 2010, 03:13 PM »

Most mainstream movies have the script copied onto websites by obsessive fans, maybe do a google search for the scripts, some are available here: Movie Scripts
This would mean you don't have to sit with the movie playing to type the script yourself, just simple copy and paste would suffice.

-Stephen66515 (February 02, 2010, 02:53 PM)

Thanks for the link. I would be working with a bunch of documentary movies, so not quite mainstream but for most I should be able to find existing subtitles in other languages to type over.

For translating "by ear", yeah, a script would be useful, although in my experience scripts provided by producers tend to differ substantially from what's actually spoken in the movie. Unless of course the script has been typed up by a fan, then it's likely to be perfect

In that case it would be nice to use a video player that can be controlled by system-wide hotkeys, i.e. directly from the editor. It should be easy to find one, even winamp can do that in a pinch.

463

General Software Discussion / Software for adding subtitles to an AVI, FLV or DVD movies?

« on: February 02, 2010, 02:42 PM »

It's a bit ironic that I should even ask, since my first freelance work was translating movies for video. I did it for years, but that was in early 90s, the times of VHS and Betamax tapes, when you were lucky to have an e-mail account on a VMS VAX university server. Anyway...

What is the general process for adding subtitles to videos? Is there any (free) software to aid in the task? There are two scenarios I'd be dealing with:

a) if the subtitles are already available in enother language, I can translate by typing over the .srt file. That way I don't have to deal with the timecodes. But what about .sub files, which are binary? Is there some software I could use to "decompile" these files, then compile the translated version back into .sub?

b) if no subtitles are available at all. This means creating the subtitle file from scratch, including the timecodes. Is there a way to avoid manually typing them in?

I've googled, but there's enough information to break a horse's back. Where do I begin? Any reliable tutorials, for example?

464

Find And Run Robot / Re: No task bar button for FARR ("Show on TaskBar when active" not working)

« on: January 21, 2010, 05:31 PM »

I have the "Show on TaskBar when active" option enabled (and I've restarted FARR), yet the task bar button for FARR never appears.

-Scott (January 21, 2010, 05:16 PM)

Same here, XP SP3 as well. No button on the task bar and no icon in the Alt+Tab task switcher after enabling the option and restarting.

465

General Software Discussion / Strategies for using user-data folders in Windows 7?

« on: January 19, 2010, 06:02 PM »

"My Documents" (now called "Documents" in Windows 7), My Music, My Videos, Downloads and all those special folders where user data is supposed to live: how do you use them? Do you use them? Ignore them? Remap them to other locations?

Starting from Win95, Microsoft have been gradually expanding the scope of these folders. In Win95 I basically ignored them completely. In XP I couldn't just ignore them anymore, because a lot of apps want to use them all the time for all kinds of data. Now Windows 7 adds more of those folders and includes them in the new "libraries". Together with the stricter permissions regime, this means it's harder than ever to avoid those folders or not use them at all.

As to why one would avoid them, here's one fine reason: data safety and your backup strategy. Every respectable backup guide these days will tell you that the most robust scenario, and one that will minimize the chance you will one day cry, is to keep your data well separated from the system and software. Good advice is, at minimum, to keep the OS and all software on your system partition, and keep all your data on a separate partition on the same disk. This is no good in case of a hardware failure, so to be safer, make it separate disk drives, not just separate partitions.

This is what I do. I feel this is the safest solution, barring a remote colo server to store backups at. It has also made it extremely quick and easy for me to go from XP to Windows 7 and back in two days, since I had exactly zero worry about my data.

(Okay, a slight exception: I also backup and restore some apps' configuration, such as Firefox bookmarks or EmEditor settings. This is a gray area somewhere between software and data, and typically you don't have much control over where it is stored, especially if it's the registry. But losing my syntax highlighting schemes wouldn't really make me cry, so let's omit that for the moment. Also, the appdata folders can be remapped, too, though I've never done that.)

Now, what does Microsoft do? Why, exactly the opposite! Microsoft creates all the specially designated folders where everyone is supposed to keep their data, and these folders are always on the same partition as the system! Who needs best practices anyway? Now nearly all applications use those folders, and meanwhile, all these years Windows has never once asked you where YOU want to keep your data. I could praise MS for improving how the folders are designed and organized, but instead I'm going to berate them: you are forced into a little pen, the pen is dangerous for you, and it takes much effort (or at least some orientation and tweaking) to escape it. With each new version of Windows, it's getting harder.

In XP I have My Documents remapped to my secondary drive, and it mostly works well - except for some rare applications where the path location is hard-coded. I've seen such apps, but I couldn't give an example right now, so I guess they're not even on my radar anymore. OTOH, I have never remapped "My music" or "My videos", and prefer to store these types of files where Windows doesn't know. Reason: any media player these days will want to continually scan and index these locations, and I don't want to have three or four or five such indexes on my system. Also, I have seen a media player that, upon first run, not only indexed mp3s, but started pulling online data and **updating tags in my files** with it, all before I had a chance to say no. (I had to restore a lot of files from backup, thanks a lot.) So I keep my media where these applications won't find them until I manually point them to the folders.

That has worked well for me in XP. But during my short-lived foray into 7, I began to wonder. Is remapping still a good idea? Do the new libraries make any difference? I thought they might make remapping obsolete, since you can just add your "real" personal folders to the default libraries instead. Yet having done that, apps would still write data to C:\users\username, and I'm not going to allow this.

So what do you do with regard to these folders? What did you do in XP or Vista, and are you doing anything different in 7? Or planning to? What's the smart thing to do?

466

General Software Discussion / Re: A possible timesaver if restoring a drive image fails (ShadowProtect, etc.)

« on: January 19, 2010, 05:26 PM »

...Of course, restoring a Windows 7 image is harder still, because there are two partitions to restore. Remember, by the way, to always image the "reserved" system partition that Win 7 installer creates and that has no letter assigned in the system. Win 7 won't boot without this partition, and it's easy to forget it even exists.

That said, after I tried restoring the two Win 7 partitions, I still had to resort to the installation disk and use the "Repair computer" feature before it would boot. I don't have a good procedure for this yet.

467

General Software Discussion / A possible timesaver if restoring a drive image fails (ShadowProtect, etc.)

« on: January 19, 2010, 05:19 PM »

In the course of restoring my XP image using ShadowProtect, I have had what can graciously be called a "learning experience" So here's a quick tip that may save others time and sanity:

If you have restored an image of the system drive, but the OS won't load, boot into your recovery environment and check whether the restored boot.ini file has the same exact contents as the boot.ini file stored within the image. If the contents are different, manually copy all the exact lines from the original boot.ini to the restored one. Having done that, you may just be home safe.

Explanation:

I was restoring a bootable XP image using ShadowProtect, but the scenario may also apply to other imaging software (especially that some vendors appear to license their technology from StorageCraft). It seems to be a somewhat common occurrence that on trying to boot from the restored image you may be greeted with the following error message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
Windows_root\System32\Hal.dll
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Depending on what's been written to boot.ini, the message may be more ominous:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

If this happens, don't panic. The OS loader is already running, so your disk and your partition are probably fine. What happened is that the recovery environment may not have restored your original image exactly as it was, but may have fiddled with the contents of the boot.ini file, which tells the loader where to find the operating system files. This is more likely to happen if you have a dual-boot system, or if you have multiple partitions on the drive being restored, but these scenarios are not required for the problem to occur. I have a single drive with a single partition on it, no dual-boot at all, yet I got the same error.

In this lengthy thread on the ShadowProtect forum you will find some explanation of what's going on. Basically, ShadowProtect is trying to figure out the correct sequence of disks in the system and partitions on those disks. The correct sequence numbers are necessary to generate a working boot.ini file. However, there is a number of things that may throw off ShadowProtect's analysis. In my case it was an external drive connected via Firewire, but it could be an eSATA drive as well. Apparently, such drives are indistinguishable from internal HDDs, so they are included in the count. How ShadowProtect tries to determine the ordering of the drives I have no idea, but from the thread referenced above it seems that it cannot always arrive at the correct sequence.

The problem is that ShadowProtect doesn't offer a hint that its determination is not exactly iron-clad, nor does it admit to have fiddled with the contents of boot.ini. This becomes an interesting psychological issue: I was using a highly acclaimed, high-tech product, and the product was telling me that boot.ini was OK and that the partition was healthy and bootable - so I trusted it. It never occurred to me that it may not have restored my boot.ini exactly as it was stored in the image, so I did not check, and thus wasted much time on hand-wringing, cursing and frantic googling for hal.dll-related errors.

The solution was to compare the original boot.ini with the one ShadowProtect was actually restoring. Turns out, they differed in the number assigned to the system partition. I changed (1) to (0) in two lines, to match the original boot.ini, and I was back in XP in no time.

I should add that once I made that change, ShadowProtect's diagnostics tool insisted my boot.ini was "broken" - since it did not match its internal determination of how the drives in my system are laid out. Never mind, though it would have been helpful to have a hint in the software that you cannot always trust ShadowProtect's opinion on when the file is correct, and when it is borked. As always, trust your own reason more than you trust the software...


On edit, though it's probably obvious: the above applies to a system whose drives have not changed in any way between the time the image was made and the time you are restoring it. If you have added or removed drives or partitions, then naturally the new boot.ini will have to be different than the original one. And likewise, your recovery CD may not create it correctly. The thread I linked to has some advice on what a correct boot.ini file should contain.

468

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: National Characters

« on: January 19, 2010, 04:44 PM »

I had no problems with ditto. each of these programs has it's advantages. Clipboard Help+Spell has some nice features, like predefined date clips, but no national character support is a no go feature for me .

-matesko (January 19, 2010, 12:07 PM)

Oh, absolutely. Ditto probably has the fewest features of all the major clipboard extenders, it's a far cry from Mouser's CH&S in this regard. It's just that I find it uniquely suited for my workflow, where I type a lot of repetitive phrases. Anything that requires using the mouse, or navigating panes, or picking categories, etc., would totally kill the flow and would slow me down rather than speed me up. (I even registered ClipMate at some point, but it's entirely too complex for how I need to use it.)

469

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: National Characters

« on: January 19, 2010, 08:04 AM »

It happens from time to time (say, once a month), slowing down the whole system to such an extent (even the mouse pointer stammers) that it's easier and faster to press the reset button.

-yksyks (January 19, 2010, 01:39 AM)

This does look bad. This happens with the latest version, right? Maybe this is why I've never seen it happen. I haven't upgraded and am still using 3.15.04, but I understand the latest version is required on Win 7. Could be either a problem in Ditto itself or in the SQLite dll it uses.

470

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: National Characters

« on: January 18, 2010, 04:37 PM »

too bad i have to revert to ditto.

-matesko (January 18, 2010, 12:35 PM)

I've been using Ditto for a long time now(*), but I have never seen it take any significant CPU time (on XP). When idle, it doesn't even register in Process Explorer. The same when showing the window and scrolling through contents. Checking right now, I am only seeing a spike to 6% CPU when copying text to clipboard, for a split second, but this of course is negligible - and I'm running winamp now and some other working processes, so the actual Ditto usage is probably 3% or so.

I have it configured to keep one thousand most recent clips, for up to 7 days, with duplicates eliminated (searching for dupes may account for the momentary spike on copy), and I keep only text clips. I'm mentioning this on the remote chance that the way Ditto is configured on your system requires it to do a significant amount of housekeeping.

(*) I've tried almost everything else, and Ditto it's the only clipboard manager interface that really speeds up my work a lot. Perfect keyboard-only access, superfast filtering on typed substrings (more than just incremental search), and it positions itself next to text caret, so it always shows up at the spot your eyes are focused on. Unicode helps too, since I often deal with more than one language. I just turn off the networking support, and wish someone would recompile Ditto without it altogether.

471

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR v2 - Official Bug Tracking and Feature Request Thread

« on: January 18, 2010, 08:16 AM »

I think #3 is the only candidate for an actual bug in FARR.

-tranglos (January 17, 2010, 04:18 PM)

And now I can report that the Properties menu item works fine on XP, in the same version of FARR.

472

General Software Discussion / Re: Just discovered a HUGE annoyance in Windows 7

« on: January 17, 2010, 10:33 PM »

Surely the issue is a BIOS issue - how can windows enable dual monitor access before it even starts up?

-Carol Haynes (January 17, 2010, 03:33 PM)

Well, in my case it was truly weird, but Windows *was* already up, in its own way. The PE environment is practically a fully-capable Windows, and it certainly has all the hardware support it needs. The strange thing was that during one phase of the installation, a short while before it prompts for the product key, it switched to the other monitor - the one that the video card considers secondary. I'd love to have an explanation for it.

The thing is, this is potentially an awful time-waster. My secondary monitor happened to be powered on only because I was creating my final backups in XP, then rebooted to the installation DVD, and didn't bother powering it off. If I had shut down the system first, I would probably have turned off both monitors using the power buttons, and it's as likely as not that the secondary monitor would have stayed off for the installation. If that had happened, I would not have seen the installer switch monitors. When the primary monitor went blank as it did (no signal), I'd have thought the installer crashed or hung, and I might have restarted the installation from scratch (and cursed profusely!) until it would have dawned on me to power on the other screen.

There is a programmer at Microsoft who needs some... re-education

473

General Software Discussion / Re: Just discovered a HUGE annoyance in Windows 7

« on: January 17, 2010, 10:08 PM »

Something's screwy on the install of W7.

-cmpm (January 17, 2010, 09:35 PM)

Clean fresh install though, with no ancient third-party software on it (yet), just Office and some crucial shareware.

Why would a language bar come up without an office program?

It's a standard feature of Windows, dating back at least to XP, but I think 95 may have had it as well. Like I said, maybe it's only activated on localized versions of Windows. It's not a part of Office. It's a toolbar that installs on the taskbar, next to your "quick launch" items. It has buttons on it to select input language and keyboard, in case you have more than one keyboard installed. On XP it's a good idea to disable it, because it's easy to accidentally do something that causes Windows to change the input language, and suddenly I can no longer type in Polish. However, if you are a translator like myself, or if you are simply bilingual, this is useful, since you can very quickly alter between different languages, which may require different keyboards (say, English and Russian, or even English and Spanish to get the accents).

Did you update any drivers through windows update-
ie-device manager-right click-update drivers.
Video controllers and ide controllers and network cards.

Who knows what Windows Update installed! I just let it run its course, so it prompted me a few times to reboot, but nothing major. There is no way to know beforehand if a particular update will mess things up, and trying them one by one would take ages. I hoped at this time the updates wouldn't be excessively bad - but then again, I should have done what has kept me safe so far: wait for the first service pack.

Are you running as admin? Even then sometimes I have to right click and choose 'run as admin'.

Yes, I was running as admin, with UAC set to default until I ultimately disabled it today.

It would be smart I think to disconnect any drives that you are not installing W7 on, then reconnect.

Just like it would have helped to unplug the secondary monitor, yes. But really, this is just voodoo to placate a crazy OS. I won't be stooping to unplugging internal drives, unplugging the monitor is where I draw the line

W7 works best to use a password to logon, a requirement for some things to work right.

I used the same username/pass as I had on XP. Kept LAN settings at whatever the installer made them. I had connectivity from the get-go, and everything else had to wait.

Also is this an upgrade W7 dvd? Then you have to have vista or xp already on the drive and working. The install options will let you do a clean install by choosing custom install. It will save your old version as windows.old.

Clean install, preceded by wiping the XP system drive and creating new partitions. You cannot upgrade XP to Seven, the installer refuses to do it (and I wouldn't try anyway).

474

General Software Discussion / Re: Just discovered a HUGE annoyance in Windows 7

« on: January 17, 2010, 09:55 PM »

One more thing, any third party software should be investigated before using it with W7. Outpost has some incompatibility issues I saw in a google search. Don't know for sure why.

Let W7 run with it's own security for a while till it's updated. I received numerous compatibility updates after the install. Give it a few days to adjust I'd think.

-cmpm (January 17, 2010, 09:47 PM)

I didn't install a firewall, and after a while I even uninstalled Kaspersky, mostly due to its general slowness. You are right; it seems like a good idea to run without too much third-party stuff. In my case, I had from Friday afternoon to Sunday night to get everything running smoothly. It's been Monday for less than 5 hours here and I already have work waiting for when I wake up. So I wanted to do as much as I could in the time days that I had, and somehow running without an a/v seemed too preposterous to entertain

I'm safely back on XP now, though ShadowProtect did screw up one thing and wasted me a few hours. I'll post about this tomorrow, because my experience may help others.

475

General Software Discussion / Re: Just discovered a HUGE annoyance in Windows 7

« on: January 17, 2010, 05:53 PM »

Two more quickies before I go. I could actually spend the night describing all the inconvincing occurrences I've had with 7 in the last two days

You can now "pin" applications to the taskbar - this is supposed to replace the Quick Launch bar, whatever. Obviously no-one at MS has ever seen True Launch Bar, or they would know how to do it right. Anyway, the pinned apps can be activated with Win+digit keys. I actually happen to have Win+1 through Win+7 assigned to folders on TrueLaunchBar, so there was a conflict. Somehow TrueLaunchBar managed to override those assignments, thankfully. But would you believe that when that happened, you could not start the pinned apps by clicking on them, either? Instead, Windows displayed a helpful error message about a missing file. I can't imagine how the pinning had to be implemented for it to fail in response to a mouse click just because the native hotkeys were not available, but it must have been taken some doing! Does Microsoft still hire temps to do most of the coding?
 
Lastly, one more tiny little crazy thing I once saw. When I installed 7, by default it put the "Language Bar" on the taskbar. Maybe it happens in localized versions only. Anyway, I didn't bother disabling it. Once, right after a reboot, the Language Bar began to dance. All over the taskbar. I'd have to record a video, but to describe it: the language bar is normally located on the right side of the taskbar, to the left of the notification area. Well, when I saw it, it was oscillating between that location and the far-left side od the taskbar, next to the Start button. Jumping from one location to the other about twice a second. Locking and unlocking the taskbar didn't help. My taskbar is double-sized, maybe that caused it, who knows. I had to disable the language bar though control panel. I've just re-enabled it to see if that dancing thing would return, but sadly, no.