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2651

Living Room / Re: Why Windows Rules: the QWERTY phenomenon?

« Last post by Shades on January 02, 2009, 11:20 PM »

Here in Paraguay the official language is Spanish, but not the European version. The unofficial language that everybody speaks is Guarani (especially when you set one foot outside the capital). Have you any idea how hard it is to get something from a message when both languages are mixed together and words are shortened to one character?

To me it is a royal pain in the (insert here other word for donkey), so to speak.

Elitist...never looked at it that way, though.   

Again, to me it is only natural to take the time to write something properly. Grammar and spelling, I mean. Content is a whole other matter. And use a proper medium to do deliver the message. 160 characters is not that much when trying to convey a message properly in my point of view.

2652

Living Room / Re: Why Windows Rules: the QWERTY phenomenon?

« Last post by Shades on January 02, 2009, 06:01 PM »

[rant]

T9 transforms any language into trash and is the first thing that gets disabled, those dictionaries are useless, if you would ask me.

Come to think of it, T9 will be viewed in the history time-line as most important thing that brings all (major) global languages together into the same trash heap.

Sorry for my (bit of) ranting, but I came from a school that deducted a full point of reports that had to be written (yes, not typed...written). You got fast in thinking how to be as clear as possible, you needed to know the grammatical and spelling rules (instead of the text editor) and you also learned a bit of calligraphy as well.

This was not so bad but you needed to write at least four of those 5-page reports each week while being swamped by 19 other classes each requiring at least 2 hours of homework and 40-hours of school per week as well.

Mainly the reasoning behind those reports were that you always should be able to write a decent report, because technical reports with errors inside them are never taken seriously in a field of peers. And right they were.

Which is also why I don't take people serious when they write a T9 message (with or without errors) to my cellphone. Honestly, they would be lucky if they even get any response from me. If you want to write me, do it in an e-mail, my phone is able to handle those.

Slashdot had a nice article about how telecom providers rip you off (I should have said: r*pe) with what they charge for each and any of those messages. 

[/rant]

2653

Living Room / Re: Microsoft's Pay-Per-Use PC: ...Worst? Idea? Ever?

« Last post by Shades on December 30, 2008, 04:45 PM »

As a company I can understand the reasoning behind this concept...who would say no to a steady (and huge!) customer cash flow while being in control of content  which generates another cash flow.

That whole "cloud computing" thingy will get never any hold of my system(s) in any way...and now this?

zridling, even if you are not happy with it or not...count me in as a member of your NO-voting camp.

2654

Living Room / Re: WinXP incredibly slow (and sometimes failing) login

« Last post by Shades on December 29, 2008, 05:44 PM »

Take a look at this site.

This is a site with a lot of registry tweaks for XP. Item 376 in this list is about disabling network shares. Maybe that is your solution.
Although item 399 could also be of interest to you...disabling and enabling the wait for the network.

EDIT:
4wd was just a bit earlier with a similar solution 

2655

Living Room / Re: WinXP incredibly slow (and sometimes failing) login

« Last post by Shades on December 29, 2008, 11:38 AM »

This kind of error I encountered once at a friends computer. My solution at the time was to re-install XP without the need to re-install everything else (comment 56).

2656

Post New Requests Here / Re: Drives lock (Floppy, USB Drives, CDROM etc..)

« Last post by Shades on December 28, 2008, 07:19 PM »

Read this article to do it like a pro...

...or use this tool MyUSBonly.

Now I did download a 'free for non-commercial use' version some three months ago, but it is not free anymore.
I can mail you the version (2 Mbyte) I download if you PM me with your mail-address.

Don't know if this version still works or not, but at least you can give it a shot before you buy 

EDIT:
I did test it at the time and it works. Had to de-install it though, because a lot of people came by with digital camera's so I needed the ports again. 

EDIT2:
After doing a Google I also find a registry tweak that should do the trick. You will need this tweak to enable writing again.

2657

Post New Requests Here / Re: USB Info

« Last post by Shades on December 27, 2008, 09:03 PM »

Thanks Phil! 

After the departure from Aida32, I found a good alternative in Gabriel Topala's SIW, which is at least as good as...and it's portable (and no, everest was nowhere near as nice as Aida was!).

However, SIV is really down to earth and although the overlap in supplied information from both applications is there, it is an excellent extension to SIW.

2658

Living Room / Re: Bad smells ... UPS recommendations ?

« Last post by Shades on December 27, 2008, 01:14 PM »

Here in Paraguay there is an US embassy. Annually they sell all kind of things as their old(er) computer gear, home stuff from personnel that moved to another country etc. etc.

At one of those sales I saw a box with old diverse computer gear, books etc. Made an offer and became the owner. To my surprise there were four APC UPS's below the gear and books, so that was 50 US dollars well spent!  

But then reality sets in, because the US embassy uses 110 volt gear while everything here is 220 volt. So now I have nice US APC UPS's that I cannot use at all. It is kinda silly to first use a transformer (220 to 110) to connect the UPS to the grid and use a transformer (110 to 220) for each output to hook up my gear

There is also a RadioShack here that only sells gear running on 110 volt. Not only is it an expensive place by default, you also need to buy a transformer as well.

Why oh why do they (still !!!) use 110 volt?

2659

Coding Snacks / Re: Idea for a useful tool for windows

« Last post by Shades on December 26, 2008, 05:33 PM »

I am with Darwin on this one. It's the (IMHO) the best one of the (not so big) bunch.

2660

Living Room / Re: Question about my video card temperature

« Last post by Shades on December 25, 2008, 08:22 PM »

I know there are tools that can actually write their settings into the video card BIOS. Thought that Ntune or indeed RivaTuner could do such a thing.

Sorry, my bad.

Personally speaking, my head is totally not into overclocking. If I require the speed for anything in my PC I will get the components that can deliver by default. In general I carry the opinion that when you start overclocking, you deserve every trouble you get.

2661

Living Room / Re: Question about my video card temperature

« Last post by Shades on December 25, 2008, 04:57 PM »

Doesn't the driver software for nVidia cards contain a software-based overclocker? (belong to the ATI cult myself)

This Google search will reveal more 

2662

General Software Discussion / Re: The OS that won't die!

« Last post by Shades on December 25, 2008, 12:33 PM »

You should create a 'BartPE' CD/DVD, this is a bootable CD/DVD that starts a minimalistic Windows environment from CD. In a way, similar to live-CD from a Linux distribution.

The advantage from a 'BartPE' CD/DVD over a Linux live-CD is the support for the NTFS filesystem. Sure, Linux knows about this filesystem and can read from it, but warns against writing to such filesystems (there are several NTFS filesystems, one for Win2000, one for XP and one for Vista).

Check the link for a how-to. Years ago I took the effort in building one with most of my favorite tools and I'm still reaping the rewards from it 

2663

General Software Discussion / Re: The OS that won't die!

« Last post by Shades on December 23, 2008, 05:47 PM »

what does "slipstream" mean?

-superboyac (December 22, 2008, 06:46 PM)

It means produce a new installation CD from and existing CD and a service pack.

Either that or it's what cyclists do in a velodrome

-Carol Haynes (December 22, 2008, 07:10 PM)

Or what migrating birds do (during flight) 

2664

General Software Discussion / Re: Cannot open Paint on Vista

« Last post by Shades on December 22, 2008, 12:13 AM »

And Monday has only just begun...


Always glad to help.

2665

General Software Discussion / Re: Electronic Arts (Complaint)

« Last post by Shades on December 22, 2008, 12:08 AM »

As you may or may not have noticed, the salutations in the last message were changed from: 'xxxx EARep, Player Relations' to 'Karl, EA Tech, EA Online Support'.

When I worked for a helpdesk (years ago) messages were humanly sorted for the level of support required and the system would spread those messages to the employees assigned to different levels of support.

It is unfortunate but it happened quite a lot that messages from the same customer were handled by different employees and because the system did not work with tickets those employees were not aware of previously made suggestions.

Definitely not nice for the customer and also not nice for the employee. In my case there were a lot of women working there and many of them started crying after reading/answering some "requests" for help (if there is something that drives me crazy, it would be crying women). 

My experience is that it always helps to be firm but still courteous when you are mailing with a helpdesk as you get a more quicker response. Also, when you don't get a ticket number assigned to your help request, assume there is no communication between employees about previously made requests.

When this is the case, the best thing to do is to copy paste each previous communication (your response, their response, employee name and/or department) below the new request for help. Refer in the new request to those previous communications. Make it easier on them is in the end making it easier for yourself.

2666

Living Room / Re: HELP! Failed System Restore

« Last post by Shades on December 21, 2008, 11:30 PM »

A while ago I tried the OnlineArmor firewall out. Nice product and all. However after a few days I experience network flukes that disconnected me from the netand the first thought that sprang into mind: "lets turn the firewall off".

That did not help, so deactivating was tried. Still no solution to my problem. Then I checked with a separate port scanner and Then I saw that ports were still closed despite the disabled firewall.

At least for me it was a lesson learned. Always check if ports are open even if the firewall says it is turned off.

2667

General Software Discussion / Re: Cannot open Paint on Vista

« Last post by Shades on December 21, 2008, 11:08 PM »

Irfanview (version 4 and up) has a very basic paint feature, just like paint. Open Irfanview, open an image or create a new image with it and use the F12 key to get a floating menu with all kind of options to draw.

As a viewer it was already way more superior than Paint (because of all the plug-ins), but now you also have drawing features and it is free (for non-commercial use).  

2668

Living Room / Re: How will the Earth end?

« Last post by Shades on December 21, 2008, 01:21 AM »

Don't worry, I will open/close the "faucet" to the electricity production plant. so you will see the whole country blinking that way (beats a torch) 

Where is your plane landing, if I may boldly ask?
If it is Sao Paulo International airport, then I wholeheartedly suggest that you book a room in a decent hotel and have one of their cabs pick you up. At night that place is dangerous (because the poorest of the poor live right next to the airport). When I came through that airport a cab drove me to the international bus station. That trip took me right next the "village" (a house there is just a pallet on its side with a piece of plastic)...and I understood why other people warned me to not be in the airport at night.

Hmmm, I could tell you a story about what happened the one time I flew back to Holland, using Sao Paulo I.A. ...but that is too off-topic. But if you (or the BLAZEMONGER Inc "Customer Service" Department) keep bothering me I will tell.

2669

Living Room / Re: How will the Earth end?

« Last post by Shades on December 20, 2008, 11:14 AM »

@ allen:
Well, I think there is still an old student chemical box in the attic somewhere...so you won't mind me setting up a new corporation called: Parasol over here?  

Hmm, maybe the name needs some revising  

@ Carol Haynes:
Mostly I agree with you, but after my continent switch I have to admit to some of the points Deozaan makes as well.
Brazil, it is a beautiful country with ingenuous people. They adapted a car engine to run on petrol, diesel and alcohol.

On the border between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay lies a place called Iguazu. The link leads to the Wikipedia page dedicated to this place but forgets to mention the fact that there is also a huge installation there to generate electricity that powers Paraguay and big parts of Brazil and Argentina.

Because of all this these countries are already a lot less dependent on oil than most. Actually, the quote from Saudi oil minister Yamani “the stone age did not end because of a lack of stones” says it all.


Ah, perhaps the best solution to please Carol and allen is: cannibals.
For Carol the dwindling numbers of human kind should sound excellent while allen gets his fantasy fulfilled (pun intended)   

2670

General Software Discussion / Re: How can I dual boot between Vista and XP?

« Last post by Shades on December 18, 2008, 11:03 PM »

A thing I would check first:
- BIOS is using the right drive to boot from?
  (My Asus motherboards (with VIA chipset) respond better to swapping SATA cable positions then adjusted setting in BIOS.)

The IDE drive has at least one (primary) partition that is "active". This means that the Windows bootloader will turn to that partition to boot from. However, it gets really confused when you have two drives that have both an "active" partition. Don't know if XP allows you to deactivate it's boot partition, else you could do that, trun XP off, move the drive to the Vista machine and see if the Vista boot loader will use the correct drive to start from. A good partition manager would be able to deactivate the partition as well as restoring the activation if this doesn't work.

By putting the IDE drive into çable select' mode (normally there are instructions on the drive on how to do this, but it is more than likely that removing the jumper next to IDE cable will do the trick) the BIOS will figure out where the drive should be. It's an option to try.

What you should have done is the following:
- Build the two harddisks into the Vista machine.
- Make sure both drives are visible in the BIOS
- Install XP on the old drive
- Install Vista on the new drive

In my experience (with Win98-Win2000 dual boot systems) it is the oldest Windows edition that has to be installed first and let the bootloader from the newer Windows edition sort it out.

Having said all this I must mention that I don't like the concept of dual-booting Windows at all. The novelty wears off quickly and I assure you that your friend will be working in the latest and "greatest" product from the Redmond stables sooner than you and he/she thinks.

2671

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Gizmo gives us Titan Backup for free

« Last post by Shades on December 18, 2008, 07:12 PM »

In that case everybody is happy!  Well done Curt 

2672

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Gizmo gives us Titan Backup for free

« Last post by Shades on December 18, 2008, 07:03 PM »

AH well, at least you get money to buy new friends   

2673

Living Room / Re: Can you throw a shoe at Bush?

« Last post by Shades on December 17, 2008, 11:26 PM »

If you would put my sock in it, it would be a weapon of mass destruction...and Bush would actually be happy with that, because then he had the proof that the whole war was legit and that he is a "liberator". 

Well, he will go into history as a "liberator" anyway...how many US citizens did he "liberate" from (most of) their money anyway? 

Read a quite interesting piece from Dana Blankenhorn on how the "Broken window theory" from an mayor of New York (Rudy Giuliani) can be used for the Wallstreet Stock Exchange.

2674

Living Room / Re: Childhood Memory

« Last post by Shades on December 17, 2008, 10:16 PM »

You would be amazed how much of those "turntables" are still in active use. The mechanics behind it is a sure masterpiece, because I know for a fact that my father still uses the same phone he bought over 30 years ago and it still works without any glitch.

Furthermore, I worked on military bases and also there you can still find a lot of those phones.  

Writing this text made me realize there is another very good reason why the switch was made: International calls.
Don't know what it is in Denmark but you have to dial 00(country access code)-(netarea without the preceding 0)-(phone number)-(extension) in Holland.

It is too easy to call internationally unintentionally. Furthermore, it takes too long for an international rescue team to save your behind from whatever peril it is facing (generally speaking of course).

Personally, it is easier for me to remember a multi-digit number that has broken sequences (555555 or 55655), also when verbally communicating a number the latter number from my example is easier. The speaking is not so much the problem, the other person that has to 'hear' the numbers (especially in a hurry/panicked/whatever) and dialing the number correctly in the first try is.

2675

General Software Discussion / Re: Is it finally time to abandon IE?

« Last post by Shades on December 17, 2008, 09:34 PM »

My nLite'd XP installation (meaning: IE and OE were removed, next to some services I deemed unnecessary) has a lot of problems with the scanning software from HP. I get continuously errors ( at a rate of 3 per second) because this software requires IE to build its interface. 

Luckily I was "born again" when I laid my hands for the first time on a piece of software called Phoenix 0.5. That was the name of Firefox before Mozilla was forced to change names (for the uninitiated). After that encounter I was already more than happy to drop IE completely.

Ah, those were happy times on the net with Win2000Pro (SP2), security through obscurity and a piece of software called: zolt (a service that removed the writing ability of the File System, not even the administrator was able to write a single bit!) without being hindered by NAT, firewall or anti-virus on a 5mbit always-on connection

Too bad the interface from zolt is not nice to work with. Because of the increase of (legitimate) disc activity with XP, the flaws in the interface of zolt became too annoying (even for me), else I still would be using it today.

Ah well, it's all a distant memory now...just where IE belongs as well.