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6451

General Software Discussion / Re: Make Firefox startup faster.

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 29, 2009, 12:20 PM »

It's impressive to see real geeks at work!

So, from what i can make of what you said.
It's something that could possibly help some folks.

-dantheman (December 29, 2009, 04:27 AM)

What OS are you running?  If you use Vista or W7 and use FF all the time, Superfetch should have that in its stats anyway.

The other trick is to load it on bootup.  Perhaps with a delay.  I was doing this for awhile on my secondary machine.  Only thing is I tend to forget about it and start typing only to have FF come up in the middle of what I'm doing.

Isn't someone on here loading it from a ram disk?  That's another approach.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Make Firefox startup faster.

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 29, 2009, 12:10 PM »

4wd How have you tested it? I've seen all kinds of conflicting info on this including that /prefetch:1 was supposed to be a param to differentiate content when using Windows Media Player(load different .dlls according to one blog, but that seems specious too because wouldn't you just go by the media file extension?)

In any case I've heard there was supposed to be some tweak to manually insert apps into the prefetch folder, but supposedly it doesn't work in any OS later than XP.  Then again, I've also seen stuff about putting a "Superfetch" registry key in XP to do something similar.  With MS you never know.  They even had "undocumented" APIs, so just about anything could be true on one of their OS. I don't know how many Windows programming books I bought with "undocumented" in the title.




edit: btw this is an article similar to what I mentioned if not the same one on another page:

http://blogs.msdn.co...05/05/25/421882.aspx

6453

General Software Discussion / Re: Make Firefox startup faster.

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 28, 2009, 09:23 PM »

I don't think this refers to OS prefetch but to browser prefetch.  In the old FasterFox AddOn one of the settings was to prefetch all the links in the page.  Seemed like kind of a dangerous tweak to me.

6454

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: TeraCopy Pro only $11 (50% off at BDJ)

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 28, 2009, 09:12 PM »

When I was running Vista pre SP1 it suffered from slow shell copy. For awhile I was using TeraCopy free versions including betas.  After awhile I went to KillCopy

KillCopy is free.  The UI is a bit quirky.  I could never quite figure out if I was supposed to set an option in the "regular" version or the "network" version of the settings.  So I just set them both the same.  It did work afaict, more consistently than TeraCopy.  I haven't tried the new 2.1 stable version of TeraCopy.  Maybe they got the bugs out.

For copying thousands of files I recommend RichCopy

6455

General Software Discussion / Re: Advice for Testing USB Sticks and Data Recovery Tools

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 28, 2009, 11:48 AM »

...

What used to be the dirty little secret of the USB drive industry was how hard it was (is?) to find the read/write speeds on every drive. Sometimes two different brand drives which are otherwise identical have radically different read and write capabilities. Sometimes for just about the same price you can get a drive that's 3 times or more faster than its competitors.

-Innuendo (July 04, 2009, 09:21 AM)

I just spent a couple of weeks trying to pick out a flash drive due to this very thing.  The online store tech specs blurb often doesn't even have the write speed listed.  Checking out benchmarks you find what is supposed to be a good ratio of write speed per dollar then find out from user reviews, once delivered the drive doesn't actually write at that speed for sustained writes.

I ended up with a Verbatim Store & Go which has pretty good sequential write speed, but I'm just wondering how it will stand up to constant plugging/unplugging since it has a plastic slide inside a really flimsy plastic sleeve.

Seems like instead of devices these things are still considered throw-away gimmicks or stocking stuffers.  Kind of like a ball point pen.  Most of these 16 GB or larger are coming in at over $50.  Time there should be some meaningful stats to go with them.  Like sequential read/write speed and durability info(will the thing break the 11th time you unplug it?)

Serious reviews should contain "life testing" results where an automaton plugs/unplugs the thing with a counter to give the average fail count.  Great if something writes at 20 MB/sec. but not so great if it splits in 2 the 3rd time you unplug it.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Advice for Testing USB Sticks and Data Recovery Tools

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 28, 2009, 11:41 AM »

I had once a fake USB key, supposedly 1GB, actually only 512MB.  The HP USB Format Tool was able to reformat it to its real size. It has been working nicely since then.  Other keys, that weren't reformatted, got damaged after a while, probably whe  more than 512 MB was written.

To test them, I also rely on a similar tool, Bart Stuff Test (http://www.nu2.nu/bst/).

-MerleOne (July 05, 2009, 04:34 PM)

One thing I noticed with a USB key I formatted. It seems obvious but easy to forget in the rush of the moment.  I did a quick format to another file system type.  Later after showing a file successfully copied, it would not read it all back out.  A full format as NTFS fixed it.. even just using Windows shell format.

6457

General Software Discussion / Re: Fave Folder hotkey utility

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 28, 2009, 11:31 AM »

where's the download? the smiley links to smiley page..

-mouser (December 27, 2009, 09:54 PM)

Sorry.  The link pasted as plain text.

6458

General Software Discussion / Re: Video player: What's the quickest (fastest/lightest)?

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 28, 2009, 11:26 AM »

One thing about it that contrasts with players like VLC and MPCHT is it doesn't take up the whole screen or show oversized with scrollbars on HD content when run in Windowed mode.  When sampling video it's good to keep this in mind since the output tends to look glassier and smoother with the lower resolution.  But checking for graininess while maximized fixes that.  It's just easy to forget it.

The main thing with me is I haven't seen it crash yet from advancing the slider.  That's very frustrating when using VLC.  Seems like half the .mkv files crash as soon as you touch it.  There's supposed to be a new Lite version out soon with some bug fixes and perhaps a few new features.

6459

General Software Discussion / Fave Folder hotkey utility

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 27, 2009, 09:48 PM »

I found that very often I was opening the same target folder for drag & drop operations. I wrote a small hotkey utility in AutoHotKey so that I can move folders to this target folder directly from the source without drag & drop. Also as a convenience you may hotkey on the desktop to just open the Fave Folder. By default the target is Documents but you may change this using the Tray Icon Menu.

The idea is to move folders with large files on the same partition via a Windows directory entry reassignment. Moving to a different partition is not prevented but unless the files are small I'd use Windows Drag & Drop or some command line copy function instead.

Also the selections for hotkey move must be folders only. Otherwise an error will be generated. For moving a mix of multiple files and folders use drag & drop. If there is an error during the move, a dialog pops up telling you which folder had the problem, then the loop continues if more than one folder was selected.

Here's the page for download:

Hotkeys

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General Software Discussion / Re: Video player: What's the quickest (fastest/lightest)?

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 26, 2009, 07:00 PM »

Not sure how fast but if you need to handle large .mkv and .mp4 files on Windows you might try Splash

I use the free Lite version.  It can handle large files without crashing, the seek slider seems to work very smoothly whereas VLC will sometimes crash as soon as you advance the slider.  Also it claims, even in the Lite version, hardware acceleration for supported video cards.  On my quad core I have the acceleration enabled.  It doesn't seem to cut down on resource usage, but I haven't noticed any pauses when playing the video as I'll sometimes get with VLC or MPCHT.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Video player: What's the quickest (fastest/lightest)?

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 26, 2009, 06:46 PM »

I think if anyone were to come out with such a thing The Man would swoop down on them pretty fast. Licensing fees must be paid to Big Brother and all that, you know.

-Innuendo

From what I read in user comments for Media Player Classic Home Theater, the user claims he can play discs in the optical drive once scanned with AnyDVDHD.  AnyDVDHD is running a promo for a few more days... but that's not really enough time for me to try it out.  Might be overkill for what I need anyway.

6462

Finished Programs / Re: SOLVED: Win7 - custom taskbar groupings

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 25, 2009, 02:42 PM »

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you mean, but I'm using it on Vista and W7.

http://www.alastria....ex.php?p=software-7s

You could get similar functionality but just having a folder or drawer analogy.  I remember there were trays or pop-out drawers on OS/2 taskbar.  But 7stacks looks cool.  The glassy pop-up seems to take some of the pain out of the extra click.  And it does cut down on Taskbar clutter.  I have stacks for Editors, Internet, Hotkey apps, etc..  Now I have plenty of room for Task Tray icons and running programs.

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General Software Discussion / Re: How to manage Firefox Smart Location Bar?

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 25, 2009, 02:13 PM »

6464

General Software Discussion / Re: How to manage Firefox Smart Location Bar?

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 24, 2009, 12:39 PM »

[/quote]

I don't know what the 'duh' is about.

-MilesAhead (December 24, 2009, 01:00 AM)

I think just a recognition that the answer was obvious (to check the Mozilla site).

-AndyM (December 24, 2009, 07:07 AM)

I probably should have drilled down to the specific question that was answered and eliminated the ambiguity.

6465

General Software Discussion / Re: How to manage Firefox Smart Location Bar?

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 24, 2009, 01:00 AM »

http://support.mozil...b/Smart+Location+Bar

-MilesAhead (December 23, 2009, 10:09 PM)

Thanks!  Duh!

-superboyac (December 23, 2009, 10:11 PM)

I don't know what the 'duh' is about.  One of the questions you asked is answered there.  As in, how to delete a typo entry.  I'm not one for duplicating stuff that's at the source.  You could read it.

6466

General Software Discussion / Re: How to manage Firefox Smart Location Bar?

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 23, 2009, 10:09 PM »

http://support.mozil...b/Smart+Location+Bar

6467

General Software Discussion / Re: Minefield(Firefox) 3.7Pre seems to work

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 23, 2009, 07:31 PM »

Looks like this build actually has 2D rendering GPU stuff enabled.  It seems a bit snappier but who knows?  Maybe if someone has a super duper gamer GPU you can tell the difference?

http://www.bassified...2.d2d.2009.12.20.zip

I got the link from the developer's blog.  What I did was download a Minefield nightly build and install it.  Then I deleted everything in the Minefield folder under Program Files, and unzipped the contents of the zip file and just layed it on.

The TV Guide java descriptions are still broken. You should probably keep whatever you are using as your default browser for the time being.  The TV Guide descriptions and the Silver Light video are the only 2 things I've found broken so far.  Seems solid other than that.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Minefield(Firefox) 3.7Pre seems to work

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 23, 2009, 04:01 PM »

btw any FF aficionados know how to tell if hardware acceleration is enabled?  Is there an option in about:config?  I know I don't have the hottest graphics cards but every app that tells me it has an option for HW acceleration, if it's on or off Task Manager reports the same CPU and memory usage.  Just seems a bit weird.

This isn't just FF but media players etc..

6469

General Software Discussion / Re: Your fav' audio CD burner?

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 23, 2009, 01:33 PM »

If you try Burrrn I recommend Burrrn Portable esp. if on a post-XP OS.  The one with the installer works on Vista, but you get double entries in the log for some reason.  The portable doesn't seem to have that bug.

Automatically converts FLAC.  Just drop them on.

edit: btw have you confirmed with other discs that the boom box supports text info?  I have a stereo system still kicking that only does audio CDs.  It gives the track number and the play time.  That's it.  It came out before all this mp3 stuff was invented.

6470

Living Room / Re: I'm beginning my experiment with Linux and other OS's.

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 22, 2009, 01:59 PM »

@superboyac they may have changed it a bit with a time-out in the new distros, but one trick I used to do was open a console and use the 'su' command to log in as admin.  Then just leave the window open if I was installing or configuring stuff.  When done I'd just exit the 'su' session.
Also the distros usually set up virtual terminals.  Often if an X session was hung you could still hotkey to a virtual terminal, log in as admin, then kill X and just restart it.  Once Linux kernels got to 2.x it was very rare to get a hardware lock that required cycling the power.

My feeling when multi-booting Windows and Linux was that they were the inverse of each other.  Windows was better for installing and using software right away.  Linux took longer to set stuff up, but it almost never broke once you did.  They've converged a bit since then.  It may be less frustrating doing Linux if you acclimate yourself to Linux/Unix style editors on Windows.  It's very distracting if you have to constantly figure out how to use the editor when you really just want to fix the configuration file or startup script.

6471

Living Room / Re: I'm beginning my experiment with Linux and other OS's.

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 22, 2009, 01:49 PM »

@40hz I have to agree with you about booting multiple Linux versions.  When trying to accommodate hardwire sometimes I would build several kernel versions.  All it took was a few lines in the boot manager configuration file to load the specific kernel, and particular modules depending on the kernel version in startup scripts.  Sometimes I would have to boot a kernel to use a device when an older kernel may be generally more stable or whatnot.  One of the things I really liked about Linux was the ability to boot a floppy that pointed you into the Linux partition on the HD.  If your boot manager got hosed you could boot the HD install from the floppy.

Some guys over at Boot Land have done the same thing using USB key drives and Windows boot manager. Boot from USB and the same boot manager menu comes up.  Very cool.

I do think though, if you really want to become an adept then immersion is the key. I have too much invested in Dos/Windows quirks to just chuck it all and go Linux.  But I'm glad I messed with it for awhile. I'm surprised how many tidbits I still remember from those days.

6472

General Software Discussion / Re: Minefield(Firefox) 3.7Pre seems to work

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 22, 2009, 01:30 PM »

Hmmmmmm, just trying 3.7Pre on my Vista64 machine.  I guess the big deal with this one is GPU rendering support if you have a direct3d 10 capable card.

It didn't kill my AddOns this time.  So far it seems solid.  The progress bars on Tabs zip across when opening several pages at once.  Feels a tad snappier anyway.  TV Guide descriptions still broken but I can live with that if it's fast.

6473

What's the Best? / Re: Video conversion: What's the best (freeware or shareware)?

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 19, 2009, 10:26 PM »

@iphigenie it sounds like you need a demuxer.  Maybe something in this list would work:

http://www.videohelp...rby=Name&hits=50

6474

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: easy toggle between Priority to Programs / Background Services

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 19, 2009, 10:09 PM »

Okay, I couldn't figure out how to jump to tabs using the keyboard

-MilesAhead (December 18, 2009, 02:24 PM)

Try using the keys Ctrl-Tab to jump from one tab to the next, with shift to go backwards if nec.

-SleepingWolf (December 19, 2009, 06:10 PM)

Thanks for the info. I thought I tried all the permutations.  Guess I could have looked up the hotkey list.  But that would be cheating.  Besides, 1 mouse click did the trick.

6475

Post New Requests Here / Idea: Focus Theft Delayer

« Last post by MilesAhead on December 19, 2009, 01:34 PM »

I read the thread about stealing focus. The focus queue idea seems the best.  But I would suggest avoiding any kind of notification be it audio or visual.  The monitor should be a Tray app with an adjustable activity delay.  When you are typing, requests for focus are queued.  Once the inactivity hits the time-out, then the next focus request in the queue should be processed.  Perhaps there should be another adjustable pause to allow you to decide if you will provide any input to the new item that has the focus(e.g. click in a dialog box or whatever) and if that times out, go to the next in queue.

The monitor should only take the focus when responding to the Tray Icon Context Menu to set the time-out values, other options(start when Windows starts) or exit etc..

How to respond to dialogs with System Modal stay on top I'm not sure.  But perhaps someone who has written similar monitor type utilities would know how to deal with window activation requests in such circumstances.