Recent Posts

6701

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: X Windows Style Death Mouse (xkill)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 11:38 AM »

'Killing' just means forcing the program to stop and exit immediately. It won't do any housekeeping functions (like telling you that you haven't saved your work).

6702

Living Room / Re: Wireless question

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 11:09 AM »

Looks like a good package solution at a keen price. Go for it.

6703

Living Room / Re: Wireless question

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 08:59 AM »

I'd guess if you are using a BT Wireless Voyager ADSL modem then you are in the UK.

The best way to go wireless is with the Linksys WAG54G Wireless-G ADSL Gateway which combines a router and modem in a single unit (at around the same price as a normal router). This works great with ADSL and BT internet (and other ADSL providers). BT even recommend this model.

All you then need is a wireless card in any computers you want to connect via the router and out to the internet.

Linksys do a Wireless-G PCMIA Speedbooster card for laptops, and then both router and laptop will support Linksys enhanced wireless G speeds (they can have Linksys's own SpeedBooster technology built in if you buy the correct PCMIA card model). Speed booster does make file transfers between networked computers faster but if you have other computers with other non-speedbooster cards in they all default to the slowest speed. Also don't be tempted by cheap slower wireless B cards as a single B card in the system will reduce the speed of the the whole system to wireless B speeds (about 20% of Wireless G speeds).

The WAG54G is a neat little box that is plugged into the mains and your telephone socket and then talks to your devices. It also has support for wired network access too (4 devices) so it is expandable in a number of ways in the future and supports both WEP and WPA security to stop neighbours hacking in to your network or sharing you internet connection without permission.

When I purchased one I did find that I needed a wired network card too to setup the router first time (you can buy any cheap wireless card to do this for a desktop computer, probably about £5,  or a PCMIA card for your laptop - but yours may already have an Ethernet connection built into your laptop which you could use. You will need an ethernet cable to connect it though (unless one came with the computer) but if I remember correctly the WAG54G comes with an ethernet cable in the box.

If you decide to go down this route and need some help setting it up drop me a personal message or post in this thread and I'll expain the setup options. Having said that the router was simple to install, and much better than the old connection sharing method.

6704

General Software Discussion / Re: slideshow to dvd making

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 07:37 AM »

Hi Tony, ULead DVD PictureShow is quite good.

However a good freebie is Microsoft's PhotoStory 3 is pretty good at producing slideshows with great pan+scan and music support. It produces WM compatible videos as standard, but there is a cheap commercial plugin (from Sonic Solutions, £12.99+VAT In the UK) for burning them to DVDs from within PS3, or you could use TMPGEnc to recode them to DVD format and then burn them using Nero. You can download PhotoStory 3 from the MS downloads website.

If I remember correctly there is a link in the software to Sonic Solutions DVD plugin.

I can email you a sample video from PS3 if you like (the smallest I have is 7Mb though - make sure your email provider will allow files this size) which shows some of the pan+scan/music and graphics effects within the package (things like charcoal/pastel picture conversions etc). PM me with your email address if you would like me to. Alternatively I could upload it to some webspace and you can download it.

6705

Best Archive Tool / Re: Re: New Review (09/05/05) - Best Archive Tool

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 07:13 AM »

I have used practically all of these utilities (most of them installed together until recently) and have finally settled on Squeeze which has a nice interface and supports just about all the formats natively in one simple inteface (including RAR compression and extraction without having WinRAR installed). Seems to integrate into Explorer as well as any of the others. It has all the functions (recovery records and SXF modules) built in and SQX format archives seem to give a good compression ratio (better than RAR most of the time).

6706

Living Room / Re: Create an Indestructible Shared PC

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 07:04 AM »

DeepFreeze can be used to ensure the system always reboots to exactly the same state. You can unfreeze some disc space so that users can save personal data if you want.

See http://www.faronics.com/index.asp

6707

Official Announcements / Re: PROGRAMMING CONTEST: Write an open source mod for SMF forum

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 06:54 AM »

Trouble is you won't want multiple mods modifying the same PHP files - if it could all be done with one mod it would be much more predictable!

6708

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Alternative to Napster - Virgin Digital (UK/US Only)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 05:23 AM »

It's up and running now

6709

Unfinished Requests / Re: diskid32,to carol hynes

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 05:13 AM »

Sorry I didn't write DiskID32 I just incorporated the executable to produce the results a user wanted. DiskId32 can easily be run from a command prompt, but the original request asked for a way a novice user could generate a txt report file easily to email to them. He didn't want to be messing about explaining how to open a command prompt window to run the utility.

If you want more info on DiskID32.exe contact the author via this page:

http://www.codeguru....on/article.php/c2815 (link posted in the original thread too).

6710

Official Announcements / Re: PROGRAMMING CONTEST: Write an open source mod for SMF forum

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 31, 2005, 05:08 AM »

How about adding Drupal to mix too (I could use that) and I know there are a lot of people on the SMF forums who would like to see an integrated login/logout/registration for SMF/Drupal.

6711

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Find hard Drive Serial Number (HDSN)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 30, 2005, 01:42 PM »

You are welcome - I'll move this thread to the completed forum.

6712

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Find hard Drive Serial Number (HDSN)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 30, 2005, 09:43 AM »

I can try ...

Let's see if this works better ...

Unpack the file to any folder you like to a single .EXE file "DiskID.EXE"

Double click this file and it will unpack DiskID.BAT and DiskID32.EXE to the same folder, automatically execute the program and produce a report called "DiskIDResults.txt" in the same folder. (The folder could simply be the desktop if you like).

6713

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Find hard Drive Serial Number (HDSN)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 30, 2005, 07:14 AM »

Here is a packaged solution.

Click on DiskID.zip (below). Unzip it on your system and you will find an executable file (DiskID.EXE) which when run will open a window with hard drive details displayed. Press a key to close the windows and then cancel the 'installation'.

Hope this helps.

Not the prettiest of solutions but it works well enough and only requires a couple of clicks of the mouse.

6714

General Software Discussion / Re: Drive Splitter

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 30, 2005, 06:48 AM »

I don't see what you have against putting your whole hard drive in a zip archive split into volumes of just under 5GB then burning them onto some DVD-RWs

-alecjw (December 30, 2005, 05:14 AM)

As already said it doesn't work for drive imaging.

The other problem I have is this is too CPU intensive and too slow.

One of the advantages of the new breed of imaging software is thit chugs along in the background and you can get on with things while it does.

I don't begin to understand how that can possibly work but it seems to!

6715

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Find hard Drive Serial Number (HDSN)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 30, 2005, 06:43 AM »

Did you try DISKID32 ?? It does actually work. If you want to be able to email it to someone who doesn't know how to open a DOS window you could easily set up a batch file to do it for them. Something like:

DISKID32.EXE
PAUSE

would do the job.

Save the batch file into the same folder as DISKID32.EXE and then send the whole folder as a self extracting zip file which executes the batch command.

Would you like me to try and put this together for you?

Here is the output on my machine:

6716

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Alternative to Napster - Virgin Digital (UK/US Only)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 29, 2005, 09:05 PM »

I have been trying it - no horror stories so far (at least there haven't been any bruisers with baseball bats beating on my door yet)!

6717

Finished Programs / IDEA: Freeware Component Solution - anyone fancy coding a project?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 29, 2005, 08:50 PM »

I haven't tried this solution as it requires some coding.

http://www.vb-fun.de...komponente0042.shtml

Unfortunately the webpage is in German but the help file is in English and tells you how to use the software. Just click the download link at the bottom of the page and then unzip the file and double click the helpfile. Look at "restributing" for info on how to register it.

Perhaps someone here could write a simple project to access the data for you (it is beyond me).

6718

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Find hard Drive Serial Number (HDSN)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 29, 2005, 08:17 PM »

I need to send an executable to a total stranger(s) with hard drive of unknown manuacturer and have them run an exectuable that will outpt a *.txt file (or something similar) that contains the HDSN.  I am not a programmer and I don't know how to do this but an explanation of the code can be found here:

http://addressof.com.../2004/02/14/392.aspx

-jdd (December 29, 2005, 08:05 PM)

Yes I saw this too - you need to have Visual Basic to compile it to an EXE file. Try the other one I posted above - that has source code and a precompiled EXE file.

6719

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Find hard Drive Serial Number (HDSN)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 29, 2005, 08:16 PM »

This seems to work for my drives: http://www.codeguru....on/article.php/c2815

It is a DOS command (open a DOS command prompt window in the folder with the .exe file and type DISKID32.EXE at the prompt).

It reports the drives on my system, except for the drives in a RAID array, but I have a RAID utility which can do that from Promise (the RAID hardware I am using).

6720

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Find hard Drive Serial Number (HDSN)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 29, 2005, 07:52 PM »

What kind of drives have you got? I would imagine that each manufacturer will store the info in different ways so it may not be possible to do this in a generic way.

If you are desparate look at the disc drive it will be printed on there.

6721

General Software Discussion / Re: Drive Splitter / beginning to wander into Partition/Backup management

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 29, 2005, 07:44 PM »

Thanks for telling me about the Acronis thing. I'm trying out the free trial now.

This is completely unrelated and I should probably have started a new topic for it but I'll write it here anyway.  One mitute's silence will be held at 4:00Pm UK time (I think that's 10:00AM USA time) today to remeber the faithful paperclip which i dropped into my CRT monitor.

-alecjw (December 29, 2005, 09:11 AM)

Do be careful with Acronis DiskDirector - I don't quite trust it since I used it to enlarge an active partition and it scrambled my partition table slightly. I managed to recover the problem but software like this should be absolutely bombproof - unfortunately I don't find any of Acronis' software falls into this category. I also use TrueImage for backing up partitions and have found the latest release of that software to be full of bugs and problems (like for example it insists on starting scheduled backups when there aren't any scheduled - ie. it doesn't forget them when you delete).

Actually with any of these partition tools be really careful - it is very easy to completely trash your system and lose an entire drive's contents !!!

On my system I am using Partition Magic - it works for me and is dependable. My only caution (above) is relating to technology released since 2002 which doesn't apply to me as I am still using reasonable IDE drives which seem to be supported fine.

For backups I am using Genie Backup Manager Pro as my workhorse now (thanks to the DC discount page) and still using Acronis TrueImage for disc imaging though I would probably be happier using a package that I had a little more confidence in. I used to use PowerQuest V2i Protector which worked very like the Acronis product but without the bugs. Unfortunately that has died a death with the Symantec buy out and there was a single issue I could not resolve (which didn't involve data integrity).

Anyone got any other suggestions for imaging products (I don't want to buy Symantec products again - so please don't mention Ghost/Drive Image) ?

6722

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Find hard Drive Serial Number (HDSN)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 29, 2005, 07:38 PM »

Try the drive manufacturer's website - they often have free downloadable utilities (certainly WD and Seagate do) to do this.

6723

General Software Discussion / Re: Drive Splitter

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 29, 2005, 07:29 AM »

Partition Magic is now marketed by Symantec but was produced by PowerQuest and is a great piece of software. I have tried most of the parttioning tools and PM is the most effective and reliable I have found.

One word of caution though - PM hasn't been updated since 2002 (as far as I can tell Symantec haven't put out a single update since they acquired it) and drive specs have changed since then. I am not sure how it will handle the very large capacities of some modern drives, and I am not sure about its support for SATA drives. One of the things Powerquest used to do was issue updates to support new drive capacities, drive formats, bug fixes and new drive interfaces.

One of the other things PM is excellent for is upgrading hard discs as it will copy partitions from one drive to another and resize them as you want on the new drive.

The other popular partition manager I have a copy of is Acronis Disc Director, this has the advantage that it is still being actively developed however the software is Linux based and you may find some oddities in the way it handles your drives, especially if you need to run the recovery software from CDROM. I can't get the CDROM to recognise my RAID array at all, whereas PM handles it with ease from a floppy disc!

6724

Living Room / Re: Generate graph paper and more online

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 28, 2005, 07:27 AM »

Actually the thing I use Graph Paper most for is printing music paper. Yes the user interface is a bit old fashioned these days but it is such a simple app that it really doesn't matter.

6725

Living Room / Re: Generate graph paper and more online

« Last post by Carol Haynes on December 26, 2005, 04:12 AM »

there's a program called "graph paper printer" which prints a million and one types of graph paper for those amongst us needing it.
Used to be freeware, now is shareware. Its very useful.

-tsaint (December 26, 2005, 04:04 AM)

Yes this is a great piece of software - use it all the time see http://www.marquis-soft.com/