Recent Posts

6951

General Software Discussion / Re: how do you count code lines?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 06:24 PM »

Lots of Text Editors can display line numbers. Try PSPad which is excellent and free.

6952

Official Announcements / Re: ANNOUNCING - DonationCoder.com Logo Contest

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 06:22 PM »

Might be misinterpreted is the you miss the C when typing ... 

6953

Official Announcements / Re: ANNOUNCING - DonationCoder.com Logo Contest

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 04:23 PM »

Maybe there could be friends Donatey and Cody - who both say "cheap, cheap" 

6954

General Software Discussion / Re: HELP >.... Some sort of IRQ conflict (I think) ... anyone andy ideas?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 03:36 PM »

No I think the only option is to disable ACPI and use APM. All the options are greayed out - which is normal under ACPI.

6955

General Software Discussion / Re: Needed ... MD5 checksum utility

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 02:53 PM »

I think I discovered the prob - I had selected treat archives as directories and it was struggling to open non-standard CAB files.

6956

Official Announcements / Re: ANNOUNCING - DonationCoder.com Logo Contest

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 02:27 PM »

How about Codie ...

Challenge for you ... you should be able to read the region that someone is visiting from in the browser ... how about a coin specific image for the major economies and a default for the others ;-)

6957

General Software Discussion / Re: Needed ... MD5 checksum utility

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 02:24 PM »

I notice in the browser context menu is a 'Compare Contents ..." option. If I use that on all the files flagged so far it says they are identical ???

Strange.

Timestamps should be the smae as they were copied a a straight aprtition copy.

6958

General Software Discussion / Re: Needed ... MD5 checksum utility

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 02:12 PM »

Here is another - and I have displayed all colmns - so it isn't attributes ...

6959

General Software Discussion / Re: Needed ... MD5 checksum utility

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 02:00 PM »

Mouser - (anyone) any idea on this ...

Using BeyondCompare it says two files are not the same. Here is the screen shot - can anyone see a difference or explain?

6960

Living Room / Re: "Price as Signal" - very interesting piece

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 01:55 PM »

Glad some one else reads Joel ... I saw that too ...

Actually I am more cynical - I think they want iTunes to vary the price simply so they can charge more ...

6961

General Software Discussion / Re: Needed ... MD5 checksum utility

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 01:51 PM »

Yes, I have spotted the discount ... thanks

6962

General Software Discussion / Re: HELP >.... Some sort of IRQ conflict (I think) ... anyone andy ideas?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 01:50 PM »

Doesn't seem to be

6963

General Software Discussion / Re: HELP >.... Some sort of IRQ conflict (I think) ... anyone andy ideas?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 11:55 AM »

It's interesting reading about the mouse stuttering problems - but I am not sure that is what i am experiencing.

I don't seem to be getting audio dropout and 99.9% of the time the keyboard and mouse work fine. Just very occasionally the keyboard doesn't respond for a couple of seconds. The keystrokes are input intot he keyboard buffer however and appear when the 'freeze' ends. At the same time it doesn't accept mouse clicks, but again these seem to queue up and are acted on when it unfreezes.

Strange ...

Still seems to be happening (though perhaps not quite so frequently) with the new VIA drivers and the last Promise drivers produced for the Promis onboard controller/BIOS I have.

Doesn't seem to happen particularly when discs are being accessed - at the mo I am using BeyondComapare to do a byte-by-byte comparison of all files in a RAID partition with an IDE partition and I haven't expereiences the freeze for a few minutes ???

6964

General Software Discussion / Re: Needed ... MD5 checksum utility

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 11:28 AM »

Thanks, I'm having a look at Beyond compare. It has a 30 day trial which is useful.

I also found http://www.fastsum.com/ which has a useful utility for this sort of thing. It will go through whole trees and produce MD5 values for individual files / folders - storing them in the folder. Then you can just run the utility and it will calculate and compare the MD5 for the current file and last MD5 calculation.

This is idea for future copying (since the MD5 values will be copied too) but not that easy at the mo to use.

Anyone got any idea how to copy all *.md5 files recursively from one tree to an identical tree on another disc ??

6965

General Software Discussion / Needed ... MD5 checksum utility

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 10:07 AM »

Ideally what I need is a utility that will take two folders and recursively calculate MD5 checksums (or similar) on both folders and compare them to check that two folders and their contents are identical.

Whn I upgraded my hard discs I copied all the partitions from my old discs using Partition Magic in DOS mode.

This seems to have worked fine but before I delete the old partitions I want to ensure that they are bit perfect.

What I need is:

Input HD/File/Folder1 HD/File/Folder 2
Compare on a file by file basis

Output:
files in one location and not in the other
compare files where they both appear and display warnings for files with different MD5 values

I have run CHKDSK on all my drives and there don't seem to be disc issues - but I am not sure if Partition Magic takes the manufacturers bad sector file into account when copying partition contents, and there doesn't seem to be any way in Windows to compare binary files easily (on a rang of files).

6966

General Software Discussion / Re: HELP >.... Some sort of IRQ conflict (I think) ... anyone andy ideas?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 09:54 AM »

I have updated to latest VIA drivers - reapplied the MSI BIOS update (hacked version) and installed the latest version of the Promise Drivers (from their site) which date from 2002 !!!

I'lll see how it goes.

Still not sure about this IRQ sharing though - it's very strange because some IRQ lines aren't being used at all, and others have three devices to manage ??? I know IRQ mapping in WinXP is virtual and so it probably doesn't make any difference but when you have high-resource impact devices sharing it seems to be a likely source of trouble.

I don't know how WinXP allocates its IRQ table - but sharing USB2 (potentially with multiple discs including hard discs/DVD burners/card readers/digital cameras etc), wireless network, RAID array drivers and Graphics card drivers seems pretty mad to me !

Re: RoboForm - I may have expressed myself badly. They quickly reset my account to allow me to reauthenticate. My argument is that changing a bad hard disc only (and installing all files from a backup) should not force reactivation in the first place. If they are going to tie the product to a single computer (which doesn't work anyway) they should use something more constant like network MAC value, CPU ID, IDE interface ID ... choosing something like a Hard Disc as a key seems plain daft as HDs are almost considered consumables these days!

6967

General Software Discussion / Re: HELP >.... Some sort of IRQ conflict (I think) ... anyone andy ideas?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 03:48 AM »

I suppose they would argue that they gave me quick easy access to reactivate again (even though their system said I had reactivated too many times). This is true.

I just feel that this reactivation lark is getting beyond a joke.

If it carries on this way it is going to take hours over days for people to get their systems up and running properly after a hardware change as they wade through dozens of apps that need to to be reactivated.

Even worse is that lots of apps now are trying to enforce one (or limited numbers) install only - this is true of things like Audible Manager, iTunes and biggies like Adobe Photoshop CS (I have not upgraded from version 7 for this reason) - in fact all Adobe products now  to name just a few.

Some (most) software doesn't have a deactivate function so that you can move it from one machine to another and for those that do - how does this help if you have a hardware fault that stops deactivation.

Strikes me that ultimately this is madness for everyone - legitimate users and software companies. Ultimately users are annoyed and alienated, and companies need to employ sufficient staff to man reactivation desks 24/7/365 to try and mitigate that irritation. Meanwhile anyone that wants to get a hacked version can find any numbers of copies with a couple of mouse clicks.

6968

General Software Discussion / Re: HELP >.... Some sort of IRQ conflict (I think) ... anyone andy ideas?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 19, 2005, 03:36 AM »

Yes, I'll try the latest VIA drivers.

As for Promise Drivers ... it's difficult 'cos I have combined trouble here - the mobo is an MSI K7T266Pro2-RU which is otherwise excellent (if getting a bit long in the tooth now). Trouble is the RAID support os for Promise Lite - which is fine for what I want., however you can't use standard Promise drivers - you have to use MSI versions and they haven't been updated since 2001 !!!

I can update the mobo BIOS to release the 'full RAID' version (it is basically hobbled in software) but when I tried this a long time ago I got some disk write errors which were a bit of a mystery. There don't seem to be errors in the 'Lite' version so it could be a BIOS issue.

I also have an ATI Radeon AIW graphics card - and am using the latest 'recommended' version of their Catalyst drivers. The later versions will apparently work with my card but aren't recommended. I don't play games much (and none that require top notch graphics) so I can't see the point of upgrading the graphics card for the sake of it, but it doesn mean drivers are a bit static.


By the way interesting response to my Roboform reactivation issue. I complained that this sort of draconian protection really only affects customers ... here is what they said:

William replied (2005/11/19 12:30 am EST)   

if you do not want to reactivate often then do not reformat your disk.

our proctection scheme will not change -- eveb if you do not like it.

Hmmm ... so much for customer service.

6969

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: Translators Wanted

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 18, 2005, 08:20 PM »

barlog's post worked for me ...

6970

General Software Discussion / Re: SequoiaView

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 18, 2005, 08:11 PM »

FolderSizes and DiskView seem a bit on the pricy side for whatthey do ???

6971

General Software Discussion / HELP >.... Some sort of IRQ conflict (I think) ... anyone andy ideas?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 18, 2005, 07:49 PM »

I bit the bullet following recent hard disc problesm and bought a new pair of WD Caviar 260 Gb EIDE drive. (I have set the old drives up as two single disk RAID arrays - that way i can still grab data from them if I need to).

I have spent the last 24 hours copying partitions from the old drives to the new (and kept the old drives as above in case of any data corruption in the process).

Whilst I had the box in bits I also added  a second 512Mb of memory. That tests OK, so shouldn't be a problem.

Trouble is I am runninging inot a glitch now ...

I am getting periodic pauses where mouse/keyboard don't respond for a few seconds and then play catch up when they become respsonsive again. It's really annoying and I suspect it is an IRQ setting problem.

Being Windows XP it doesn't seem possible to tweak the settings manually.

Anyone any idea how to fix this before I go barking mad ... ? (IRQ list below)

I know there are disabled devices (they are 1394/Firewire netwrok interfaces that I don't use).

No device on the system reports an IRQ conflict, but as you can see there are a number of IRQs which share 3 devices - and they are all hungry devices (RAID / Enhanced USB, aka USB2 / Wireless Network Card / Graphics card etc).

The other really annoying thing is that a number of bits of software are demanding to be reactivated - just beacuse I changed my hard disc:

RoboForm Pro
NitroPDF
iTunes

iTunes and Nitro both reactivated fine, but RoboForm have changed their activation system and it won't let me reactivate (says I have activated too many times). There is no option to deactivate RoboForm - so what do they expect you to do? Really pi****ed off with this sort of behaviour. Why is it that companies now seem to think that it is OK to bugger about with genuine users who have purchased their products, knowing full well that anyone who wants to a cracked version can do so without all this hassle!!

WindowsXP and MS Office both behaved perfectly - for once MS gets this right.

Anyway ... IRQ list:

6972

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: CCleaner / Crap Cleaner - easily remove Windows ballast

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 17, 2005, 05:33 AM »

Nice find ... I have been using DiskCleaner which is quick and easy to use, but this is a bit more customizable. DiskCleaner does clean some extra areas though so I shall probably keep both.

CCleaner is particularly nice because you can exclude some cookies - always a pain in DiskCleaner.

6973

General Software Discussion / Re: JetPhoto - How come I've never heard of this before?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 16, 2005, 06:31 PM »

Really nice flower shots tsaint ...

I have added a new gallery to mine of some photos taken on a Canoe trip in Northern Ontarion in the summer. I was particularly pleased with some of the lily shots.

Don't know why, but one of the thumbnails is missing ???

Anyway here it is ... http://www.lairdswood.com/jpserver

6974

General Software Discussion / Re: WARNING - Fake Windows XP Service pack in circulation

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 16, 2005, 03:17 PM »

It was sent as an email - probably just his standard sig ...

6975

General Software Discussion / Re: RSS Reader?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on November 16, 2005, 02:23 PM »

Yes it is good but do you want to pay $20 a year just to use it?