Wednesday, July 2, 2008
About two weeks ago I decided that I was just completely done with my Dell Latitude D630. I’ve had it for just under a year now and it had continued to disappoint me at every turn. I had had an Inspiron 8600 — which was a pretty darn good laptop — for about a year and then upgraded to a D610. I loved the D610. It was the best laptop I’d ever owned. Unfortunately my lovely wife was underwhelmed with the 8600. Plus, it was now over two years old, the battery was dead so she had to use the power cord all the time, and the processor was no longer cutting it for what she needed it to do. So we shelved the 8600, I gave her my wonderful D610, and I “upgraded” to the D630.
I hate the D630. It drives me crazy on a regular basis. Sure, a large chunk of the blame should be on Microsoft; I’ll admit that. When I went from the D610 to the D630 I also went from whatever version of Office was current three years ago to the “new” version of Office. (I have no idea what the versions in Office are these days. Microsoft, I think, intentionally uses a conflicting and confusing taxonomy to keep us all guessing. Let’s just say that I went from a version of Office that worked “pretty well” 80% of the time to the really slow and obnoxious version that uses all new, not-backwards-compatible file formats and hogs every drop of memory it can.) At the same time I also moved from a Blackberry to an iPhone.
Now, listen: I have been a Windows guy for almost 20 years now. I always looked down my nose at the silly artists and screenwriters eating granola bars, wearing Birkenstocks, driving eco-friendly cars, and using Macs. They had no idea how to use a real computer and certainly couldn’t program their way out of a paper bag. I’m a developer. I program computers. I needed to use a computer that let me build things. And, plus, I never met a Mac user that didn’t spend all day sending me files that would only work on a Mac.
But something funny happened when Y2K struck. I stopped writing computer programs. I am still a developer, but now everything I do is on the world wide information superhighway. It’s been almost a decade now since I needed to code a DLL or an actual client-side application. I still build fabulous and amazing applications, but they are all web-based. And that means that I have been working almost exclusively with plain old text files. And you don’t need Microsoft to work with text files. (Hell, you don’t even need a GUI to work with text files!) Combine that realization with the awe-inspiring, paradigm-shifting, mind-bending total f&$*@ing coolness of the iPhone (and the iPod!), and you can start to see why I finally decided to switch to a Mac.
So I did it. I made the switch. I bought a MacBook Pro. I’ll keep you posted.
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Last week my wife called me to say that her laptop — my old Dell Latitude D610 — wouldn’t boot. Of course her whole life is on this machine and she had a paper due that evening and, no, she didn’t have any backups. So I left the office around 3pm to try to save the day. Alas, after about five hours troubleshooting and researching and on the phone with Microsoft and Dell customer support, I was forced to admit that the hard drive was toast. Three different Dell technicians all gave me the same advice: Reformat the hard drive and reinstall WindowsXP.
Doing that would have deleted all of her data — including her 3000+ iTunes library. This was clearly not a good solution.
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Saturday, April 21, 2007
Looking for a way to clear some of your computer’s clutter? Getting rid of empty directories is a good start. I was looking for a file and realized that my machine was spending a long time searching through folders that I knew had nothing in them. A quick Google search returned a handy DOS trick to zap them all. It took me about one minute to delete just over two thousand empty folders. There’s nothing like a little command-line scripting to get something done.
Monday, April 10, 2006
For Christmas ‘04 I got my girlfriend a shiny new HP Photosmart 7960. She loves it. It prints fabulous, high-quality images and it comes with some great photo-printing software. Sure you have to mortgage your house to keep the ink flowing, but you knew that was going to be the case when you bought the thing, right?
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Tuesday, March 2, 2004
Does anybody know of any way to have IIS automatically restart itself every few hours? Do tell.
Saturday, May 3, 2003
Here’s an interesting development: For some reason my browser is no longer displaying title tags for anchors! I have no idea how this happened. Has anyone else noticed this? Title tags for hrefs do not appear regardless of the site I am viewing. This is very strange.
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
Thursday, February 7, 2002
Download tools and utilities that help you manage and support Windows 2000!
Y’know. If you wanna. No pressure or anything.
Saturday, December 22, 2001
It really drives me nuts that you can’t delete Notepad.exe in Windows 2000. Oh, you can, but only if you really muck around with your files. Here is a tutorial on getting rid of the pesky application. Note that you must delete the notepad.ex_ file from your I386 directory before you try to delete the copies in C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DLLCACHE, C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32, and C:\WINNT. If you don’t, it will just keep raising itself from the dead. I love the fact that when you finally manage to rid yourself of the world’s least-feature-packed text-editor, the Windows 2000 Operating System makes a dire warning that a file integral to system stability has been replaced with a different version. And then, when you tell it that you did it on purpose and you’re not just a bozo screwing around in your system files, it warns you that you’re being a bad, bad little hacker. Great Caesar’s Ghost! It’s not like I’m trying to get into the Pentagon, y’know? I just like EditPad better.
Note that mucking around with your registry is most likely not going to help much. I’ve tried several times to change registry settings to simply avoid notepad instead of deleting the file. Doesn’t work. As long as the file exists in the above locations (in Win2000, at least) it will ignore and / or undo whatever changes you make to the registry. Crazy, huh? If you do want to try to change your notepad registry settings, look for the strings “C:\WINNT\notepad.exe %1″ and “%SystemRoot%\System32\NOTEPAD.EXE %1″.
Sunday, December 2, 2001
Here’s a pretty cool trick from the January 1997 issue of PCComputing.Com:
The Windows Start Menu has a built-in stutter, a brief delay in the appearance of the Programs, Documents, Settings, and Find fly-out menus that’s supposed to make Windows easier for mouse newbies. If you tend to think of any intentional PC delay as a mortal sin, getting rid of the stutter couldn’t be simpler. Go into the Registry Editor and look at HKCU\Control Panel\desktop for a value called MenuShowDelay. If it isn’t there, you can add it. Just click on Edit and then New String Value, type MenuShowDelay, and hit Enter twice. Set the value to “0″. You have to restart Windows for the change to take effect.
Thursday, November 29, 2001
Reghacks - Tips, Tricks and Registry Hacks for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP
Wednesday, November 28, 2001
