Archive for the ‘Windows XP’ Category
Darko on April 9th, 2008
In this article, i’ll explain the importance of Defragmented your Hard Drive every now and then, in aim to maintaining the good health of your computer.
When a computer starts writing to hard drive, it write everything in a spiral fashion. A healthy spiral would look like this:
But as time passes, you’re bond to delete some file off of the hard drive, that will leave an empty space in the spiral. And now it looks like this:
When the computer starts writing on the hard drive again, the writing process will start in the first empty space that the computer finds. In the case of our last spiral image, that first empty space will be the one previously reserved to the deleted files, witch as you can see is a limited space. If the file being written is larger then the available space, the computer will continue writing on the next empty space that it finds, that’s called fragmentation:
With time, the fragmentation process will slow down the computer, because loading files will take more time since the computer has to search the hard drive for all the different pieces of the file
Defragmentation will reverse the fragmentation process by finding all the pieces of a file through the spiral, lining them together in an orderly fashion, thus making it eithier for computers to find the files requested. Once defragmented, the spiral will look healthy again.
Darko on March 28th, 2008
Lately, i’ve downloading lots of FLV files off of multiple websites. I have both K-lite and VLC installed on my laptop, witch pretty much does the trick.
Today, i wanted to play an FLV file in Windows Media Player 11, but as you might have noticed, WMP does not support FLV playback. So here’s what i did:
To play FLV files, we need to have a splitter because of the way it encodes two streams. I chose the FLV Splitter from the Guliverkli2 project.
1- Download the Splitter, you’ll have to register the file manually.
2-Place the “FLVSplitter.ax” file in your preferred directory, i chose c:\windows
3-Launch the Run service, and run the following line:
regsvr32 C:\WINDOWS\FLVSplitter.ax
Congratulation, Windows Media Player 11 now supports FLV playback on your PC
P.S: The Guliverkli2 project provides support for many other file types then FLV, includin: ogg, mov, rm…..Make sure to check it out
Darko on March 21st, 2008
I have used GreatNews: The intelligent RSS reader for over a year, and this application never failed me. GreatNews runs immediately and doesn’t require any special runtime environments.it’s a portable application.
With “Auto-discovery” Adding feeds to GreatNews is very simple, all you need to have is the link to the website and the reader will automatically find all the feeds offered by the website and give you the option to choose your preferred one.
Here’s a list of GreatNews Features(from the official website):
* Channel Statistics shows your top 10 most or least visited channels.
* Use labels to organize your articles. With just a single click, all items with the same label can be listed as if they are under the same folder. You can also use labelsto customize article exports.
* With Search Channels, you can type in stock symbol to track the latest news about the company via Yahoo Company News. Or use keywords to monitor latest blog comments via Feedster, MSN and Flickr
* Support all major feed formats, including RSS 0.9x, 1.0(rdf), 2.0, Atom 0.30 and 1.0. Support popular extensions like dublin core, content:encoding etc.
* Integrated internet browser, with tabs and popup blocking. Working closely with default browser like Firefox.
* With Import/Export wizard, you can import/export all channel subscriptions in a single step.
* Export rss articles to rss 2.0 format. You can also customize the export by selecting channel/group/label, and/or applying filters.
* Bloglines.com integration
Read everywhere at Bloglines.com, but read twice as fast at your desk.
* Full text search with keyword highlights.
* 100% Unicode support. Displays international languages on the same page. Use any languages anywhere in GreatNews, including Search, Label and News watch.
* “Channel Organizer” helps organize channel subscriptions in one place. Use “Find Channel” to locate your subscriptions quickly.
* Support HTTP Conditional GETs and gzip/deflate encoding to reduce bandwidth consumption.
* Track Comment function automatically updates articles with latest comments.
* BlogThis function to post directly to your blogging service. Support popular blogging tools like w.Bloggar, Zoundry and Windows Live Writer.
GreatNews: Official Website - Direct Download
Darko on March 12th, 2008
Since the moment i got my 1 GB Flash Memory stick, i began to gather all the portable applications i can find. Usually these applications are not marketed as portable, but you can easily figure it out by renaming the installation directory and running the application, if it run properly then it’s a portable application.
Here’s a list of free portable applications that every IT guy should have on his flash memory at all time.
PortableApps.com’s has a very nice list of portable application, here’s my favorite:
DesktopApps’s Simple and portable applications:
- menuApp - a menu based application launcher.
- audioApp - for all your one-click muting needs.
- monitorApp - a small system resource monitor.
- imageApp - a digital image viewer.
Windows Sysinternals’s (formerly Sysinternals) portable system monitoring software:
- Process Monitor - real-time monitoring of file system, Registry and process/thread activity
- RegMon - Sysinternals.com - Monitors all modifications on the registry
- DiskMon - Monitors all modifications and traffic on the hard drives
- FileMon - Monitors all modifications and traffic on files
- TcpView - Monitors all traffic incoming and outcoming from the system
All of the following application are 100% portable:
i will keep updating this list, every time i find a new portable application
Darko on March 7th, 2008
What are the $NTUninstall folders?
$NTUninstall is a folder that appears everytime you download on of Windows XP updates. For example, if you download KB924667, a $NtUninstallKB917953$ will appear in your WINDOWS directory.
These folders contains the information on how to remove the update, the same information used by “Add/Remove program” utility.
How to safely delete the $NTUninstall folders?
As i said before, these folders containing the uninstall information of windows updates, to delete them means that you can no longer roll back those updates. Nevertheles, these folders tend to take up space. So if you’re running out of disk space, you might consider deleting that data.
To find out the nature of the update in question, simply check Microsoft website, by copy/paste the id into the following link
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=(paste id here)
Ex: $NtUninstallKB917953$ > http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=917953
Now that you know what the update does, you can make your decision on whether you might uninstall it in the future or not. I recommend waiting a couple weeks after installation before making your decision. After that period, if you feel that your system is stable, odds are that you wont need to unistall the update anymore, you are good to go.
I recommend making a backup of everything before deleting.
Now, that you delete the folder, you might want to remove the entry from Add/Remove Programs.
To do that, launch the application and then attempt to uninstall the update.Add or Remove Programs will realize that the backup files already been delete and will automaticly remove the listing.
