The Newegg Newsletter emails are perhaps the only kind of spam that I like to receive. Believe it or not, I actually look forward to looking through each one to seek out the good deals and keep tabs on the world of electronics. But lately they’re starting to bore me. More
Here’s one giant Microsoft-ism for you — Outlook’s “Suggest names while typing in To, CC, BCC fields,” also known as Auto-Complete. It’s the feature that gives you a drop-down list of names & emails when setting up recipients. Except, only for some contacts. And, this only happens… most of the time. See, the programmers over in Redmond figured you’d appreciate a good test of your memory from time to time, so they slipped in a secret feature that displays the suggested contacts on all but one randomly chosen day of the month. More
So I found this awesome program called QTTabBar, and it adds tabs to Windows Explorer. If you’re like me, you use tabbed browsing a lot. So when you have to go from that to clunky ‘ole Explorer, it kind of sucks switching between more than three windows. So, make it easier on yourself and put all open explorer windows into tabs. More
As I talked about in my last post, recently I set up 15 computers for an office. What a heist — we ran into all kinds of errors and incompatibilities, mostly caused by legacy software running on a new OS, Windows 7. Along the way of setting up and tweaking Windows 7, I ran into a lot of interesting discoveries — moments when I thought to myself, “why the hell does this look this way?” Poking around in the registry, checking out directories of crap, and drilling down into folders and folders of program configuration, there were instances where I needed to customize something a certain way, and after poking around in Windows 7′s innards, I realized that a lot of “stuff” hasn’t changed too much.
Now you have! I know, no blog posts lately. But that’s okay, I don’t have many viewers anyway (yet…).
The past week I built fifteen workstations to be used in a small business. These boxes are awesome — they exemplify the new generation of computers. Only five have slimline DVD drives, which probably won’t ever be used anyway. They’re all ITX builds in the awesome Silverstone Sugo SG06 case, which comes with a 300W power supply. I really liked assembling these because there weren’t any inefficiencies, except if you count unused power supply lines. More
I kept intending to blog about this, but I never had the time until now. Jeesh, summer sounded so relaxed and lazy, but I’m definitely finding myself with less free time than I thought.
So, onto the topic of discussion. I got an xbox, and I didn’t buy it. And, I didn’t steal it either. Nope — instead, my friend gave me his Red Ring’d 360 after he got the new slim one. He was aiming to chuck it, and my DIY instincts gave me the split-second motivation I needed to intercept that sucka’ before it hit the landfill. More
I am a huge fan of using the combination of ctrl and backspace to delete a word. I use it so much that I don’t even think I just use plain old backspace anymore, except when I’m fixing spelling or something. And even then, I usually just retype the whole word. However, it’s hugely annoying that some programs, namely Windows Explorer, don’t support that combination, and instead just generate a box placeholder character. To fix this, I found a great program called AutoHotKey that allows you to bind macros to certain keys. To make control and backspace always work, I set up the program and used the following line of code in the script:
^BS:: send, ^+{left}{delete}
To make the script launch on startup, you should just move it into your Startup folder.
After reading Ed Bott’s article about trying Windows 7 Starter on a netbook and other various sources about the OS, I was shocked to learn that there was a window of time, something like October 2009 to May 2010, when Microsoft convinced itself that a great way to degrade cheaper versions of Windows 7, to encourage people to buy at least Home, was to limit the number of programs (not windows) that Win 7 Starter could run simultaneously.
Kay. All I can say is, I am so glad that Microsoft developers have at least a scrap of common sense since they did change their mind. But to think that severely restricting a version of their best operating system to date, that will be on millions of netbooks, is in-sane.
Well, maybe for the next four years. At the beginning of this week I put together a small-formfactor computer based on Intel’s new i7-2500k Sandy Bridge processor, OCZ’s Vertex II SSD, and Windows 7 (new to me). The difference between this and an Intel Pentium M 1.86 ghz processor, a Fujitsu 250GB standard hard drive, and Windows XP is like comparing a BMW M3 to a Peel Trident. And yes, just like the Trident, the laptop has heat problems. More
Before I could install Windows 7, I had to install XP first because I bought the upgrade version (way more economical!). This is how fast a absolutely-clean, vanilla copy of XP boots on an OCZ Vertex and an i7-2500k.
