Posts Tagged ‘windows’

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Fresh 'n' Funky.

May 23, 2009

It’s been a year and a half since I built my desktop computer, so I decided to spruce it up a little. Added a few more sticks of RAM, a new hard drive, re-arranged the insides of the case to make everything a little cooler and neater, then reformatted the whole thing. I was really tempted to install Windows 7 RC on here, but I think I’ll keep using XP SP2 and wait for now. I’d like to try it in the future though, and no doubt the full version will appear on the MSDNAA when it gets released.

I’ll probably add another tweak post soon, once I’ve re-installed everything again. I realise that there was so much stuff on my PC that I didn’t need – I’m making do just fine with Firefox, MSN, Spotify, VS08 and WoW. I guess I’ll try to limit the crap in the future. And if people have recommendations for good programs, let me know.

winxppro
In other news, I bought a hard dance mat off a friend the other day, and I’m enjoying it. Sure, it’s making me feel dead, but it’s fun. I only played DDR for the first time last November at Auchinawa, and I’ve been wanting to play more, but the crappy plastic dance mats put me off – this is a nice compromise. Plus, I have 6th through 10th to work through, so it’ll keep me busy (and fit) over the summer. And at least keep me off WoW a little.

*edit* I thought I’d used that image before. Right here.

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Lappity-Tippy-Tap-Top

January 15, 2009

I’ve been busy the past few days sorting out my new laptop, y’see. I ordered a Dell Vostro 1310 which arrived on Saturday (5 days after the order was placed, not too shabby), and I’m liking it so far. It’s plain black seeing as a business laptop, but still looks great, and everyone keeps commenting on how light the thing is. It’s powerful enough to run Unreal Tournament 3 on high settings at a playable frame rate at the native resolution, and manages to get over 4 hours of battery life with Wi-Fi turned on… it’s great. well worth the money I paid for it.

The only issue was that it came with Vista… I tried to give it a fair chance, but after spending a day using it and messing around with the settings just so it would behave how it should, I just though “Screw it.” and wiped it – it’s now running XP with a custom theme and RocketDock, looks just as good as Vista and runs a lot cleaner as well. I’ve got most of the things I need installed on here (I’m trying out OneNote for all my lecture notes rather than pen and paper), and it’s going to be for work use only. Honest. If I install certain MMORPGs on here, I’m just condemning myself to failure.

laptopdesk

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Tweaks I Can't Live Without

January 1, 2009

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while… I’ve wiped and reinstalled computers plenty of times, and there’s a few extra programs or addons that really make using Windows XP a lot more enjoyable. So here’s a top five, not in any particular order.

5) Xentient Thumbnails

By default, Windows XP can show some thumbnails of images, but only a few common formats such as .jpg and .gif, and only in ‘Thumbnail’ view in Explorer. If you’ve got a lot of images in a folder, it can be hard to see what image is which… Xentient Thumbnails makes things easier, by replacing icons for the image with small thumbnails of the images, in all views, for all image types. This integrates into everything, including open/save dialogs, and makes managing image files a whole lot easier. Grab it here.

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4) uxtheme.dll Patcher

I don’t like the look of  the default luna skin that comes with XP… everything seems too chunky and ugly. By default, Windows won’t allow unofficial skins, but you can patch it using this program and make your computer’s UI look a whole load prettier. You can grab tons of new skins from Customize.org, maybe grab a Vista or OS X skin if that’s your thing, but my personal favourite is Tener VS.

tweakuxtheme

3) TrayIt!

Especially on a single monitor, room on your taskbar is a precious resource that can fill up quickly if doing multiple things at once. TrayIt! is a nice application that you can run once to configure the options, and then it’ll invisibly load every time you start your computer… it’s function? It lets you hold Ctrl and click ‘Minimize’ on any window to hide it down in the system tray, very useful if the application doesn’t provide that function in the first  place. I’ve uploaded it here, ’cause I had trouble finding the invisible version.

tweaktrayit

2) Mozilla Prism

One that I bet nobody’s heard of… It’s an extremely cut-down version of the Mozilla web browser, used for integrating web pages into applications. In English? Create applications out of your favourite websites – for example, I use it for an online radio player but it can be used for pretty much anything. It’s just a proof of concept, but I like it… grab it here.

tweakprism

1) TweakUI

The ultimate tweak of tweaks… grab it from the Microsoft website and instantly  have so many more options to modify Windows, it’s unbelivable. Go download it. Now. I’ll probably cover other stuff from the Powertoys website at a later date, because I think I have enough stuff for a second ‘tweaks’ blog post in the future ^^

tweakui

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Fucking Computers.

August 22, 2008

I’ve had enough of them for one day… how can my computer stay perfectly running for years, while their PCs of others seem to break all the time? No offense to the person who’s computer I’m fixing at the moment, of course, I’m complaining more about the computers than then people who own them.

So, a computer randomly throws up a BSOD, then refuses to boot from then on. I pegged it as a corrupt registry, so I restored a previous version so I could get into the GUI, and then tried system restore… which broke it again. Broke it so much, in fact, that the recovery console didn’t feel like loading anymore, which isn’t entirely helpful. So then I pulled out an old PCI dial-up modem (what was that doing in there anyway?), and the thing booted perfectly. I hate how the problem and the solution seem to have no relation at all.

…so anyway, that worked for a few days, whereupon it threw up another BSOD and stopped booting, just to taunt me some more. So I just told it to fuck off and reformatted the bugger. That’ll show it. I did have a few problems mounting the hard drive to transfer some files over the network (side note – I now know how to create a network!), so I’m guessing it’s the hard drive that’s gone kaput. If that damn BSOD comes back from the grave, I’m going to throw this computer out the window. Seriously.

Now that this farce is over with, maybe I’ll have time to, you know, play WoW.

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