Category Archives: Windows

Windows (&) Me

Hold the front page! Shock, horror! I find I actually like Windows 8! Not your common-or-garden stock Windows 8, you understand: the interface formerly known as Metro (TIFKAM) is definitely a dog’s dinner and I can’t stand it or its applications. Both look ghastly and are, it seems to me, an impediment to productivity (if I ever get a Windows-based tablet, though, I am certain to find TIFKAM a great idea. Just not on my desktop, thanks all the same).

Fortunately, a quick install of Classic Shell immediately after Windows 8 installation makes TIFKAM go away, almost completely. It’s free, too. (There are other Start menu replacements, but most of them cost a few dollars. Classic Shell, though, does all I need it to do for none at all). You may need to do a few ‘open with’ tricks on various file types to stop them being opened with the new ‘Modern Apps’, but otherwise, once Classic Shell is in, it’s pretty much a Desktop Experience a la Windows 7: bearable!

Pro Tip: Classic Shell also works fine on Windows Server 2012, and is a god-send there, too.

Firefox 20 is a better privacy-protecting browser than Internet Explorer (at least in part because Adblock Plus, Noscript and Ghostery will run in the former but not the latter), so that bit of the Windows experience immediately got a makeover, post-installation, too.

I’m using Windows 8 Pro, and that comes with Hyper-V (I mean that it comes with the ability to install Hyper-V, because it’s not implemented by default). This is not available in basic Windows 8, but the Pro and Enterprise editions include it. The last time I used Hyper-V was back when Windows 2008 (1st release) was new, and I didn’t much like it, largely because on the desktop PC where I tried to use it, the presence of NVidia graphics drivers meant the entire PC stuttered and stammered badly (unable to play a little bit of audio without choking, for example).

Well, that problem is fixed. If your CPU uses Second Level Address Translation (SLAT, or Extended Page Table in Intel-speak; or Rapid Virtualization Indexing in AMD-speak), then that sort of performance stutter is completely gone. Most i3, i5 and i7 processors do include SLAT, and my one, happily, is on the list. So now I can bare-metal virtualize and play Mozart without wincing.

This means I can park my VMware Workstation license where the sun don’t shine; and I won’t be needing VirtualBox in a hurry either. The Hyper-V management tools are slick and well-integrated and a very nice step up from those desktop virtualization offerings, too. I particularly like the way Hyper-V makes displaying a VM entirely separate from running one. It’s true that you can switch a VMware VM to run in the background after you’ve started it; and if you run your VirtualBox VMs from the command line, they can run-but-not-display, too. But this capability is baked-in to Hyper-V and requires no post-startup or command-line shenanigans to get working, so I noticed it and liked it immediately.

“Guest Additions” are available for CentOS/Red Hat/Scientific, too, so those OSes are able to make best use of their virtual environments. Admittedly, there is no support for Solaris on Hyper-V, which might be a problem for me down the track. We’ll see.

In short, there’s a lot of Windows 8 hate about (the comments on this article are a nice snapshot of that sort of thing!); but I think much of it is overblown. Stick Classic Shell on it and you have a practically-pure 100% desktop experience, devoid of all Metro taint. On the other hand, you get very nice, very capable virtualization built-in for nothing, which has to be a plus. And to top it all off, it performs nicely, too (rather better than Win7 on the same hardware, I think, anyway).

It’s early days, and it could all end horribly in tears any moment now… but so far, at least, the trip back to Win8 has been ‘not bad’.

Disable NTFS self-repair

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In an Administrator’s command prompt, type

fsutil repair query c:

…to see whether self-healing is on or not (that example is using the C: drive, of course). If it is and you don’t want it to be, type:

fsutil repair set c: 0

…to switch it off. Change that final ’0′ to a ’1′ to re-enable it. You might reasonably wonder why you’d ever want to disable self-healing …and the only answer I can come up with is along the lines of “You’re using TrueCrypt on Windows 8 (for which it isn’t certified) and the self-healing process will mistake full system drive encryption for corruption. When it does so, it will “correct” things -resulting in a completely unreadable disk”. This tip won’t be needed when TrueCrypt has a proper Win8 version out, in other words.

Invisible Mending

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Just by way of a little test, I upgraded ToH’s PC to Windows 8 yesterday (from Windows 7), without actually getting approval beforehand.

You might have thought a change like that would have been noticed. But 36 hours later, and still not a word to indicate that “something’s different”! That’s 36 hours with things like Photoshop and Microsoft Money being used pretty intensively. Apparently, a change of O/S makes not one noticeable difference to that particular user experience!

This is as near as I can get to the “An O/S your mother could operate” test -and Windows 8 would appear to pass with flying colours. I really do wonder what all those screaming, ‘What an abomination! The end of Microsoft! A Disaster!!’ have actually been using all this time. As someone who took about 2 years to vaguely feel OK about Windows 7, I’m experiencing precisely nothing in Windows 8 except “faster, snappier, efficient”. This is certainly no Vista…

Various commentators have also moaned about different aspects of Windows Server 2012 and/or Office 2013, but I’m using both very happily. Server 2012 feels leaner than before and runs Oracle 11.2.0.3 perfectly well (though I did have to manually install the .Net 3.5 framework first).

There is an issue with using Internet Explorer 10 to access Enterprise Manager, though. You’ll get the usual warnings about invalid security certificates, but you’ve previously been offered a chance to ‘continue to this site’, import the certificate and thus work around the issue. In Internet Explorer 10, however, there is no link to let you continue to the site, so there’s no way to import the self-certified certificate. My workaround was, therefore, to open a command prompt (Win+R, then type cmd and press Enter), and issue the following four commands:

set ORACLE_SID=orcl
set ORACLE_UNQNAME=orcl
set ORACLE_HOSTNAME=localhost
emctl unsecure dbconsole

It’s important to use “localhost” for the ORACLE_HOSTNAME value, rather than the “proper” name for your server, whatever it might be. Otherwise, feel free to substitute in the correct name for your instance if it isn’t actually “orcl”. The effect of the last command is to allow you to connect to Enterprise Manager by a plain http URL instead of an https one. For example, I can now connect to http://localhost:1158/em -and by not using secure http, you completely negate the need for security certificate in the first place, so there are no dramas getting it to work.

No doubt when Oracle 12c finally appears (my bet is on December 12th: 12c on 12/12/12 has a certain symmetry about it), IE10 will work perfectly… but until then, that’s the best I can offer. Of course, it’s not ideal from a security point of view, but that’s the state of the workaround at present.

Oh, and don’t forget to add 1158 as a new rule to the server’s firewall if you mean to connect to Enterprise Manager remotely. (Win key -> type “firewall” -> launch Firewall with Advanced Security -> right-click Inbound Rules-> New Rule -> Port -> Next -> 1158 -> Next -> Allow the connection -> Next -> Next -> type ‘Enterprise Manager rule’ as a name -> Finish).

Windows 8 fiddling

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There are a few issues I have found with Windows 8 (64-bit) as my main desktop. In no particular order:

I wanted to uninstall Java, because of recent security scares (and because I use nothing that really depends on it, as far as I know). But I was unable to uninstall Java without first disabling the User Access Control feature. I set it back to its default setting afterwards, of course.
Both VMware and VirtualBox are flakey/unstable. I tried the VirtualBox beta, but that didn’t improve matters much there. I felt obliged to download the new VMware Workstation version 9, and that’s running really well… but it is an awful lot more expensive than it used to be, and I don’t know that I can justify the price to myself:

Interestingly, despite VMware’s best geolocating efforts to prevent me from visiting the US version of their store, I can tell you that the US retail price for the same thing is $249… which is most odd, given that currently one US$ buys you more or less one Aussie dollar. I wonder why the Aussies are therefore being over-charged by something in the region of 50%??! Definitely a case for a US-based VPN, methinks.

Microsoft Security Essentials does not work on Windows 8. That’s not an issue in itself, because Win8 ships with a capable “Windows Defender” equivalent. Unfortunately, there is no way to scan an individual file or folder with this tool (there is no right-click and select ‘scan now’ or its equivalent, for example). You can do it via the command line, but it’s not pretty:

"C:Program FilesWindows Defendermpcmdrun" -scan -scantype 3 -file "C:usershjrDownloadsVirtualBox-4.2.0_RC3-80444-Win.exe"

(Obviously, replace the specific path/filename with whatever is required). There are articles out there saying it’s possible to get a right-click option back if you create a couple of registry keys, but they didn’t work for me (most were written before the Win8 code was finalised, of course). A third-party anti-virus application might be the better option, therefore. If only I knew which one to use…

Oracle 11.2.0.1 installs on it fine and without incident. However, it spews a lot of pretty ugly-looking icons all over the Start screen. Nothing you can’t unpin and sort out manually, of course; but a pain, nonetheless. A lot of older programs are going to wreak the same sort of havoc, I fear.
There is no desktop clock (my eyesight means I can’t read the little clock down in the system tray area from a distance, so I really need one!) Fortunately, a free one looking very much like the one I described creating on Centos a while back is available for free from here. It works well, but I have to warn you that the installer tries desperately to get you to install extra packages or agree to have your browser home page changed. It is, frankly, appalling but if you take the time to actually read the various screens and decline the various offers of licenses, it is possible to have the desktop clock/gadget without any nasty extras. I’d really like to find an equivalent that isn’t so burdened with crapware, though.
The Task Manager in Windows 8 is a lot more useful than its Win7 counterpart (and the graphs are nicer!). You can get to the list of Services here, and also the list of applications which will auto-start at each reboot. Very handy.
I mentioned last time that there was no apparent way to switch off sound effects or the 3-card deal in the Metro-ised Solitaire game. There is: you have to do a Win+C when it has focus. That key combination brings up a “Charms Bar”, one of whose options always contains a “Settings” option. When you click that in desktop mode with nothing particular running, you get options to visit the Control Panel or personalise the desktop theme. Click it when using a Metro app, however, and the Settings option will instead take you to app-specific configuration options. I can’t say that’s entirely intuitive: it’s taken me a day or two to discover it, after all! But now I know it’s there, it will make a big difference to how useful some of those Metro apps really can be.
It’s not yet possible to install the Media Centre component, so I haven’t been able to upgrade my Win7 Media Centre, currently doing TV recording and video playing duties. Apparently, it will be available on the day the OS is officially released to the public, but not having it available even though the OS has been released to manufacturing seems a bit dumb to me.
Windows 8 support for FLAC (i.e., it doesn’t) is disappointing but not unexpected. Unfortunately, the workarounds for previous versions (Shark Codecs, WMP Tag Plus, etc) seem to be broken in Windows 8. This is a deal-breaker for me… I can always use Foobar2000, of course, but a native Windows player for one of the commonest codecs around would have been a nice gesture from Microsoft!
There are lots of references at various points when you’re doing something to “tap here…” when, from a quick look at my hardware, the OS should know “click here” would be more appropriate. Irritating, a very little…

Nothing that’s a complete show-stopper, though the FLAC stuff is a real pain (as I say, Foobar2000 is the saviour there). I have just bought myself a new 128GB SSD, so this weekend, I think I’ll do a fresh Windows 8 install on that and see how I get on. I never thought in-place upgrades of MS O/Ses was a great idea, though this one’s gone a lot smoother than I thought possible.

Windows 8… meet Desktop

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I am having the day off and so, naturally, I thought I’d replace my O/S with something new and exciting. And then I got out the RTM of Windows 8. In for a penny, in for a pound, so no messing around with VMs: this one got installed straight over the top of my workaday Windows 7 (which shares dual-boot capacity with whatever Linux distro I happen to be playing with that day).

So this article comes to you from a real, live genuine Windows 8 desktop… and I thought I was going to write about how awful it was etc. etc. etc., but in fact, I have to write that “It isn’t anywhere near as bad as it’s been cracked up to be”. Colour me surprised.

First thing I should get clear is that the loss of the Start “orb” isn’t a big deal. For example, if I wanted to launch the calculator in Windows 7, I might well have clicked Start -> All Programs -> (scroll down a bit) -> Accessories -> Calculator. (Did you realise it was so many clicks for something so trivial? I certainly didn’t!) In Windows 8, I click Desktop -> the calculator icon I pinned to my taskbar earlier. Dramatically fewer mouse clicks! OK, I cheated, because you have to: once you are in the traditional desktop mode, there’s no obvious way to launch any programs at all, unless you have the relevant icons festooned on your taskbar or desktop. So, knowing this, you make sure those icons are to hand before you go to Desktop mode… which is, of course, a bit of a nuisance, but once it’s done, you really do use less mouse-clicks than before …or, at the very least, no more than before.

My point is that having no Start button doesn’t necessarily mean things are more difficult to find or launch -just that you have to do things in a slightly different way, but that new way isn’t actually too bad.

If you are red-hot with your Windows key shortcuts, for example, you might already know to do Win+R to bring up the ‘run command’ dialog. Worked in Windows 7, still works in Windows 8. So you could simply type Win+R then “calc” and press Enter in either version. Again, the loss of the Start orb doesn’t make doing that any harder than before.

Discoverability of things in Windows 8 is a bit more of a problem, I will agree.. but, after a bit of thought, I’ve decided that a lot of things which seem impenetrably difficult to find are really just in a new place and it’s no big deal: we learnt where the stuff used to be, thinking it was a bit odd. We’ll learn where the stuff has been moved to …which, whilst decidedly different, isn’t actually any more logically insane.

For example: we all know that to log out or switch off a Windows 7 PC, we click the Start button. Now, in Windows 8, you have to know to bring up the “Charms Bar” (Win+C or hover your mouse in the right-hand top-most corner of the screen), click Settings then Power: there are your options to sleep, restart or shutdown. Log out is somewhere else again: the Start screen (so press your Windows key or hover in the bottom-left corner of your desktop), click your photo/icon, then select “Sign Out”. I mean, it’s definitely different, but there’s a certain logic to it and not that many key presses extra, if any. It’s just a matter of climbing a learning curve for something new. In other words, it’s not worse than before, particularly; just different.

I know a lot has been written about the split-personality thing, too: on the one hand, Windows 8 looks remarkably like a de-Aero-ified Windows 7 (in Desktop mode); on the other hand, it looks like a tablet interface (in its Metro-esque guise). A lot of people on assorted forums seem to dislike this immensely. All I can say is that I’ve been tapping away in Desktop mode for about an hour and a half… and I haven’t seen sight nor sound of Metro (or whatever we have to call it these days) once. The thing doesn’t keep flipping between the two modes: if you stick to running “desktop apps” (VMware, Chrome, Word, Outlook, Handbrake, Stellarium, MuseScore etc etc), then you’ll live in the desktop and you’ll hardly notice anything has changed. If you happen to start using more “tablet-like apps”, then you’ll spend more time in the Metro area. Personally, I don’t find the dichotomy annoying, simply because they are so different. It’s not like two similar things that are easy to confuse, for example: that definitely gets annoying. This is more like speaking French in Paris and sticking to English in London: you adjust to whichever world you want to move in at that time. It’s certainly not difficult.

Funnily enough, I think if you own a tablet or smartphone of any description, you’re going to wish you could spend more time with the Metro interface. The idea of a small, cheap app dedicated to doing one thing is certainly something a Galaxy/Nexus/iPad user is going to be familiar with… and having to put up instead with huge, monolithic, hundred-dollar-plus software packages like Office or Photoshop is going to seem a bit odd in time, I feel sure.

Anyway, for me, I find that I’ve got an un-Aero-ized version of Windows 7 that has Metro available to me if I need it, but isn’t in my face (hardly at all, in fact) unless I do. It’s certainly a hybrid approach, but it’s not as crazy as I’ve been reading it to be for months past.

Actually, whilst on the subject of Aero, I’d like to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish”. It’s a relief to see it go. I frankly never understood the attraction of semi-transparent (and semi-readable) window title bars, so their loss is a return to sanity as far as I am concerned. There is instead a reasonable choice of colour schemes and on the whole, they work quite well. It’s just like having a theme-able “Classic” skin in XP, really: it feels efficient and effective, without looking like it’s been dragged screaming and kicking out of the 1990s. I can certainly live with it.

There are plenty of niggles, all the same. A simple case in point: I occasionally play a game of Solitaire whilst waiting for something to install or build, but no such game exists in Windows 8. Oh, I can certainly go to the Start page and click Games… but I am then launched into something that demands my Hotmail credentials before admitting me to an online store. Solitaire is available for free download, but it’s 196MB and plays very slowly in full-screen with no apparent way to turn off dumb sound effects (or to stop dealing three at a time!) Same thing for photos: yes, the Metro app will pick up the contents of your Pictures library and display them quite nicely, but there’s no (apparent -it’s early days!) way to tell it to import pictures from a network share… whilst multiple tiles encourage you to link your Facebook or Skydrive accounts. The Metro Music app is similarly forever pushing you to sign in (hotmail credentials, I guess, though it mentions the Xbox on-screen… why?!) and displaying loads of web content for me to buy (strangely, there’s not one Beethoven album on display!)

The Internet is crawling all over this particular O/S, and it’s annoying. You are prompted for your Windows Live/hotmail credentials as part of the basic O/S installation process -and it’s by no means obvious that you aren’t required to part with them (but you aren’t). I don’t have the best of Internet connections at the best of times, so an O/S that starts behaving as if it’s permanently connected to the Internet or assumes that you want to connect yourself up to everything all the time is not great news for me.

But that’s all the Metro stuff; back in the Desktop world, things chug on much as they always have, I am relieved to say!

And that brings me to the much-discussed issue of “touch”: this is the O/S that assumes you’ve got touch-enabled monitors and so on, isn’t it, and is hopeless unless you have? Nope. Not in my (limited) experience. The worst I can say is that the Start screen (and a lot of the Metro apps) splurge their contents horizontally across the screen… so I am forever having to use the scroll bars to see everything. It is obvious at this point that life would be a lot easier if you could just flick things sideways by touch, as I’d do on my Nexus. But as I’ve tried to emphasise: the Metro stuff is something you definitely don’t have to interact with much if you don’t want to. I am certainly not overwhelmed by a feeling of “must upgrade my hardware to touch-sensitive kit”, anyway.

A couple of serious issues arose that I should mention. VMware Workstation 8 refused to run my virtual machines after the O/S upgrade. I had to manually edit the .vmx file for a VM and change the vmci0.present = “TRUE” setting to be “FALSE”. After that, the machine would boot but the network interface still refused to work. In the end, I uninstalled VMware and re-installed… and everything came good.

Perhaps most seriously, I have to report that Angry Birds in Space doesn’t work at all, complaining that OpenGL renderers of various versions aren’t supported or installed. I haven’t researched this issue yet (!), so I’ve no idea if there’s a workaround. I’d expect one sooner rather than later!

All my other favourites (Stellarium, MuseScore, Exact Audio Copy, Photoshop, Office 2010) work just as they always did. The upgrade is, from their point of view, perfectly painless.

Anyway, I’m sure we’ve all read what a disaster Windows 8 is and how it will ruin Microsoft… but I’m pretty sure it won’t. I’m likewise sure we’ve all read how Microsoft always alternates good OSes with terrible ones (98 -> Me ->Windows XP -> Vista -> 7)… and so we’re due for a terrible one. But this release, I think, proves that “rule” false: it’s a perfectly good OS. I reckon the Metro stuff is a bit under-cooked, to be honest, but it’s certainly intriguing for what it might become.

Would I rush out to upgrade a perfectly good Windows 7 machine? Well, I did… but no, I don’t think there’s sufficient goodies to justify it if I hadn’t already paid for it via my Technet subscription. But if you’re buying new kit and the new OS ships with it; or if you’ve got some ancient XP machines that are in need of a refresh… then I don’t think there’s anything here to be particularly afraid of or concerned about, and I’d not hesitate to do the deed (because it runs smaller and lighter than Windows 7 on older kit, basically).

And that is definitely something I wasn’t expecting to write at the start of the day!

Storage Solutions

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Long-time readers may recall that I bought at least one of these:

It’s a Drobo and it’s been a disaster. First, because it’s temperamental: move it, or power it off then on, or basically breathe anywhere in its general direction, and it will dramatically start flashing red lights, indicating total failure (and lost data). When you have suppressed the sick feeling in your stomach at that thought, you can power it off and on a few more times and, probably, it will decide to reboot in ‘green light’ mode. At which point your data is safe for as long as you don’t breathe again.

Secondly, it’s incredibly slow to re-protect your data. One of the advertised joys of the Drobo was that you could eject one of the four existing hard disks, pop in a new one of greater size and then just sit back and wait for the thing to re-distribute your data over the whole array so that it was all protected once more. Which is, indeed, what happens… except that you wait a long, long, very long time. And throughout the duration of that wait, your data isn’t protected against another hardware failure at all. When I last tried to do this with 4 2TB drives, the box spent 6.5 days thinking about it.You run with unprotected data for a week and see how you get on sleeping!

And third: the Drobo was and remains relatively noisy. Easily audible above the noise of a loud action movie it’s providing the data for, that’s for sure.

We had a council clean-up this week, so my Drobos finally met their destiny as land-fill, as should have been the case many years ago. I hated them, and I’d never buy another. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say!

Let me instead introduce you to this beauty:

It’s an HP Proliant N40L Micro Tower Server. It shipped with a single 250GB hard disk, but with space for three others of any capacity. It also shipped with 2GB of ECC RAM and an AMD Turion II running at 1.5GHz.

For that lot, I paid the princely sum of AU$264, from these guys, who were the cheapest I could find. I notice that today, they’re quoting an extra $25 for the same config, so obviously I got lucky!

I added 8GB of ECC RAM -and fitting it was not fun. It requires pulling the entire motherboard out, and that can only be done by unplugging all power, SATA and other cables. Those cables fit tightly in the confined space available -and the SATA connector, in particular, seems to have been welded into place by cruel people with exceptionally fine welding skills. My previous experience of detaching soldered SATA connectors from motherboards came back to haunt me… but we got there in the end. I’ve also added a USB-3.0 expansion card to fill the available PCIx slot, but I didn’t bother adding a graphics card, so it’s strictly on-board graphics for me.

All up, including postage, I think one of these things cost me AU$370. So naturally, I got two. And that still means I’ve bought two brand new, quality servers for hardly much more than I paid for one of my original Drobos!

Of course, you only get 250GB of storage for that price: you have to fill the other three slots (non-hot-swappable) yourself. Fortunately, I had quite a few 2TB drives knocking about the place, thanks in part to me having recently destroyed Drobos en masse. So, pop those in (very easily!), and I now have 6.2TB in each server.

Time then to install a server OS… and it could have been Scientific Linux, of course. But since I have my Technet subscription, and I wouldn’t mind learning more about Windows 2008 R2 administration, on that goes instead. Turn the three 2TB drives into a single 4TB, RAID-5 array… and I now have 8TB of protected storage, humming very quietly in the background. I think each server consumes about 50W, which seems economical enough. Plus, the big bonus: I can barely hear them, even though they sit just behind my triple-monitor setup, precisely at ear-height.

A 1.5GHz CPU doesn’t sound like much: I’ve seen people slagging the Turion IIs off as though they were barely in the Intel Atom class. But Windows 2008 is certainly responsive when I remote desktop to it, and both boxes are running virtual machines (one each) without seeming to struggle. I’ve no complaints about them, anyway: fast enough for this old-timer.

Essentially, all I’ve ever wanted is for near-silent, RAID-protected storage for my music and other multimedia collections. The Drobos failed to provide that on so many levels, it wasn’t funny. These new HP boxes, in contrast, do the job just fine… and give me a capable, stable platform to run permanently two large-ish (6GB RAM and 200GB HDD) virtual machines at the same time, which is a nice bonus. At AU$264, I’d recommend them to anyone, though at AU$289, I find even my enthusiasm waning a bit.

But I still like them a lot, and they have cheered me up no end, allowing me to dump the damn Drobos. That’s worth almost any price, come to think of it.

Windows Tools

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I thought I’d take a quick audit of the freeware (i.e., zero cost software) I use on Windows… and was surprised by how much there is of it and how good it all is! Here’s the latest list:

7-Zip – all your file compression requirements met in one, genuinely 64-bit, package.
UltraDefrag – I don’t defrag often (Windows 7 has a pretty good self-defragging tool), but this does a good job when I really feel the need for it.
Cobian Backup 11 – Invaluable for fully backing up 6+ TB of video, music etc to hard disks for off-site backup. Subsequent differential backups get all post-backup changes onto more 2TB USB hard disks stored on-site. Every 6 months, the off-site disks get a full backup refresh, and the cycle starts once more. Cobian is at the core of my data recovery setup, so I wouldn’t be without it.
SyncBack Free – There are several ‘satellite’ PCs around the house whose contents need to be sync’d back to the servers, from where Cobian Backup will take care of them. But for that satellite-to-server synchronisation, SyncBack Free does the job nicely. (It’s a bit like Microsoft’s SyncToy, but without the bugs which cause files to duplicate or be lost entirely!) It doesn’t copy open files, but that’s not an issue here. If it were, SyncBackSE would cope with them for $35 or so. There are loads of free file synchronisers out there: I’ve pretty much tested them all and SyncBack is the pick of the crop as far as I’m concerned!
Keepass – Cross-platform password manager. Protect its database with one very long, very strong password and you’ll never even have to know what your passwords to anything else are, ever again. Just get the program to auto-generate them, then paste the obscured password into a web page as it asks for it. Has trasnformed the way I interact with the Web, providing a peace of mind I’d never had before.
TreeSize Free – When you need to know what’s occupying all your disk space, this works nicely. I’ve never felt the need to upgrade to the personal or pro versions.
MP3Tag – Best tagger for FLAC, MP3, WMA, OGG and other music files out there, IMHO.
ISOBuster – This invaluable tool can, slowly and laboriously, recover data from otherwise unreadable audio, video or data CDs and DVDs. It’s not actually freeware (US$40 gets you the full product), but the non-Pro version (which is free) has always done whatever I’ve needed it to do.
Sumatra PDF Reader – Time was when Foxit was the freebie PDF reader of choice, but it got a bit too bloated and tricksy for my tastes. Sumatra does the job nicely, without fuss or funny business.
Bullzip PDF Printer – Reading PDFs is one thing, but creating them is another. Bullzip works perfectly for that sort of thing. They also have some nice tools that come in handy for working with databases (an SMTP command-line mailing agent, for example).
RD Tabs – Remote Desktop Connections in a tabbed document interface. When you have lots of Windows PCs or servers to connect to remotely, this saves having to launch the Windows built-in RDP client multiple times, and keeps things nice and tidy.
Explorer++ – Windows Explorer replacement, complete with tabs… and fully 64-bit, if you need it to be. Doesn’t need to be installed, either (i.e., one of those “portable” apps).
LockHunter – When you want to delete a file, but Windows declares it’s in use by some process or other… and you can’t think what process that might be! Only a beta, but fully 64-bit and I’ve not had issues with it.
Foobar2000 – Windows Media Player is not actually too bad these days… except for the fact that it can’t play most codecs without a lot of fuss, bother and third-party codec packs of variable quality and dubiousness. Foobar2000, on the other hand, is pretty minimalist to look at, but plays everything from the get-go. It does all I need it to do, without much ‘glamour’, but cleanly and effectively. Its music organisation abilities are also excellent and suits my needs nicely.
Calibre – E-book management made simple (and very effective). Keeps my Kindle organised, at least!
Stellarium – For those cold, dark Winter nights when you’re wondering what heavenly body you’re looking at (and realising, sadly, that it’s not your own)
Handbrake – Converts Blu-Ray and DVDs to Mastroska files in a (relative) jiffy. Does a nice line in converting films to be watched on my smartphone, too.
Greenshot – An always-on, flexible and low-resource-consumption screenshot-taking utility. Great for putting illustrated documentation together.
Quake-Style Console – Brilliant! A DOS Window that runs permanently in the background, but drops down for use at the press of [WinKey]+[~]. Another press of that key combination, and the window ‘folds’ back up, leaving everything running. Extremely convenient, very productive.
Programmer’s Notepad – A small, highly-productive replacement for Notepad. Excellent code-writing assistance -and a nice line in being able to convert between Unix and DOS line endings!
ImgBurn - Most effective DVD/CD writer I know of -and does Bluray, too, if pushed. Nasty habit of trying to sneak in the Ask toolbar on first installation, but that’s avoidable with just one mouse click, so nothing too evil.
Irfanview – I’ve actually got Photoshop 5.5, but if I just want to do quick, lightweight edits to an image -perhaps a crop here, an auto-adjust there- Irfanview does the job so much more simply! Genuine tough-nut photographers will never be able to part with Photoshop (there’s nothing that runs it even close), but I’m happy most of the time with the capabilities Irfanview can provide.
Media Player Classic : Home Cinema – MPC is great for playing just about any video file, no matter the format. It’s lightweight but highly functional, though it appears to have an annoying dependency on DirectX9 libraries: it will complain vociferously if they’re not installed, but seems to work fine without them, anyway. (The libraries can easily be downloaded and installed, just the same). That old standby, VLC, just doesn’t seem quite up to MPC’s standards these days, especially as far as integrating nicely with the rest of Windows 7. Besides which, MPC is fully 64-bit and VLC isn’t (or, at least, the 64-bit version of VLC is only marked “experimental”).
Stardock Fences – Some people insist on a completely clean desktop; others allow the icons to pile up as they will. Me… I like the middle ground, where I can store things on the desktop -but in an organised way. Fences allows you to ‘corral’ your icons, shortcuts, files and folders into grouped and categorised areas on the desktop. I’ve never felt the need to pay for the Pro version.
Putty and Filezilla – In a world where ssh’ing and ftp’ing are frequently necessary, these are the tools for the job as far as I’m concerned.
Musescore – Perhaps just a tad specialist, but if I’m jotting down bars from my sixth string quartet, this will be the tool I use to do it with, the best free music composition/notation tool I know of. Does a good job with playing back what you’ve written, too, which is important. Cross-platform, too, which is comforting.
Exact Audio Copy – It is not the most intuitive piece of software, but it’s free and capable and does perfect rips. If you don’t mind paying money, I think dbPoweramp is easier to use, though even its interface is a bit clunky at times. But given that CDs seem a quaint and antiquated technology these days, I think EAC is probably all you really need! If you need to switch between FLAC/WMA/MP3 or other formats after the initial rip, LameXP is pretty good. It comes with some seriously stupid sound effects, and it doesn’t output to WMA (it can read them but not output them). But it does do multi-threaded encodes.
When it comes to virtualisation, I haven’t mentioned VirtualBox, because I prefer to pay for my VMware Workstation. However, VMware Player is completely zero-cost and lets you create virtual machines, as well as run them. So either way, it’s nice you have choice in the virtualisation world.

In that vein, indeed, let me just briefly list the Windows software I’ve paid for -and which I’d readily pay for again:

VMware Workstation – polished, functional, vital for the work I do. ‘Nuff said. I wish 3D Graphics acceleration would work better, but that’s never the main focus of what I’m trying to do with virtualisation anyway, so I can live with it. I’ve found it consistently more robust (and faster) than VirtualBox over the years, too. US$199.
Microsoft Technet Subscription – Giving me access to SQL Server, Office, Windows Server and Windows client software …and more. At US$199 for the standard technet subscription (and US$149 per year thereafter as a renewal fee), it’s an excellent, cost-effective way of getting the latest MS servers, clients and tools.
Photoshop – As mentioned above, I don’t do a lot of photography work that justifies the outrageous price for this particular piece of software, but The Other Half does, so I have no choice. Apparently, it’s a great program… but I have no artistic ability whatsoever, so I couldn’t possibly comment. Pricing is so complicated, with a bazillion different options, but let’s just quote the AU$1,168 it costs for an outright purchase of Photoshop CS6 for starters!! Ouch. Thank God the upgrades are priced slightly more reasonably.

Finally, it is probably evident that I’m not a great one for playing games on the PC. I couldn’t, however, go without recommending:

Angry Birds in Space – will cost you $6 for the full product, but the demo version is plenty of fun for free

And, to keep things strictly in your browser window, The Wiki Game is addictive!

Microsoft Office

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This is definitely worth a mention, because it’s not something I think I’ll ever want to forget: a way of pretending that the ghastly ‘ribbon interface’ in Office 2007 and 2010 doesn’t exist!

For personal use, the UBitMenu is free.

It’s a tiny install that creates a “Menu” tab in the Office ribbon -inside of which sit all the old-fashioned menus whose location and functions you probably know intimately, having used Office for 15+ years. Instead of poking around the “improved” ribbon for hours at a time wondering where the hell everything is hiding, now you can use Office as you once knew how to, all over again!

I’ve spent 4 years trying to get familiar with the Ribbon. I cheerfully admit that this is a lot more useful for me!

Corrupt Zips… or not!

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I created a 78GB zip file, with the Windows version of 7-zip, back in November. Today, for the first time, I tried unzipping it on my Linux desktop: a simple right-click and Extract Here and things looked good: all the file were there in all the right places, properly named and ready to go…

Unfortunately, when I then tried to do anything with the files produced by the extraction process, all failed to work: music and video files simply refused to play in VLC, Movie Player or anything else, for example.

I feared the worst: a corrupt zip file. I was about to shrug my shoulders, delete the zip file and chalk it up to experience when I thought, ‘let’s try to repair the zip!’ Nothing ventured, nothing gained after all… and if the repairs failed to work, I’d at least be no worse off than I was already.

Two programs suggested themselves, thanks to Google (both Windows-only, so run in a virtual machine).

First up: Disk Internals. Small download, apparently free, nice wizard point-and-click interface. A bit slow identifying anything capable of being recovered… and, in the end, it only output a couple of hundred files (out of over 3800 in the original zip) before falling over in a heap and crashing. None of them was usable.

So, second try: Object Fix Zip. Another small download, standard Windows installation and simple wizard interface. On its first run, it prompted me for a password to the zip file… and it was at that point I suddenly remembered that I had, indeed, password-protected the original zip file. I also suddenly realised that the Disk Internals program had never prompted me for a password… no wonder that first program had been unable to recover anything usable!

Even more interesting, Object Fix Zip prompted me for a password… and then kept prompting me for each file it encountered within the zip. It would accept the password I typed, extract a file from the zip, move onto the next file within the zip and then prompt me again. Then I noticed that (a) every file it appeared to extract was unusable and (b) I could type a password I knew to be rubbish… and the program would continue to extract, move on, re-prompt.

That in turn made me realise something: the Linux Extract Here menu option had never prompted me for a password at all… and its outputs were useless. The Disk Internals repair tool had not prompted me for a password either… its outputs were similarly useless. Object Fix was at least prompting me for a password … but its continual prompts regardless of what I typed in seemed to suggest that maybe I was providing an incorrect password all along.

So then the penny dropped: could the original idea that my zip file was corrupt be merely the result of the non-supply of a password, or the supply of a wrong password?

I re-ran Object Fix a couple of times more, each time supplying a different plausible password. And Lo! On one of these subsequent runs, it accepted the password and stopped asking for it after that. Clearly, when the right password was supplied, it only needed to be told it once. And, even better, the files being output by the Object Fix tool were (drum roll, please)… completely usable.

To cut a long story short, I then went back to my Linux desktop and used the Linux equivalent of 7zip (called p7zip, but invoked with the command 7za) to extract the file:

7za x /path/filename.zipghjghjgh

…and this program properly prompted me to supply a password. When I typed in a password I knew couldn’t possibly be correct, the program at least told me there was a problem:

CRC Failed in encrypted file. Wrong password?

The second part of that message is, at least, a good, strong clue as to what’s wrong, although you could get the wrong idea entirely if you paid any attention to that bit about CRC failing. A genuinely corrupt file would generate warnings about CRC failures, after all!

So, finally, I re-ran 7za with what I knew by this time to be the correct password… and the whole thing extracted itself without a hitch. All files were usable, all 78GB of data were back safely from the brink!

In summary, if you think your zip file is corrupt, make sure it wasn’t originally password-protected. If it was password-protected, don’t expect Linux’s ‘extract here’ functionality to prompt you for the password -and expect its output to be garbage as a result. A program like p7zip will prompt you for a password appropriately, but may not be obvious about it if the password you supply turns out to be incorrect. And don’t give up on your zip until you’ve exhausted every conceivable password!

Win NFS Fixed (at a cost)

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Further to my last post, in which it was discovered that the NFS client tool included in some editions of Windows 7 can’t cope with accented characters (or anything not in the standard American view of the alphabet, really)…

The good news is that I have a fix. The bad news is that it comes in the form of a commercial NFS client, called ProNFS, which costs US$40. That’s at least $15 more than I feel entirely comfortable paying, but there’s a 30-day trialware edition that at least you can test stuff out with before you part with your hard-earned moolah.

Crucially, in the client settings tool that is provided as part of the ProNFS software stack, there’s this little dialog box:

Spot the reference to using UTF8 file names! Woot!

Once you then use the ‘map drive’ tool to find your NFS shares and mount them as a standard windows drive letter affair, everything works as advertised on the tin-lid:

Spot all those European names displaying correctly, replete with accents, umlauts and cedillas! Problem solved, I think.

I do have a few “issues” with this approach to solving the problem, though. I suppose the first one is simply this: “if they can do it, why can’t you, Microsoft?!”. The second is that the installer for this program looks like it was written in 1994 and hasn’t been updated since! There are lots of little touches on the company’s website, for example, that make me nervous -constant references to the software being compatible with Vista, for example, with never a mention of Windows 7. If you check out their promotional screenshot, too, it will seem as if the software hasn’t been updated since 2003! They’re shooting themselves in the foot there, because if you actually run the NFS server component today, it will report version 1.6 with a compile date of June 23rd 2011, which is much more reassuring! Finally, there’s the not-so-minor matter of the Blue Screen of Death I got when I removed the evaluation version and performed post-removal reboot. I haven’t seen one of those for years, so getting one as the software is removed didn’t fill me with warm glows and kindly feelings!

In the end, though, such things are probably not major issues. I should say in fairness that once the software was installed and running, it behaved itself perfectly -and I can live with slightly out-of-date documentation and promotional wares so long as the software behaves itself. Yes, I could wish it were a tad cheaper, but even at US$40, if it means I don’t have to configure Samba, it’s probably just about worth it! Colour me happy, ish.