Category: Windows

More Apps

Last post on this (for now). More portable apps:

Apps to go

usbAges after everyone else has one I’ve finally got round to getting a USB Stick. The Corsair 2GB Flash Voyager is a 2GB stick that recently got the PC Pro award for USB sticks. At £82 I thought that was pretty good value. First step was to split the stick into two 1Gb drives. One drive will have a backup of my XP files – mail, pictures, files, passwords, pdf’s of manuals – that sort of thing. This is a protected drive and also the backup file is protected too – just in case it falls into the wrong hands. The second drive contains some handy apps that will work on any machine without installing and some essential utils to fix a pc. They are:

That’s it for the moment. I’m sure there’s a few more tools that would be handy to carry around but that will do for now – if you think there’s anything else worth adding let me know.

Microsoft PDC

Microsoft PDC is taking place at the moment and after years of talking about Vista and some other new technologies there are finally some products and beta’s to grab and install.

Codename Max allows you to view and share photo’s with other users. To me this isn’t much of an app as such but more a tech demo – a chance to see how future windows products will look and feel. It requires an install of WinFx which is the graphic model to be used in Vista. First impressions are shaky as the install isn’t the best. The Codename Max blog even mentions to ignore the error message. Once into the app you can’t help but admire the user interface – it’s gorgeous. There’s a really nice ‘mantle’ feature that displays a few photo’s from you list as they look on a mantle piece – click on a photo to swoop and zoom in. But then you look for what’s in the app – photo management, any manipulation tools, how do I publish the photo’s. There’s none. I can create a photo ‘list’ and share it but it’s not immediately obvious how a friend views the photo’s.

Ouch – they need to download the Max client to their pc, install it and then my photo’s will be downloaded to their client machine. I know it’s just a tech demo but that just seems so wrong. Also, you need to sign up to Max with a MS passport account. They then send you an e-mail allowing you to share data. Pity Hotmail threw the Codename Max e-mail into the junk folder – obviously Hotmail is more intelligent than I thought.

Putting that aside the GUI really is a step up from XP. Another difference which I guess is deliberate is the language used in describing the app, the website and the blog. It’s so not Microsoft….much more Apple – even more laid back like Flickr. Refreshing especially when you think how many people will be moving to Vista in the next couple of years.

Office is also getting refreshed for Vista and for once it looks like some serious changes are taking place. A screenshot for Word highlights the ribbon functionality that they are bringing in. While nice to look at I think the fact the file formats are moving to an open standard are far more important and open up the opportunity for some lightweight tools to steal some market share – it’s amazing how little functionality within the Office package is actually used. But then that’s the drive behind the UI change – see this Channel 9 video for a more in depth look. No drop down menu’s!

Finally – WinFS beta. This has been dropped from Vista but may be included after all and will eventually appear for XP too. The beta is for XP and will allow you to set-up some WinFS stores. Being a bit of a database geek I see real potential in dropping the traditional folder/file file system and moving to one powered by a db – the video they released last week shows hot it would work but didn’t really show much else. The danger is that moving to WinFS will result in no step forward for the end user. Search might be better but that advantage is diluted with the various desktop search tools. The video showed a really nice app that isn’t included with the beta but highlighted the strengths on WinFS – hopefully that will be released soon.

Overall a strong showing – there looks to be some substance behind the last two years of hype at last and an increased level of competitiveness from MS. I hope Vista will deliver more than just good looks though – need something like WinFS to introduce a step change in how we manage and organise our data.

Konfabulator – now free

July DesktopJust read on Ricky’s blog that Konfabulator has been bought by Yahoo and is now free. Yippee. Yahoo even. This should give the desktop widget market a good kick. DesktopX has been around for a while but is still too awkward to use and configure. Same for Samurize although you could get some stunning results if you put in the effort. Konfabulator was always nice but cost money and was short of widgets the last time I tried – not any more.

I’ve put up my new desktop which has also taken on a Longhorn Vista look and feel to celebrate the fact we’re a year away from a new Windows environment. So much was promised with Longhorn and on the face of it so much has been stripped out. Here’s hoping there will be a radical yet stable product at the end of it all.

 

MediaMan

dvds movies collection
I’ve always had a desire to catalogue all my media – dvd’s, games, music etc. Every package I tried seem to have some shortcoming – cumbersome to use, costs too much, didn’t look very nice. Then I stumbled on MediaMan. Easy to use, integrates nicely with Amazon, supports custom fields and allows you to scan in barcodes via a web-cam. Also allows you to make up some nice virtual shelves as you can see in the picture (link to big picture on Flickr).

The reason for doing this – I like to keep a track on what I’ve watched and how I rate the films in my collection. The virtual shelf is a really nice idea which I first saw in the Apple package Delicious Library. Thankfully someone made this pc clone which is free.

 

MX 3100

I’ve given in to geek toys yet again and bought a new keyboard and mouse – Logitech MX 3100. I already owned a wireless Logitech mouse (which will find a new home at work) but the mouse in this pack was a laser mouse, supposedly much smoother and more reliable than the other optical mice. Verdict – it is smooth but only when I through away the mouse pad which is a bit odd considering it’s supposed to work on a larger range of surfaces. Still it’s comfy and the battery charge lights are very useful as are the number of buttons on it which allow for quick web browsing and app switching.

The keyboard is a lot better than my old MS wired keyboard. Very comfy and a nice response when typing. It also comes with a large amount of extra buttons mostly for media playing and easy zooming/scrolling in supported apps. Also some buttons for IM & calc buttons but none for launching a web browser. Easy fixed by customising the apps launched by each button but still an odd omission.

One word of warning is that it was a bitch to set-up. Took about 3 hours of faffing about, restarting and removing all known trace of Logitech products, removing batteries and letting capacitors run dry and eventually a half hour break from it before returning and getting it working…eventually. Not recommended if your not prepared to get your hands dirty but if you are it really is a lovely keyboard/mouse combo.

MSN Desktop Search

A new version of MSN Desktop Search has been released. After trialling a few others this has become my default search tool and one of the most used apps on the pc. It searches instantly, returning searches in real-time and the presentation of the results is excellent. It covers all the file types I need but surprisingly for a Microsoft app it supports add-ins, is feature rich and allows you to add shortcuts and functionality of your own. The latest version tarts up the presentations and adds some new searching features.

The searching is pretty powerful allowing you to use NOT, date ranges and size ranges. You can also search against document properties, so ‘author:richard sent:march’ will find all mail sent by Richard in the month of March. A nice feature is that clicking on the green arrow on the toolbar will open up results in a desktop search windows, allowing you to click on the mail or doc and see a preview in the right hand pane. You can also view by result type (mail, document, mp3) to get to the results quicker.

Shortcuts can also be added. Typing in the following ‘@delicious,http://del.icio.us/tag/$w’ will allow you to do quick del.icio.us searches by typing delicious forza which will return all del.icio.us entries with the tag Forza. More desktop shortcuts can be found here. You can also add shortcuts to apps, so @word,=winword will allow you to type word to launch Word. Very cool and unusually adaptable for Microsoft. The indexing doesn’t add any noticeable overhead either – all in all a recommended app and my first install on a new machine after I lock it down with security apps.

Spyware

I helped out a friend from work today. “I’ve got adverts popping up from time to time and it’s starting to annoy me”. I cannot believe the amount of spyware I found and cleansed from his machine. Unbelievable. I started thinking…how did you let it get like this but after a while it was more…the majority of folks pc’s will be like this – spyware and spam are ruining the internet for the casual user. Therefore what follows is my quick guide to stopping spyware.

Firstly, use a firewall and a virus scanner. Preferably a hardware firewall but software will do. Win XP service pack 2 comes with a firewall but I would still recommend installing a separate program. As soon as you install windows make sure the firewall is up and running. Next install an anti-virus package. I still can’t see past Nortons Anti-Virus and probably Zonealarm but Nortons Security Suite will do both. PC Pro also recommended F-Secure Internet Suite as their recommended net security tool so that’s worth a look too.

That’s the pc secured but it won’t stop spyware from being installed and taking over your machine. The next best step is to install an alternative browser to Internet Explorer. You could try Opera but Firefox for me is faster, offers more features through extensions and is free. By doing this many of the spyware tools that takeover your browser will be eliminated from ever running on your machine. This however is still not enough.

Next I would download and install three different spyware detection and removal tools. They are Microsoft’s Spyware beta, Ad-Aware and Spybot. The reason why I suggest all three rather than one is that they all seem to detect spyware to a greater or lesser extent. The advantage of Microsoft’s tool is that you can have it running in the background so that new spyware threats can be trapped before they are installed. Ad-aware and Spybot are recognised as industry leaders when it comes to spyware – I would recommend running them at least once a month and deleting anything that they find.

The above should lead to a clean pc free of any nasties that are downloading in the background while you surf. However the key to hassle free pc is to make sure all the signature files and virus updates for the above software are downloaded as frequently as possible. It’s a pain but there’s no point having a virus scanner whose signatures are a year old.

Once final brownie point goes to the Microsoft Spyware beta. It has a couple of nice features that make it easy to track and remove other problems. One is the System Explorers. From here you can easily see what is currently running on your pc and what is started up each time you reboot your machine. In fact using this tool today I found a search bar that wasn’t automatically detected by any of the above tools but could easily be disabled and then removed from the System Explorer screen. The second feature is a tool to restore the default IE settings in case your browser has been hi-jacked by another search engine – very nice.

MSN Toolbar Suite…

…is it’s official name but it includes MSN Desktop Search, Microsoft’s entry into the desktop search market. First impressions were very good. It quickly indexed (my recently formatted) drives and allowed me to content search Office App files, Outlook mail, Text files and also title search all files including music and pictures. Results returned were quick and accurate. It also worked across a network. Great – as fast as Google desktop with a lot more content. Annoyingly you also had to install the MSN Toolbar at the same time which meant IE and Control Panel etc. had a MSN search bar – once installed you can remove.

However after a reboot it stopped working. Only logging in as administrator allowed the desktop search to work – anything else failed. So it’s uninstalled but one to keep an eye on. MS have created a Wiki to track developments.

Re-installing XP

The new PC (who am I kidding – it’s 6 months old and out of date) was struggling with Windows. Seemed to have a lag at the start where no matter what program I selected it would wait for a couple of minutes before launching. After that it was fine. Shutdown also had the odd blue screen. I spent the last 2 or 3 weeks trying to find the problem but gave in at the weekend and formatted it again.

I’ve always been against re-installing everything every 6 months or so but the results have been dramatic. No startup lag, no shutdown problems and I’ve got most of the programs I use re-installed. Only snag was that I forgot a couple of things before formatting. I had an electronic download of Half-Life 2 via Steam. 3 gig download later and it was sorted (apart from the game save – swine). Also, I was sure I had moved my Outlook folder to My Documents (which is backed up and on a separate drive). Nope – looks like I hadn’t. SWINE. I still don’t understand why something like Outlook keeps the main pst file outside My Documents but that’s an excuse really for my fools rush in attitude. Got all important e-mails re-sent though so nothing lost. One utility that is a nice find is Startup Control Panel. It’s a small download and install which allows you to easily control what will be automatically started the next time XP boots. Accessible via Control Panel it’s and essential app.

So I thoroughly recommend that you do a proper (format the drive and re-install) refresh of Windows and applications at least once a year. Also – sort out a good backup regime. I’m trialling Norton Ghost with a main backup and incremental’s (weekly) onto my old pc. So far so good. End of public service announcement.