Posts Tagged “Windows”

This is the screencast to go along with the article about changing Windows cursors with Stardock’s CursorFX.

Microsoft released SP1 for Windows Vista this past week and the reviews seem to be mixed.  Some reviewers say SP1 improves various system performance tests, and others say it does the opposite.  I installed Vista SP1 on my main desktop PC last week, and the installation process was flawless.  As far as any "real world" performance issues, I haven’t noticed anything either way.  On my system, I have had no noticeable performance gains or slowdowns as others have reported.

I haven’t installed SP1 as of yet on my HP laptop, as the SP1 betas I have used kept constantly BSOD’ing my machine.  I was never able to narrow down the culprit, but I am a bit wary about installing it again on this computer.  I might fire up Windows Update tomorrow morning and give it another go, so we will see how that works out then.

Otherwise, my question to the community is have you, Vista users, updated to SP1 yet?

Giveawayoftheday.com has a fantastic piece of software up for grabs today.  Evernote (beta), which is an application that allows you to take notes, web clipping, images, etc. and keep them in order.  This new version (still in beta) also allows you to synchronize your notes with other computers that you have Evernote installed on. 

There is a Mac and Windows Mobile version that is currently in private beta, but you can get access to that as well.  I found this via Lifehacker and they say the current beta will allow you to update to other betas and the final application when released.

Features of Evernote:

• Access notes across multiple platforms: Windows, Mac (OS X 10.5), Web, Windows Mobile, Mobile Web Browser;
• Full synchronization across all platforms;
• Powerful image recognition and search for printed and handwritten text in images;
• Email and MMS snapshots and text from your mobile phone to your personalized Evernote email address;
• Windows and Mac clients allow local-only notebooks, which will not synchronize with the Evernote Service.

Remember, this is good for today only, so there is only a few hours left.

Link:  http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/evernote-beta/

Defraggler is a new utility I discovered recently, and it comes from the same folks who make CCleaner.  One of the big benefits of this application is that it lets you select files or folders to defrag, not just the entire drive.  I have used it on several Vista machines, and the defrag process was fairly quick.  It’s free so go check it out.

Link: Defraggler

This past Sunday I discovered a trojan on my main desktop PC.  Later on that day I discovered it had also made it’s way to my laptop.  It had disabled some Windows applications, and just to be on the safe side I decided to just backkup my data, and restore a disk image with Acronis True Image.  Doesn’t sound too bad?  Yeah right..

The disk image for my desktop appeared to install correctly, but after a few hours of working with it, it appeared something got corrupted in the process.  This of course, after I spent hours updating, installing applications, and updating again.  So I just said forget it, and did a clean install from my Vista Ultimate disk and started from scratch.

Next, I tried to restore my laptop image, and of course the disk image was corrupt.  Something must have gone wrong on my external drive at some point which screwed up both disk images.  It’s now Monday and I’m going a clean install of Vista on both my desktop and laptop PC’s.  The amount of reboots between updates is just incredible.

So here we are on day 3 and I almost have my laptop ready to take a new disk image.  While that is being done I will finish installing applications and setting up my desktop PC, and then image that drive again as well.  So 3 days of nothing but installing and reinstalling.  I can’t do a bunch of things I was working on because I need the computers, so all I pretty much have to work with is my Mac which I’m writing this on now.

I guess that’s just the way it goes in a Windows world.