Category Archives: Tech stuff

Essential software

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I have had the misfortune to have had some PC trouble lately.

In each case, it involved reformatting the hard disk and installing everything from scratch.

I find that it can greatly benefit a machine to reformat and reinstall about once a year anyway, to clear out all the crap that accumulates, like redundant DLLs and fonts, not to mention tidying the registry.

When it comes to a rebuild, I have a list of absolute essentials that have to be installed as soon as the machine is running.

First is the Anti Virus.  I use AVG, as I find it is well supported and consistently gets good write-ups.  I have never had any problems with it anyway.

Next comes Firefox and Thunderbird.  I refuse, on principle to use Internet Explorer or Outlook.  I hate them.

WinRAR is next, as a lot of software installations require decompressing, and I find WinRAR to be the most versatile.

Now that the essentials are in, what comes next?

WampServer is an essential tool of the trade.  The ability to run PHP and MySQL on a local machine is an absolute essential for me, and I just love that programme for its simplicity, though it can be a bit of a pain tweaking the configuration to suit my needs.

One of the worst bits of software ever invented has to be Notepad.  As a default text editor, it is utterly useless.  For years now, I have been using Textpad which is one of those programs that is as simple or as complex as you want it to be.  An amazing piece of work.

Another utility I like is DAEMON Tools Lite.  This is a neat little application that you can use to mount ISO files into a virtual CD ROM.  Storing ISO files is a hell of a lot easier than storing CDs or DVDs!

Once I have that lot up and running, I’m just about ready to install software.

So what do you consider to be essential?

Losing the picture

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Life has been busy.

I recently was asked to host an existing site.

Fine, says I.  I’ll do that.  I transferred everything across and everyone was happy.

“Now,” says the client, “seeing as you have full access to the site, could you do some minor changes to the wording?”

“No problem,” says I, and then I looked at the site.

Some bright spark had produced a lovely looking site.  It’s clean, with nice images and showcases the client’s business beautifully.

But it is all images.  There is no text anywhere.  All wording is embedded in images.

I rang the client and talked him through disabling images in his browser.  I then told him to look at his site.

“Where the fuck is it?” he cried. 

“Exactly!” says I.  I then explained to him that the search engines won’t be able to see it.  The visually impaired won’t be able to use text-to-speech software, and that the damned thing rtakes an age to download.

I have been commissioned to rewrite the site to make it work.  The only problem is that it has to look exactly as it did before.

It’s a nightmare.

Is it any wonder I want to get out of this game?

Feeding the 400

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Much as it is against my better nature and sense of taste, I had a look over at Head Rambles today.

I see Himself has finally broken through the 400 readers mark.

Actually, he’s a bit chuffed about it, but I soon burst his balloon by pointing out that tomorrow, he’ll probably be down to less than 300 again.

It is one thing I have noticed about his feed reader.  The figures seem to leap around like a budgie in a cat cage.

The first half of the graph is nice and smooth, but the second half looks like a seismograph.  Sometimes figures will rise or drop by as much as 100 (or even more) in a single day.

I tell him it’s down to the quality of the shit on the site.

There is a distinct co-relation between the graph and the level of his hangovers.

How to revive a dead disk

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

In case either of you is wondering what happened to my dead PC, this is what happened.

First of all, when it died, it died spectacularly.

Not for it a bit of file corruption or a blown fuse.

For some unknown reason it totally screwed up the file allocation tables and the boot sector.  What this means is that when you fire up the PC it reports that it can’t find any disk.

The laptop in question is an Acer Aspire 7220, which has two hard drives.  I knew if one was guntered that the other should be OK.  Fortunately, all my really important data was on the second drive, so it was just a question of accessing it.

I tried running an old XP disk, to see what would happen.  It failed miserably and reported that there was no hard disk.  They are SATA disks, so they need special drivers which XP doesn’t have.

After a good piece of research, I came across a rather neat little utility – The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows or UBCD4Win.

ubcd4win

This is a free program that you download and run, presumably on a PC that works.  What it does is create a boot disk, but gives you full scope as to what goes on that disk.  It asks for a Windows i386 folder, so I gave it my XP CD, and it was happy. 

Not only does it create a boot disk, but it includes a whole load of utilities for fixing corrupt sectors, boot files, Master Boot Records and the like.  It also contains utilities to set up a network and generally breath a little life into a machine.  The interface actually looks like a cross between XP and KDE, so it is very easy to use.

Using this disk, I was able to offload all my files onto spare storage, and to reformat the dud disk and recreate all the partitions and boot records.

With a lot of help from two very patient people – Cranky Canuck and Robert Sweetnam – I was finally able to reload the operating system, and it is now almost back to its original state.  I say ‘almost’ because it is, in practice, better, as I have removed a load of junk programmes that were dragging it down.

So Herself finally gets the Acer that she has had her eye on.