Posts tagged Windows
Want to know why you computer is slow to boot?
Jun 12th
Ask Soluto! Soluto is a brand new company and product that aims to take the guess work out of determining what is making Windows slow to boot. We’ve all got moms, dads, brothers, and sisters who call us up on some Saturday and ask us to look at their computer and speed it up only to find it loaded to the gills with toolbars and “ink reminders”.
Now with Soluto, they can just install the slick program, reboot their system, and let it do the work. It uses a kernel-driver along with a database of applications and user experiences they have collected to determine what an application does and make recommendations to you.
I installed it but it found little it could do to speed up my system. I have already trimmed almost all the fat from my rig.
Here’s a shot of the UI.
You can hover over this timeline of your boot and it will explain each element, what it does, and give you a recommendation as to pausing (not starting) or delaying (start on-demand). So the next time uncle Bob calls and wants you to speed up his computer, just send him to Soluto!
XAMPP – Where have you been all my life?
Jun 11th
I love Wordpress. Really there isn’t a better blogging platform on this platform. It’s that good. And I’ve been using it to self-host my blog for the past year or so. For awhile, I hosted it using II6 on WHS v1. That was a real pain as it took several days to find a URL rewriting solution that worked with IIS6. The past few months I’ve been hosting it on my Windows 7-based media center. Since that runs IIS7, URL rewriting was easier using the standard URL rewrite module.
A few days ago I decided to test out WHS “Vail”. After installing it, I wanted to move my blog onto it so I downloaded the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It promptly let me know that it couldn’t find any products in my selected language. Huh? This is what drives people crazy about Windows software. Crap just doesn’t make sense sometimes.
I googled and found several links describing how to manually setup Wordpress on Windows Server 2008 but each of them had about 30 steps. Sheesh. I was about to punt back to media center when I remembered trying out XAMPP a few months back.
Man, this thing is beautiful. I downloaded the installer, double clicked it, and watched it dump Apache, MySQL, and a bunch of other stuff into c:\xampp. It then brought up this nice UI where I could enable Apache and MySQL as a service and start them.
A simple file copy of my wordpress folder to the c:\xampp\htdocs, a copy of my wordpress mysql database to c:\xampp\mysql\data and create the proper username in mysql and I was set. That only other thing I had to do was to open the appropriate holes in my Windows firewall. Five minutes and I was done! Windows may be pretty awesome but XAMPP is pretty awesome too.
My month on OS/X is finished
Jun 1st
Well, I’ve finished my month on OS/X. It wasn’t really a month but rather a couple of weeks here and there. To be honest I didn’t really hit too many situations where I felt like I needed Windows. I didn’t have good luck with Chicken-of-the-VNC and the Mac version of remote desktop is not nearly as good as on Windows. That being said I love the fact that iCal and Contacts sync with Google.
I’m writing this under Windows 7 but I’m typing it into the web UI. I’ll likely hang out in OS/X a bit more as I have some video editing I need to do and iMovie just blows away any free products on Windows.
One of the things OS/X does right
Feb 21st
I’m writing this on a 2008 Macbook Pro that I dual boot between Snow Leopard and Windows 7. I spend most of my time in Windows but occasionally I pop into SL to test something out or use iMovie to edit some video. From time to time, when OS/X boots, you get this nice System Update dialog that explains that some installed software on your system needs to be updated. Here’s a shot of the one I just got.
What’s interesting to notice is that it is listing non-Apple products as having upgrade available. My Epson printer drivers and Microsoft provided remote desktop client software are both listed.
Why can’t Microsoft do this? Why do I have to manually check for upgrades for products like this?
Keeping a system fully updated is the easiest way to keep things running smoothly. Microsoft does a nice job of this with system level patches and hardware components, but it does nothing to help keep my products updated. Windows 7 gets a lot of things right but this one goes to OS/X.
Do I have a third choice?
Feb 2nd
So, a while back I started this series called KISS. This stood for Keep It Simple Stupid which is an age-old phrase commonly applied to computers. I posted several times about areas where Windows really breaks this rule. While I’m not announcing the revival of that project, I did recently run across another instance I thought would be fun to share.
Now, this is something I’ve seen many, many times which is actually a sad confession. Sad because it shows that Windows users really can use lame UI for years and not even really notice it. We are just used to crap.
So, yesterday I was setting up a new Windows Server 2008 R2 box in VirtualBox (a killer VM product if you don’t already know) and came to the following screen during setup.
So, let us be clear. This is a brand new machine (VM) and my two choices are Upgrade and Custom? Huh? First, there is nothing to upgrade so is it even a choice? So my other choice is Custom (advanced) which sounds like I want to do very advanced things like partition the drive, etc. Why is there not a ‘Simple Install’ option? Linux has this. OS/X has this.
Oh, and before you comment that this is a server install so the user is likely quite technical, the Windows 7 and Vista install was just like this. Yes I am a geek so this dialog has never tripped me up but what would my mom do with this dialog? I know what she would do. She would call me.