Fine tuning WindowsXP

My profession as an IT (Information Technology) type has it's pro's and con's. The con is that I'm like the car mechanic always working on other folks computers outside of work and mine at home are in really bad shape. I have about 10 computer systems with various operating systems (O/S) from Windows, different flavors of Unix/Linux and even a SUN Microsystems Blade100 workstation. My main workstation for a number of years was running RedHat Linux until the hard drive crashed hard on me in Fall '05. I received a HP laptop for Christmas so I wasn't in much of a hurry to rebuild and haven't really done much with my network lately.

I have tried to perfect my knowledge of managing my Windows systems but it's all about time. I've found some nice freeware utilities that I will list later. I have also found a utility that is built-in to the Windows O/S. Let's discuss this a little.

Go to the "Start" button and select 'Run'. Now type msconfig and hit 'Enter' and popup window will appear. WARNING: This is not for the squeemish or those of you that don't know what your doing as you could severely cripple your PC!!! You'll see several tabs now, the ones you want to look at are 'Startup' and 'Services'.

Freeware/Shareware Utilities:

• Now I have found a couple of tools that are relatively easy to use. The first one is " Glary Utilities". This one will clean up the Windows registry, internet temp files, fix broken shortcuts, remove spy-ware, etc... It will speed up your PC noticeably.

• The other tool is one I like but it can be somewhat of the a resource hog. It is Secunia PSI. This one will keep some of your install software up-to-date for you automatically.

• Another good tool is ccleaner which is similar to Glary Utilities. Here's the link to the features.

Note: Take the time to read the help files in each of these and get familiar with what they do before you use them.

Spyware utlities:

Microsoft Windows Defender (Free) – I haven't used this one at all to be honest with you. Click here for more info.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware (Free) – This one works really well and we used to use it at work for a number of years. Click here for more info.

Webroot Spy Sweeper (Not Free) – We use this one at work now. It can be a nuisance but it works. I don't recommend this one for the not so computer savvy.

Symantec and McAfee have their own version of Anti-malware/spyware utilities that you have to pay for but I let you do some of your own research about them.

Happy New Year! Feliz A ñ o Nuevo! Frohes neues Jahr!

Google Voice

Read this article about Google Voice. I just received my Google Voice Tel.# and this has some really cool options. For one all calls made from this number in the US are FREE and I can call Germany at $0.02/minute which is a whole lot cheaper than what Verizon is charging me.

I can manage this number from a google.com website and initiate calls from this site. I type in the number I want to call and it calls both that number as well as dialing my number I specify to connect both parties up.

iTunes 9

APPLE just pushed this new version out tonight. It seems to be a vast improvement over version 8. Doesn't seem to use up the CPU as badly on this old XP box I'm using. I will admit that I turned off the simultaneous downloads in the old version too. I can play the radio and download one podcast at a time without the GUI hanging up on me.

It looks like they've added a Home Sharing feature that might be a greatly needed feature. Since it's late I won't force myself to play with it to figure it out. Nor do I want to write about it either at this late hour. I need to go into work somewhat coherent.

To use the home sharing go to the menu-bar, Help. After the iTunes Help window pops up select the Index tab then type sharing. I actually somewhat impressed with the Help in iTunes as it is clear and concise. You have to have an iTunes Store account to use some of the sharing features with multiple PCs' on your home network. For instance if I just want to listen to he music on another PC it's not a problem as you just search for shared music on your network. If you wanted to import music though you would have to log-in into your iTunes store account on every PC. Note that you can also password protect the share.

Rolling Thunder 2009

Happy Friday!

Testing the SUN blog publisher in OpenOffice 3.1 from a Linux system.

OpenOffice 3.1 upgrade

I had OpenOffice 3.0 Beta on my Windows XP PC and I upgraded to OpenOffice 3.1 tonight. The install went smoothly, except the installer did not delete the old folder from the programs from the start menu. I also had to download all the extensions again into the new version. I'll have to list them at a later time as it's a little late in the evening.

I used one of the extensions to up load to my blog. Interesting when I uploaded the first paragraph OpenOffice Writer froze and I couldn't exit. I had to open the Task Manager and kill the soffice.bin process.

Currently installed Extensions:

English spelling and hypenation dictionaries and thesarus 2008.07.01

French “Classic and Reform 1990” spelling, thesaurus and hyphenation 3.2.0

gdoc_1.7.0.oxt (Google docs)

OOOP-accessories-2.4.0.4.oxt

OOOP-templates-unified-en-US2.4.0.4.oxt

Professional Template Pack II – English 1.0

Spanish spelling dictionary 2008.07.01

Sun PDF Import Extension 1.0

Sun Weblog Publisher 1.1.0

Text Effects 0.7

I haven't test all of the extensions out yet. I'm interested to see if the Sun PDF import works. Let you know later.

Comcast out, Verizon FIOS in! Happy New Year!

No more Comchrash.net (Comcast) for me. I had Verizon install FIOS New Years Eve day, finally went to digital TV as well. It's been nice, I like the speed that I have now.

I can't seem to get my Dlink Dpr-1260 print server to connect to the Verizon WAP though. Of course, I had issues configuring it with my LinkSys WAP also when I first bought it quite some time ago. Now I've got no network printers at the moment. I have to setup my old configuration again.

I downloaded a 4.2Gb DVD ISO file the other night. It took a little over an hr., can't tell you exactly because I kept stopping and restarted it while I was messing with the wireless print server.