Category: Compgeeky

While Linux users are usually offered a wealth of options for burning CDs and DVDs using software that’s “automagically” installed with almost all modern distros, Windows users have usually felt compelled to go out and buy Nero or Roxio software to have more than the very basic burning included with recent versions of Windows. Now, Windows 7 does have more capable burning options than previous versions built into its default installation, and the Roxio and Nero softwares are certainly very capable, but… I want free and very capable.

DeepBurner is pretty good, and certainly surpasses the abilities of Windows’ built in functionality, but it’s just not good enough to have me use it in preference to the nearly good enough burning capabilities Windows has on its own.

Enter CDBurnerXP. All it’s missing as compared to Roxio or Nero are some audiophile-oriented recording and leveling tricks (and the free Audacity does a superior job with those things). This is one seriously good piece of free software. Using it to burn copies of a mix CD for Lovely Daughter’s wedding (2 weeks and three days away :-)) is an exercise in simplicity. Very nice. Handles creation of DVDs, audio and data CDs/DVDs, burns ISOs and creates bootable disks very easily, among its many capabilities.

Now, most of that is fairly easily done with Win7’s built in capabilities, but not all. Most can be done with DeepBurner–just not all, or as easily. Roxio’s and Nero’s solutions can do everything CDBurnerXP can do and a little bit more, of course, but why pay $50-$100 for capabilities that are available for free? Seriously, if Roxio or Nero want me to buy their product, they’d need to add some serious capabilities, like making my coffee or doing my laundry or some such. *heh*

Comparable capabilities via free software in Linux are almost too many to list (OK, I’m just too lazy to do so), but something this capable in free software for Windows is a nice find. I’d used earlier versions of CDBurnerXP some years ago and dropped using it because its capabilities just weren’t extensive enough at the time. Now? In Windows sessions, it’s my go-to app for burning optical media.

I’ve used the command line less over the years, since the “good old days” of DOS filtering all the folks who could NOT manage linear thinking were filtered over to Mac. But eventually the laziness inculcated by easy-peasy GUIs managed to dull my command line “skilz”… making my relatively recent increase in use of ‘nix boxes more challenging for quite a while.

Still, I do use Windows in various incarnations a lot. But keeping command line skills from rusting has been a challenge. But since so very many things, even nowadays in the easy-peasyest Windows GUI of all, Win7, can still be best done at the command line, it’s a useful skill set that any moderately advanced Windows user ought to never let fade. Here’s a really great reference to help out in that regard: a command line reference for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Vista. Really useful for Windows users to have, IMO.

And here’s a fun little trick using one of those commands to cut one mouse click off a reboot. *heh*

RIGHT-Click on the desktop and select New>Shortcut
In the Text box, type

shutdown /r /t 30

OK your way out (naming the shortcut anything you want)

The “30” is the time in seconds to reboot from invoking the command. You can, of course, set it to other time in increments of one second.

There, now instead of CLICK-ing Start>Shutdown(arrow)>Restart, you can simply CLICK on Show Desktop>Restart (as I named my shortcut). Or, if you wanted to save another CLICK, just put the shortcut on your Taskbar. (In Win7, RIGHT-CLick>Pin to Taskbar.) Then it’d be a one-click reboot.

A number of other parameters can be invoked to custom tailor just about whatever shutdown behavior you want to invoke.

And that’s just one of an abundant alphabet soup of powerful (OK, sometimes just fun) command line tricks at your fingertips. Batch files are a great way to automate some everyday maintenance using command line tools as well, but without a lot of time drilling those commands (and all the available switches) into one’s brain, OR a good reference like the one at M$TechNet referenced above, simple tools to simplify one’s life are not that simple to come by. *heh*

If your computer is running Windows 7, you may have noticed that the command line trick for verifying system files that’s been around for a decade–sfc /scannow typed in a run dialog–needs something more to work, now.

Open a command prompt with administrator priviledges:

Start>Search: cmd
Right click on the command found and select, “Run as administrator”

(Vista’s a tad different and I’m just not going to mess with it. If you have Vista, upgrade. No, seriously. I have no help for you. Figure it out on your own.)

In the command line window, type

sfc /scannow

(Note the space between “sfc” and “/scannow”) And press Enter.

It’ll run as it always has, verifying that your system files are uncorrupted. If it needs to replace one, and you’ve not placed the installation files on your hard drive and edited the registry to make Windows aware of where, you may be asked to place your installation DVD in your optical drive if a file needs to be replaced. This isn’t all that common, though, since Windows caches copies of most essential system files.

Oh, if you’ve been a Windows user for more than a decade and haven’t discovered the “sfc /scannow” command before now, just pass this on to the 13-year-old who maintains your computer for you. *heh*

I really need to put a tip jar on my sidebar… 😉

Continue reading “Micro-Mini-windows Tip”

OK, I’ve been right-clicking on Windows Media Center .wtv files and selecting “Convert to dvr-ms” one at a stinking time so I can then convert that to a format that’s able to be written to a DVD for playing anywhere, and it’s gotten old already. Yeh, yeh, call me lazy. Call me doubly lazy, since I could just set up another external drive (but make it a humongous 1.5TB drive, cos the files are about 3GB per hour of recorded video) to store the things on. But. keeping wtv files isn’t in the cards for me anyway, since some programs also record with DRM junk that voids the recording after a given period of time. Not appreciating DRM. (Anti-DRM: I still have some old Tom Baker “Dr. Who” episodes on VHS. No making unplayable by remote DRM management for those puppies, and I’m NOT accepting it now for new recordings.)

Dug around, and other folks feel the same way. Here’s a possible solution: WTVWatcher. I’ve scanned the thing for malware every which way from Sunday and it has come up clean so far. Does it work? Well, yes, it does. It watches the folder I specified (NOT my Recorded TV folder, another one where I put recordings I want converted), and then automagically converts whatever .wtv files are in the folder to dvr-ms. From there, I can convert the dvr-ms files into whatever I want to burn to optical media. Heck, for the shows that are going to be viewed on the old analog TV, that can even be avi onto CD! It’s as good as old VHS…

WTVWatcher uses the WTVConverter.exe app that’s included in the \\Windows\ehome folder where WMC resides. It’s the same app that’s invoked when using the right-click>convert to dvr-ms context menu schtick, but the script just automates it by watching the folder specified by the user and converting any and all .wtv files there. Easy-peasy, and seems to work just fine.

One word of caution: when the thing converts .wtv files to .dvr-ms it also automatically deletes the .wtv files. For me, this is a good thing. YMMV.

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Additional thought: I had attempted to use WTVConverter on one .wtv file and kept getting a “WTVConverter cannot convert the file from wtv to dvr-ms… ” error, and this whether I attmpted to perform the conversion via the RIGHT-CLICK context menu or via the command line. But this lil script that uses WTVConverter to do its work churned right on through the file and produced a usable dvr-ms file. Strange. But good.

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BTW, I hate commercials, so…

Trying out LifeExtender to remove commercials from dvr-ms files. I’ll drop back by to comment on how it does its job. It was written for Vista, hence the tailoring for .dvr-ms files, and hasn’t been updated for almost 2 years. I hope that’s because it works just fine the way it is. 😉

Update: OK, LIfeExtender (so-called, because it gives one back the minutes that commercials steal *heh*) does work, and as far as I can tell hasn’t caused any video loss, but be warned: it’s a slow process. I had to just let it run while I went on and did other things, but it took several hours to scan and remove commercials from 10 programs–all but one just one-hour programs. Do note that LE isn’t perfect. It glitched up a tad on one episode of one show, inserting 20 minutes of blank screen, though none of the show was lost, and every now and then, tiny pieces of commercials remain. Still, it’s a heck of a lot handier than editing the files manually.

My excuse is that this is only moderately geeky. I put my hands on a book that is the subject of this post for the first time today. Since Windows 7 is going on more and more computers here in America’s Third World County (and a surprising number of folks are buying new computers with Windows 7 already onboard), I figured I’d take a look at one of the better-rated (OK, I just saw it mentioned in a few columns) tutorial books to see what was what. After all, my use of the OS has led me to think of it as something no one really needs training for, so surely this must be chock full of deep, dark mojo.

Nah. The book? Windows 7 Step By Step. My first take? This is a book for folks who still ride bikes with training wheels. Seriously. Like something one would write for those rare disaffected Mac users trying out this “Windoze thang”.

And right off the bat, it tries to pitch folks on buying new hardware with comments like, “If your existing computer runs Windows XP, it might be able to run Windows 7, but it likely won’t support Aero.”

Well, pardon me, but I’ve installed Win7 for folks on aging XP computers running on integrated graphics chipsets that use system memory in place of video memory and not had a problem with Aero yet. Perhaps if one digs back to some nine-year-old Xp computers that can’t handle more than 512MB of system memory, with onboard graphics only, well, sure they’ll not handle Aero, but Microsoft specifically disclaims the idea of attempting to run Win7 on less than 1GB of system memory, anyway.

Nah. This book is for people who’ve never used a computer–let alone a Windows computer–before in their lives. It’s what you might give to Great Aunt Sadie, if you were to give her a Windows computer (when you could give her a perfectly good computer running a free OS instead. After all, she’s probably only going to use it, if she can master the concept at all, for email and web browsing and a few other uncomplicated things.).

Pass. Glad I decided to check it out of the library instead of buying it. *heh*