Lazy Man’s Restore Points for Win7

Those of y’all using Win7 (or Vista, if there be any such critters reading here :-)) who’re lazy as all get out might find this Quick Restore Point Maker mini-app useful. Note: the link’s been fixed and now points to a download page insted of attempting to point directly to the download itself.


And here’s another download page touting a pdf file with a (nearly) exhaustive list of Keyboard Shortcuts for Win7–that also mostly work in earlier versions.


And for those who’re tired of Win7 talk, here’s a download page for Puppy Linux and one for PC-BSD (the latter for folks who want to try an OSX-like OS without the Apple straitjacket *heh*).

This has been a “value added” compgeeky post. Don’t tell the feds or they’ll try to tax it to death.

Right In Their Faces

OK, so it was a notebook in a bright, outdoor setting, but really: people just don’t pay attention.

OTOH, KDED 4.X is a really slick GUI. I think I’ll ad a Mac-like Dock to a KDE skin and see if people like “the new Mac OSXI” better than OSX. *heh* (Or, just to be really mean, add a “MacDock” app to an old XP computer–yeh, it’s an easy thing to do–and see what they think.) Sure, I’d have to cripple whatever mouse was connected (or use a crippled-from-the-factory Mac Mouse ;-)) to make it seem more realistic, but that’s do-able. *heh*

Revisiting “Life Extender”

In WTV Files: A Better Way?, I mentioned trying out LifeExtender to remove commercials from WTV files converted from WTV format to DVR-MS format. I noted at the time that it seemed to work pretty much all right.

Well, yes and no. It reminds me of the “little girl with a curl, right in the middle of her forehead… ”

There was a little girl who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
When she was good, she was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.

When LifeExtender works, it works well. But at other times, it simply… stops working. Or, it doesn’t “find” DVR-MS files to decommercialize… when there definitely are some in the folder to find. At other times–and this is the most irritating issue–it just hogs CPU cycles to the point that using my computer for anything else is an exercise in futility.

I do have a solution (a kludge) for that last issue, though. I start taskmgr.exe using admin privileges and lower LifeExtender’s priority to “Below Normal”. (I have to run taskmgr with admin privileges, because LifeExtender MUST run with admin privileges, and so it refuses to have its priority modified unless I run taskmgr with the same privilege level.) Strangely, it seems to actually work better that way.

BTW, I’ve been able to reduce the size of recorded TV files by almost 1/3 by decommercializing them. Somethiung between 25% and 33% reduction in file size, edging toward the upper number. Not bad.

Quick Win7 Tip

For most Windows users, the “Homegroup” networking-on-training-wheels approach works well on home networks. But what to do with Windows XP users on the same network when you want to share resources on Win7 computers?

This lil tutorial covers that base, and touches on Vista users as well. Bob’s your uncle. It does require doing a few simple, ordinary Windows networking and user management things that any normal user ought to be able to do, but if you refer someone you know to the site and they have difficulty, you may either have to walk them through in “babier” steps or tell them to have their 10-year-old do it for ’em. *heh*

CDBurnerXP: A Nice Addition for Windows Users

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.

Windows Command Line Tools for Users

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*

Micro-Mini-windows Tip

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… ๐Ÿ˜‰

Continue reading “Micro-Mini-windows Tip”

WTV Files: A Better Way?

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.


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.


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. ๐Ÿ˜‰

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.

Yet Another (Sort of) Compgeeky Post

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*

Shields Up!

Steve Gibson has some good resources available for the average user at his webs site. (For those of y’all who may not be familiar with the name, Gibson’s the guy who developed the venerable–and still useful, especially in its newest iteration–SpinRite.) One of the useful lil tools he offers at his site is Shields Up! While the tool only tests the first 1056 ports on your computer, it’s nevertheless a useful measure of your firewalling.

Between my ISP’s watchful eye, my “hardware” SPI firewall in my router and Windows 7’s built in firewall, that installation on this computer results in a very respectable showing on Gibson’s tool.

Not surprisingly, the results are the same when browsing in a Linux Mint or Puppy Linux or PCBSD session hosted on the same machine–as long as I remember to configure Puppy’s firewall (the others are configured and turned on by default in modes that effect the same results on this test as Win7’s firewall; Puppy’s firewall must be turned on–once; after that it “remembers” its settings like the rest).

Other security scans can be found at Audit My PC and PCFlank, among a wide range of places. Each scanner has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, so multiple scans with different tools would probably yield a “best mix” of information.

DO check links to scanner tools out with something like AVG’s Linkscanner or McAffee’s less trusted (by me) Site Advisor, especially if your browser of choice doesn’t have a reliable tool to warn you about suspicious sites.

NOTE: None of the port scanning tools I know of will definitively demonstrate that you are really secure, but they can give you a good idea of common areas of weakness. If you then also have well-rated (by reliable, known sources such as WestCoast Labs), up-to-date anti-malware software, and keep it up to date and turned on, AND you practice usual and customary safe computing, you should be fairly safe.

But note well: break any link in the chain, and you WILL become infected with malware. The weakest link? Simple, safe computing practices, like being careful where you travel on the web, NEVER installing software you’ve not “manually” scanned with a reliable, up-to-date anti-malware, avoiding CLICKing on links in emails and NEVER opening attachments unless you

1. Know absolutely, exactly, beyond any shadow of doubt what it is you are opening and
2. Have nevertheless manually scanned it with a reliable, up-to-date anti-malware BEFORE even considering opening the thing

Seriously. I don’t care if Great Aunt Sadie would never send you a virus, trojan or worm. DO NOT OPEN THAT ATTACHMENT FROM HER! Especially not from her. *heh*


Continue reading “Shields Up!”