Archive for the ‘Uncategorised’ Category
If you enjoy Usent newsgroups then the latest versions of Windows Live Mail (WLM) are fairly much useless. The most troubling issue with WLM is that it doesn’t quote the text of the people you are replying to. In a word, it’s horrible. kadaitcha.cx had to spend time getting used to Mozilla Thunderbird, which didn’t have the desirable features of the old Outlook Express or the older WLM. Now though there is a simple solution.
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There’s no need to spend hours hunting, downloading and testing media players that support amr, mpc, ofr, divx, mka, ape, flac, evo, flv, m4b, mkv, ogg, ogv, ogm, rmvb or xvid audio/video formats. These files can be played directly in Windows Media Player. Here’s how…
Microsoft have done a lot of work on win7 to tune it for SSDs, so much so that in terms of the OS itself, there’s little to no need to tweak anything. However if you’re considering a purchase, there are some things you ought to know, some things to consider, and some things you can and can’t do with SSDs, which is what we cover off in this article, along with providing some good advice on maintaining your solid state drives in peak performance.
In summary, as far as the OS is concerned, there is little to nothing that needs be done for a single SSD, but the same can’t be said for your applications or for SSDs configured in a RAID set. While the OS is optimised for SSDs, applications aren’t, and with very few exceptions, RAID controllers don’t support TRIM, which marks blocks that can be erased in the background by the SSD.
If you’re looking for step-by-step instructions, forget it. If you can’t understand the high-level advice in the article sufficiently to work out what steps you must take for yourself then you shouldn’t be reading this page at all.
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Tags: This article explains how to remove the stupid Homegroup item from Explorer in Windows 7, and how to hide the Libraries group from Explorer too. Read the rest of this entry »
If you have a bootable Windows 7 installation DVD or a bootable recovery disc you can rip an ISO image of it to your hard disk, install the image on a USB 4GB pen (flash) drive and boot from it, all in two easy steps. If you already have a bootable ISO image you can skip the whole of Step 1 and go straight to the easiest and last step, Step 2.
The beauty of the method described here lies in the fact that once your USB pen drive has been made bootable, you can create a directory and store any special drivers or standalone applications you might need, which means you don’t need driver disks either. When the flash drive boots and the Windows Recovery Environment is loaded you can install things like OEM drivers directly off the flash drive. Read the rest of this entry »
Scenario 1: You’re buying a new machine and you’ve spent the best part of a week or two investigating the absolute best bang you can get for your buck; your browser favourites list is full of references to benchmarking articles, reviews, and both performance and price comparisons. Finally you decide that you can buy an entire Black Edition 6 core AMD Phenom II processor-based system with 6GB of 1.6GHz RAM, two amazingly fast Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB HDD’s, a 24-inch 1080p high definition monitor and a factory over-clocked PowerColor HD 5850 PCS+ video card for less than the cost of Intel’s top-end i7 processor on its own. You bite the bullet, buy it, install Windows 7, and with much fanfare and expectation you run the Windows Experience Index (WEI) tool only to have your ego pitifully deflated by a horrible 5.9 rating for your hard disks, which are in RAID0 configuration and pumping more than 4x the bandwidth of a standard hard disk.
Scenario 2: You spent a small fortune on the best and fastest laptop you could find, which has Vista installed and gives a Windows Experience Index of 5; you upgrade to Windows 7 and your ego is pitifully deflated by a shocking score of 2.
In this article kadaitcha.cx will explain the discrepancies and advise you what to do about it. Read the rest of this entry »
This page provides advice, links to resources, sample sounds, high-definition videos and guides to help you show off the capabilities of your Windows 7 surround sound system. Unless you have a great collection of Dolby digitally encoded DVDs or some of the more recent Dolby encoded PC games, 3D surround-sound samples are generally hard to come by, but not now. Read the rest of this entry »
When Firefox started to become popular kadaitcha.cx watched the site’s browser stats for Firefox creep up to and then surpass the 10% mark. There was much rejoicing back then because if 10% of visitors were using Firefox then there was finally a serious competitor to Internet Exploder, and that was taking place despite the Microsoft Borg’s shenanigans in forcing users to comply with its will. A few years later, in 2009, kadaitcha.cx watched as the Firefox stats crept up to close to 30%, but still not surpassing Internet Exploder as the preferred browser. Read the rest of this entry »
Don’t get ripped off when looking to buy a USB pen drive for use with Windows 7′s ReadyBoost cache.
Caveat Emptor
Not all ‘Hi-Speed” USB flash drives are high speed. Unwary consumers can be caught out by misleading words or, as in most cases, completely missing information about the USB flash drive’s read/write specifications or it’s ability to support ReadyBoost. Read the rest of this entry »
It isn’t necessarily a simple thing to set up a blog on your website. The job isn’t overly difficult but there are a number things you might need to watch out for. For example, there are a number of open source blogging packages but some might not suit you. Click the ‘Read more’ link below for a simple list of things to check and do.
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