I was very excited to try the beta release of the next version of Windows. The install went smoothly and I was soon greeted by the pretty new taskbar of Windows 7

I was very impressed with all the little UI touches that Microsoft has made to the operating system, like the ability to snap windows out of maximized mode by dragging them, and simple keystrokes for minimizing windows, for example.

But the reason I am beginning to feel a severe panic attack coming on right now – is that MEDIA PLAYER HAS BEEN MUTILATING MY MUSIC COLLECTION!

There is a warning on the Windows 7 Beta download site, recommending to backup all vital files before installing the operating system on your PC. I wasn’t too worried by this, as all my music was backed up on my linux server in the wardrobe. A free Microsoft product called SyncToy syncs all my music over the network every night at 3am.

I was pleased that iTunes was running smoothly on the beta OS – at first.

I wished to watch one of my movies on the Xbox360, and to stream it over the network I had to add my media library to Windows Media Player. This was my downfall it seems, as there was a bug in this new version of Media Player, which would cause some audio files to have the first few seconds cut off from them – permanently!

After a couple of days, I began to notice some songs would skip the intro, or start abruptly, and just thought it was a problem with iTunes. However, after playing the files in Windows Media Player and Winamp, the problem remained. Thank God I had all my music backed up, I thought – on the linux server, and my iPod. But – damn! Of course all this time iTunes had been syncing the broken mp3s to my iPod, so they were now broken too.

By this time, Microsoft had released a patch in Windows Update which fixed the bug, but not after several of my digital albums had been circumcised ( I still don’t know how many, I am trying to find the SyncToy log files)

Deciding to find all my broken music and replace it with the backups in the morning, I went to bed – just as my younger brother decides to boot back into Windows XP and start playing Battlefield 2. Now back in XP, the scheduled SyncToy task  was just waiting to kick in at 3am. In the morning, all broken mp3s in my music collection were also broken on my backup, as SyncToy did what it was supposed to.

Now thoroughly angry at Microsoft and myself, I decide this would make a painfully comical blog post, but it has only made me feel worse.

Even though my audience consists of approximately 3 regular readers plus the people who searched for the Red-footed tortoise of South Africa, AKA Jabuti – I feel like I’m letting those 3.5 readers down by my recent lack of content. 

My excuse is the Higher School Certificate, the exams which mark the end of high school. I’m currently in the middle of these minor annoyances, which after I get the results back will confirm just how difficult my professional life is going to be. It’s all on a scale from 50-100, basically ranking how intelligent (ability to rote learn lots of pointless crap) you are. 

So, tomorrow – well, later today – I shall be sitting my 3 hour Mathematics exam. It is now nearly 3am and I have to congratulate my brain’s extraordinary ability to avoid work that needs to be done. 

In the 8.5 hours since 6pm when I resigned myself to begin my epic cram session, I have accomplished the following:

• Memorisation of most critical formulae needed for tomorrow’s test ( I don’t need to actually practice)
• Learnt to play the verse riff from Muse’s Bside, ‘The Groove’, which has been repeating an endless loop in my skull for days
• Read the summary of all characters with special abilities from the TV Show Heroes
• Watched about 150 videos from YouTube

For your fix of music – From the very talented Alyssa Hart, “Crazy – Gnarls Barkely Cover”

And for a mix of both categories, “Electric Stimulus To Face” from Daito Manabe

I would hazard a guess as to some of the reasons Cuil has not taken off in the competitive search business:

1. Wow, a huge index list? That’s nothing unless you can display results in an accurate and relevant list. Google has had 8 or so years to develop technologies like Page Rank, and it is innovations like this that place Google at the top of the pack when it comes to search.
2. Search is a critical technology which is required to use the Web. It demands efficiency, clarity. It is not a function which can be sold to people through a pretty Web 2.0 interface.
3. There are so many other superb Google web products (maps, image search, gmail etc) that all their popularity and success is boosted by each other. People are more likely to put all their eggs in one basket, especially when that basket is such a free, functional one. Additionally, people trust Google and it has a brand image in a very positive light.
4. Google’s search functionality and feature list – features of advanced search, like searching for specific file types, and from certain domains are excellent. These features are also available with commands like ‘filetype:xls’. You can type something like “time in california” or similar, when you can’t be bothered doing a time zone conversion, and Google will just tell you the answer! It’s the same with calculations. Along with suberb image search, scholar search and others, Google’s search feature set is not even worth comparing with Cuil’s.

My computer has been crashing in games lately, and I narrowed the problem down to the video card or software.

So, before burning completely through my pocket buying a new video card, I decided to try and go back to XP to fix the problem.

Unfortunately, once back to Windows XP my gaming stability did not change one bit. However, it made me think, what really are compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista?

Security Features such as DEP and ASLR would be more relevant if most developers coded with them in mind. Vista is certainly more pretty, with its glassy, see-through features. Also, there is the fact that all the security patches and upgrades you would have to download and apply after installing XP SP2 are already included or not needed in Vista

But after using XP again for a few weeks, the only thing I missed from Vista was the start menu and its bottom search bar. This may be something for the more keyboard oriented users out there. But I’m guessing most geeks can type quickly and are very at home at the keyboard. I prefer the ease and efficiency of pressing the start button on the keyboard, typing ‘word’ and pressing enter, to using the mouse to navigate the start menu.

XP does not have this excellent feature, but luckily there are several programs you can turn to, if you have not yet “upgraded” to Vista.

Launchy is a free, open source solution which I found on this Lifehacker article, Best 5 Application Launchers. It runs on Windows and Linux (KDE, Gnome)!

All you do is pick a keyboard combination to bring up Launchy. I chose Ctrl + Space. Then you begin typing the name of the program you wish to launch, and the results come up (which are indexed based on your start menu contents and desktop) in a Firefox like magic box, then you press enter.

The time I have saved by launching my applications via the keyboard is probably equal to the time it’s taken me to write this article, so just be grateful I’ve let you know about this excellent program.

Let me know if there are any features of Vista that would stop you from going back to XP, or simple productivity savers like this that you “just couldn’t live without”.

Short Answer: Use the free tool Autoruns to stop malware running at startup, then scan and remove with AVG etc.

Slightly longer one: Having had many people request my services to rid their computers of all kinds of malware – viruses, worms, spyware etc – I have developed a simple toolkit and method for removing them, for systems that you can actually boot up, at least.

The weakness of malware is that they are not very dangerous if they are simply on your system somewhere, they obviously have to be executed. This is most likely to initially be the user themselves, but after that, there are many areas in the registry which control what programs, services and .dll files are to be loaded at the start-up of the system.

My most invaluable (what a very strange word, by the way – like extraordinary) tool when combating malware is Autoruns. Autoruns is written by some guys at SysInternals. It is a tool for listing, deleting and disabling all items that run when Windows starts up. This includes executables, shortcuts, Browser Helper Object .dlls, drivers etc.

Scroll through the Autoruns list and look for items which are not digitally signed at all (the publisher column is blank), and for ones with suspicious names like random numbers and letters. If you find one with no publisher which you are not sure about, just type its process name into google and see what you find. You can simply uncheck items you don’t want, and if this breaks your computer you can always return to Autoruns in safe mode and re-check them again.

It would be smart to double check tsnp2std.exe is legitimate, as it does have a digitally signed publisher

I was tasked with removing viruses from my friends computer recently. There was some particularly annoying malware present that I couldn’t find inAutoruns, and AVG Free 8 did not detect it either. When I would try to browse to certain URL’s like support.microsoft.com, or windowsupdate.microsoft.com, (on IE and Firefox 3, but not Chrome) the browser would redirect to 127.0.0.1 and fail. The system32 Hosts file was not the culprit either.

Sufficiently disappointed in AVG for not finding this rogue piece of code in my system, I looked for other free tools to try scanning with. I would recommend Adaware as a great free tool for removing spyware, except that it did not find this Malware program.

Finally, my saviour came in the form of another miraculous free software product, Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware. I would highly recommend installing this product along with AVG Free. Malwarebyte’s program does not run on start-up, so it doesn’t take additional system resources. It would be a good idea to run this occasionally, in case AVG misses something nasty.

If you suspect that some Windows system files may be corrupted or missing, running the ’sfc /scannow’ will check all system files and replace them if needed. You will need your Windows install disc for this tool.

The Windows Vista install DVD is also very adept at repairing a Windows installation. You may need to use this option if you cannot even boot into Safe Mode.