Category: Windows

Well, its been a few weeks now since I put in a 100GB 7200 RPM drive to replace the 4200RPM 40GB that Toshiba had christened this laptop with. Speed wise, it is noticeable, not as noticeable as I was expecting, but the main points are that I can hit two areas of the disk at once without experiencing the severe performance hit that I was used to on my old disk.

I say, if you are a developer, then shell out the extra for a dual core, but if you are the poor uni student like me (violin music please) then the upgrade has bought a little more life into this lappy till I return to regular full time work.

At last its comforting to know that you can indeed put a faster drive in your Toshiba. The linked article, a person put a 5400RPM, 160Gb disk. The only problem a BIOS limitation preventing it seeing beyond 128Gb.

You CAN do it!! : Large drive upgrade – Toshiba M30

In another article on the same blog, this blogger found a way to get AERO effects working in vista on the same machine. Genius 🙂
You CAN do it!! : Vista Ultimate with nVidia Go5200 – there is hope!

Oscar’s Multi-Monitor taskBar and Synergy are two monitor tools I’ve been needing for quite a while.

The first is a very useful multimonitor helper, that provides an additional taskbar for the second monitor in addition to providing a quick ‘send this window to the other monitor’ key shortcut and title bar buttons.

The second piece of software is kinda like a virtual kvm, whereby you can sit two pc’s and their monitors together and then only using one set of keyboard/mouse on the server pc, access and control the other one. Better still this one works on Windows, Linux and provides limited OS X support.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1457/

foXpose provides a view of all your firefox tabs much like the overview in IE7.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/sort_menus_alphabetically.htm

Its another registry hack (I’m sure I’ve used a tool in the past to do this) but if you run it, Window’s will forget your start menu’s ordering. See this winguides.com link.

If you want this permanently, then follow the main link which shows that by restricting access to the registry key that controls the sorting, you will always have the menu sorted.

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerMenuOrder

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1012509538

After performing a windows re-install and using Tweak UI to change some unrelated settings, I found my desktop and program icons had all reduced in colour.

I was using a 16-bit display and the problem alleviated itself when I changed to a 32-bit colour depth. Going back to 16-bit though left the colours in their 256 colour glory.

Trying a variety of settings and deleting the IconCache.db didn’t help however the attached annoyances.org link, led me to a registry change.

HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktopWindowMetricsShell Icon BPP was currently set at 32.
On changing it down to 16 and rebooting, my machine went back to displaying icons in their 16-bit glory.

ATI Catalyst tray tool has a useful screen resolution changer. The problem being I set this to a resolution that was much too high and the screen became a mess of moving horizontal lines, unable to change the thing back.

On rebooting, I found the resolution back to normal and everything was readable. That was until I logged in under my girlfriends profile, and the setting was resolution went back to its garbled form.

I knew how to fix this in the past, but after being out last night and my brain not in top shape, I let google try to answer this for me. Suprisingly it was hard to find a solution but this site had the answer:

Beginners Guides: 104 Performance Tips for Windows XP – PCStats.com

Basically it says reboot the PC, press F8 before windows kicks in and select VGA mode. Once you can see things, you can go and change the resolution to something you can see clearly.

Wearing my Commodore 64 WIZZKID tshirt yesterday sparked a discussion about classic games.

One of my friends had a fix to play Montezuma’s Revenge, the fix was so strong, he caried the disk image on his USB stick in the hope he’d come across someone with a C64 emulator… he was willing to buy a C64 just to play this game.

This morning I went looking and playing.

Apple IIe version

First google hit was the Apple IIe version. It felt a bit clunky and the graphics seemed a little piss poor (is it just me, or do you remember game graphics to be better when you were playing them as opposed to what they are now). Still, if thats the version you grew up on, you can get the “rom” from ClassicGaming.com. The emulator link they provide doesn’t work, but go here for the latest version of the Apple //e Emulator for Windows.

Nothing much to do with the Video Game

While browsing the net, I came across the meaning of Montezuma’s Revenge. Think of War of the Worlds meets Biological Warfare, 1520’s Mexico style. Montezuma was the name of the Emporer of Mexico at the time but got trounced on when Invaders from Europe took over. Soon after though, the invaders literally got the shits. A form of diarrhea that the Mexicans were immune to. Revenge is a dish best served… never mind. See Wikipedia

C64 Version

Moby Games had the first entry about the C64 version. It actually provided screenshots for all the versions of the game which allowed me to compare them graphically and know which tail I should be chasing. The C64 version looked one of the best.

The disk image (Montez.zip) I found here along with a pretty ordinary DOS emulator called PC64. My patience didn’t really last and I didn’t get past PC64’s dated interface. Knowing there are newer Windows emulators around I deleted PC64 and searched again.

The answer came in CCS64 for Windows. V3 was released on May 17th 2006 so its still in active development. It needs DirectX 9 but it means a very smooth run. Even on my laptop with 512MB and 1.4Ghz processor, the game ran smoothly. Download the version that includes the Installer. Unzip it to say C:temp, and run the installer from there. You can just press Next to accept the defaults.

Once installed, you can launch CCS64 from the Start menu. When you run it, it will bring up the old Basic v2 screen. Now unzip the Montez.zip file (c:temp or desktop or anywhere you’ll remember it in future). Montezum.d64 is the file that you need.

In CCS64, go to File->Load C64 Files->Disk Drive->Device 8.
You’ll then get a 1541 Device 8 page, simply use the arrow keys to navigate to the Drive and Directory you put Montezum.d64 file. Once Highlighted press F3 to start the game.

I found the C64 version to be particularly smooth and heaps more playable than the Apple version. Take a look.

Edit: I almost forgot. If you want to change the controls press Alt+I. You can then change the control method (Joystick port 2). I like KeySet 3 which basically maps the joystick to the arrow keys, but you can configure the keys to however you like.

Sega Master System version

While at Moby Games, I noticed the Sega version had graphics that gave Montezuma’s Revenge to all the other versions ;-). I didn’t play it myself, but if you are interested I found a place you could download the rom at euroemu.net. I leave it to you to find a decent Master System emulator.

Enjoy!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/default.aspx

WMP 11 is available in beta form. Guess what. Its faster than WMP 10. The interface is a much slicker looking black. The buttons, Now Playing, Rip, Sync, etc all have drop down menus to the most commonly needed functions. My favourite part is that within a couple of clicks you can bring up the equaliser, a feature I missed since WMP 9. When ripping tracks, you can specify the format and bitrate from these menus too.

The presentation of the play list is a bit better with animations and more fluid drag and dropping. The media library has improved with Album Art appearing next to the items allowing a more interactive browse. For things you dont have album art for yet, you can now right click and Find Album Info rather than jump into another area of the app and coaxing WMP to download it.

In my opinion, all thumbs up. I had just switched to WinAmp 5 for speed, I can consider changing back.

After briefly trying Star Downloader and later uninstalling it, I found that Firefox would not download any exe or zip files. Instead, I would be greeted with a blank tab with the exe URL in the title bar. Everything else seemed ok.

To troubleshoot the issue I did as followed
1) Disabled all my fancy extensions to get as much of a pure firefox as possible.
2) Checked the file associations for application mime types and exe/zip associations opened in the current application. To access these options go to:
Tools->Options->Downloads->View & Edit Actions…
You will see the ‘Download Actions’ dialog. Look for anything that has Star Downloader / Opera plugin and change the Action to either save or use another program to open that kind of app.

3) On restarting firefox the problem was still there. In firefox, going to About:plugins in the address bar, showed me that the star downloader dll (npstar.dll) was still in firefoxs plugins directory. Even though the zip/exe associations were now cleared from the download actions dialog, they were still getting handled by the plugin.

4) Closed Firefox. Deleted npstar.dll from E:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxplugins. Restarted firefox.

The behaviour was now restored. I reactivated my extensions and enjoyed being able to download again.