jan's diary

The other day I did a foolish thing. I downloaded a video and when I tried to play it I was told I had to install a new version of one thing or the other. I clicked OK, and my life turned to the worse.

The new thing was malware, virus or both.

Today I have reinstalled Windows XP Pro and I like to jot down a few things in case when it happens again.

I have a netbook EEEPC 1000HA and it comes with a CD of its drivers which made the reinstallation so much easier. First, I put in the Windows XP Pro CD and deleted the C partition so it would go ahead formatting C and installing Windows. If I did not delete the C partition I was told that I already had a Windows version installed and that was not a good thing.

When Windows was installed I used the ASUS CD to install the drivers. Connecting to our local wireless network went like a breeze. All I had to do was to type the code typed under the modem.

I then downloaded AVG Free, IE8, and Chrome. When the current IE6 was updated to IE8 I disabled the use of IE alltogether in Control Panel. I installed Chrome and but the bookmarks file I had copied from the old setup into the folder C:\Documents and Settings\Jan\Configuración local\Datos de programa\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default. Then all local bookmarks in Chrome was in place.

I installed AVG Free and ran a full scan. For spyware detection I chose Ad-Aware Free Internet Security 9.

Here are all the programs (those in brackets were not installed, but may be installed in the future).

Audio & Video

1. (Winamp)
2. (Audacity)
3. Camtasia Studio 7 (http://www.techsmith.com)
4. Format factory (edit videos and more, http://www.pcfreetime.com/)
5. VLC Media Player (www.videolan.org)
6. (Mediavatar converter (http://www.mediavideoconverter.com/))
7. (Jing)
8. (Windows Movie Maker)
9. (Cyberlink Power DVD 9)

Games

1. BabasChess (www.babaschess.net)
2. Dinosaur Chess (http://www.chessok.com/ )
3. Igowin

Images

1. FastStone Photo Resizer (batch convesions, http://www.faststone.org/ )
2. GIMP 2
3. Irfanview
4. TreasureUP PDF to Image Converter 1.1 (converts pdf to images. www.treasureup.com)
5. BIMP Lite v1.62 (batch conversions, http://www.cerebralsynergy.com/bimp/ )
6. (Jing)
7. SmoothDraw3.exe (used with the Bamboo tablet, http://www.smoothdraw.com/ )

Internet

1. Dropbox
2. Filezilla
3. Google Chrome
4. Google Earth
5. Google Sketchup
6. S10 Password Vault
7. Skype
8. Teamviewer 6 (for remote assistance, http://www.teamviewer.com/ )
9. µTorrent
10. (Firefox)

Mathematics

1. Geogebra
2. wxmaxima (http://wxmaxima.sourceforge.net/)
3. (winplot and other programs from same author, math-exeter.edu/parris)
4. (speqmath, www.speqmath.com)
5. (Microsoft Mathematics)

Office & Notes

1. Keynote NF (http://keynote.prv.pl/)
2. OpenOffice
3. Scribus (desktop publishing)
4. Treepad Lite (http://www.treepad.com/)

Pdf

1. A PDF merger (http://www.a-pdf.com/?product-mg, I got a license, see Gmail)
2. pdfsam, splits and merges pdf files (then maybe 1 is not needed)
3. Foxit Reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/)
4. Treasure UP PDF2 Image

Programming

1. Visual FoxPro 9 and service pack 2
2. (FoxPro 2.6)
3. Installshield Express 5.0 for Visual FoxPro
4. (Logo)
5. (Toontalk)
6. (Etoys)
7. (Scratch)
8. (BYOB)
9. Alleycode HTML editor
10. Kompozer (http://kompozer.sourceforge.net/)
11. QuickSeacher (http://www.aks-labs.com/products/quicksearcher.htm)
12. XAMPP

Projects

1. links to various folders

Windows

1. 7-zip file manager (also does rar) (http://www.7-zip.org/)
2. Ad-Aware Free Internet Security 9 anti spyware
3. AVG 2011 free anti virus
4. Bamboo (padlet)
5. Ebackitup (http://www.rdcomp.net/)
6. ODIN (creating image of the hard drive, http://sourceforge.net/projects/odin-win/files/ODIN/0.33/ODIN-0.33-32Bit.zip/download )
7. Teracopy (better copier than Window’s, www.teracopy.com)
8. Touch free at http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/. (more)

The idea is to use ODIN to create an image of the hard drive with the programs installed. Next time the computer crashes the theory is to just copy the file from ODIN without having to install anything. The ODIN file can, of course, also be used when we buy a new netbook and want it to look like mine.

Since I have a Thai keyboard I looked at this page to be able to type Thai.

Last week my 300GB external hard disk died on me. Most of the data on the disk were backuped elsewhere, but not all. Stupid me!

To avoid future data loss I bought a 8GB usb drive and two external WD My Passport Essential 500GB hard drives. The hard drives take their power from the USB2 port so AC adapters are not needed.

On the usb drive I store all the data I am currently working on. Daily I take a backup of the drive to the hard drive on my laptop. To keep the data on the usb stick is very practical as I work on the data both at home and at work.

Data I do not longer work on I archive to one of the 500GB drives. The second 500GB drive is a synchronised copy of the first. If a file is deleted from the first, it is deleted from the second.

By the way, Mediafire offers unlimited free data storage while Mozy gives for free a program that automatically backups 2GB of your data to their online servers.

I ran the program CompareFiles and found 35 files out of 18,838 that had not been copied. Nice to know when one is doing archiving.

If your computer is slow try these free programs to speed things up.

All of the programs, except the last one, are from this page:

Get rid of the crap:

21. CCleaner: a fantastic hard drive cleaner that can rid your system of temp files, internet traces such as your surfing history, cookies, logfiles, cached files and other unused files from your computer. Installer comes with Yahoo toolbar included, so be careful to uncheck that during the installation process so it doesn’t install on your computer. Also includes a registry cleaner.

Make it faster for the machine to load and save files:

17. JKDefrag GUI: this is the graphical user interface for JKDefrag a hard disk defragmentation program. There are 3 reasons why you should use this program (a) JKDefrag has recently been tested and found to be the best amongst x different defragmentation programs, free and paid, (b) it provides the option to install itself as a screen saver, which will kick-off the defragmentation process whenever your computer is idle and goes into screensaver mode, and (c) it is fast and delivers excellent performance (see this blog for an interesting comparison of free and commercial defraggers, where JKDefrag was deemed the best freeware defrag program)..

Sweep your ram:

45. SweepRAM: a tiny, no-install RAM optimizer that frees system RAM by allowing applications all the RAM that they need, but no more (i.e. does not deprive programs from RAM). Use it to free RAM whenever your available memory plummets and/or your system becomes sluggish.

Where did all the hard drive space go? Part I:

18. Folder Size: this free Windows Explorer extension provides a “Folder Size” column in Windows explorer’s ’Detail’ view that shows the size of both files and folders (Windows shows the size of files but not that of folders). My second choice for a for a free program that does this would be “Aurionix FileUsage“; the latter offers more columns but requires .NET and therefore much more resources than Folder Size does.

Where did all the hard drive space go? Part II:

SpaceSniffer is a freeWare (or, better, donationWare) and portable tool application that gives you an idea of how folders and files are structured on your disks. By using a Treemapvisualization layout, you have immediate perception of where big folders and files are situated on your devices. Treemap concept was invented by Prof. Ben Shneiderman, who kindly permitted the use of his concept into this tool.

Update May 27:

You may also like to update your drivers:

Like any software, drivers are upgraded and updated by the manufacturers, to remove bugs, add extra functionality to the hardware or to improve the performance of the device. Unless you update your drivers regularly you may face problems ranging from the relatively minor, such as having hardware that seems buggy and poorly performing, to the more major such as hardware failures, conflicts and complete system crashes.

A free program can be found at http://www.liutilities.com/products/campaigns/affiliate/offer/gen/ds/. The program scans for outdated drivers and if you pay $29.95 you can get the new drivers downloaded automatically.

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