To the Vista/Win7 naysayers…

I’m quite sick of Windows ‘gurus’ bagging vista/win7 because it did something differently to XP. All that’s saying to me is that they are set in their ways. They always complain about having less ‘control’ than they had with XP, when in fact, if they bothered to educate themselves about Vista/Win7 as much as they know XP, they could get as much control as they used to have. If it took them so many months/years to become the XP guru that they have become, how much personal experience time are they allowing Vista/Win7 before they cast their judgements on how less useful the newer Windows OSes are?
Sure, criticize the newer OSes for doing something unintuitive or having a crappy implementation, but if the main excuse is that they don’t know how to do things the Vista/Win7 way as opposed to the XP way, I have no sympathy for them.

Disclaimer: I’m an early adopter of Vista and Win7 but have been working with computers since DOS 4.

PS, I also posted this here.

Tags: Vista, Windows7, WindowsXP, Rant

Mark Russinovich demonstrates how to clean malware

Take a look at this link. This shows Mark Russinovich, formerly of SysInternals, and now Microsoft, demonstrating how to clean malware off a Windows system. He shows how certain SysInternals tools such as Process Explorer and Autoruns can be used to help identify malware and deactivate them.

The best way to listen to podcasts

I’m an avid listener of podcasts. It lets me consume information while doing something else. And to be even more efficient, I like to listen to podcasts at about 1.5x speed.

For the PC, I use mplayer. There are optimised versions for particular CPUs here and here. You will also need to drop this file in your mplayer folder. Mplayer is a media player that supports Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, etc. There is a GUI version but the one I use is command-line-based. In Windows Vista, I just make a shortcut with the commands I prefer and then drag media files to that shortcut. The command-line options that I use are: -vo gl2 -idx This basically says, use OpenGL to display the movie and generate an index if it is missing to allow jumping backward and forward through the media. I use the OpenGL switch so that Vista does not switch to Aero Basic mode whenever I play a media file. The following are the keystrokes that I use the most:

Left arrow	Seek -10 seconds
Right Arrow	Seek +10 seconds
Up Arrow	Seek -60 seconds
Down Arrow	Seek +60 seconds
9	Decrease volume
0	Increase volume
[	Decrease playback rate
]	Increase playback rate
Backspace	Reset playback rate
F	Fullscreen toggle

For my PDA, I use The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP). There is a mplayer version for the PocketPC but it doesn’t work on my HP iPaq.

Update: I have “rediscovered” that Windows Media Player has the ability to speed up the playback of media files. Unlike mplayer, the audio retains the original pitch, so voices don’t sound like chipmunks on caffeine. I think this will now be my preferred player for podcasts.

My first rant!

Okay, I’ve heard the phrase “reformat and reinstall Windows” too many times and I really think that whoever says it probably doesn’t know enough about what formatting does and why it’s usually not necessary if all you want to do is reinstall Windows. So this is my rant on the subject.