Archive for August, 2008
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
If you had ever wanted to slip reactivating Windows XP after reinstallation here is one good tip from [Online Tech Tips]. There is only one file that is needed for sliping of reactivation and that is wpa.dbl which is located in C:\Windows\System32 directory.
So procedure would look like this:
- find wpa.dbl file and save it to some external media (usb disk, floppy, cd, etc.)
- reinstall Windows
- after reinstallation skip registration and activation
- restart pc and on boot pres F8 to enter menu where you can select safe mode
- in safe mode rename existing wpa.dbl file to wpa.dbl.backup and copy old one
- restart
- VOILA!!
So procedure is very simple and if you create your own installation cd with help of Nlite you can include this file too and skip activation after reinstallation.
Note: This file that you have saved can be used only on the PC that it comes from, on others it won’t work.
[Online Tech Tips]
Tags: activation, install, reinstallation, tips, windows, xp
Posted in Tips and tricks | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
I have tested today WavePad Sound editor as it was free solution that I needed to edit some sound files. I was more then surprised with results and program itself. Program layout is very similar with another editing software CoolEdit which is commercial product, but capabilities are almost the same.
Program is easy to use, offers many things for both amateur and professional use, can save and import many formats and most important it’s free.
Here are some of the features listed on home page of the NCH Software who are creator of the WavePad:
Features
- Sound editing functions include cut, copy, paste, delete, insert, silence, autotrim and more.
- Audio effects include, amplify, normalize, equaliser, envelope, reverb, echo, reverse, sample rate conversion and more.
- Full featured Mp3 editing software
- Supports a number of other file formats including wav (multiple codecs) vox, gsm, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg and many more.
- Batch processing supports up to 32000 files allowing you to apply effects and/or convert your files as a single function.
- Tools include spectral analysis (FFT) and speech synthesis (text-to-speech).
- Recorder supports autotrim and voice activated recording and more.
- Audio restoration features including noise reduction and click pop removal.
- Supports sample rates from 6000 to 96000Hz, stereo or mono, 8, 16, 24 or 32 bits.
- Includes its own CD ripper with ‘ultrafast ‘rip mode and cddb music database lookup.
- Works directly with MixPad multi-track audio mixing software.
- Links directly to the Express Burn CD Recorder to burn your sound files to CD.
- Edit tracks for the Zulu DJ software.
- Easy to use interface will get you started editing in just minutes.
Typical Editing Applications
- Software audio editing for studios and professional journalists.
- Edit sound files to broadcast over the internet with the BroadWave Streaming Audio Server
- Normalizing the level of audio files during mastering before buring to CD.
- Editing mp3 files for your iPod, PSP or other portable device.
- As a music editor (includes ringtones creator formats).
- Music editing and recording to produce mp3 files.
- Voice editing for multimedia productions.
- Restoration of audio files including removing excess noise such as hiss and hums.
You can download program from NCH site.
WavePad Sound Editor
Tags: Audio, cooledit, editor, free, freeware, mp3, nch, Software, sound, sound editor, wavepad
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Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
Firefox is my default, one and only browser and I like it very much. Especially tabs and addons that enables me to increase productivity to the max.
But there is one negative thing and that’s memory consumption.
Firefox is known as a big memory eater.
Solution is here and it’s called Firefox ultimate optimizer 2009.
It decrease Firefox memory consumption from 180mb and more to just few mbs.
Here are two pictures of my taskbar and memory consumption of Firefox before and after running optimizer.
You can download it here or visit home page(page is on Spanish) find the new version here.
Before optimizer
After optimizer
Updated on 2009-09-15: old page is dead, so new program link is here.
Tags: addon, firefox, firefox ultimate optmizer, free, freeware, memory, optimizer, plugin, ram, tab
Posted in Tips and tricks | 1 Comment »
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
Sysinternals, company that was started by two programmers and latter bought by Microsoft, had always good freeware tools for administration of windows. Best thing was that they were freeware.
Yesterday they have published a new tool with symbolic name Desktops.
This tool allows you to have up to 4 virtual desktops with separate systrays and programs on them. Even alt+tab combination doesn’t take programs from another virtual desktops so if you have runned program on one virtual desktop you won’t get it with alt+tab on another one.
Best of all, you can guess, it’s free, with size of only 62kb and you can get it here.
.png "Desktops")
Tags: desktops, free, freeware, microsoft, Software, sysinternals, virtual, virtual desktop, windows
Posted in Tips and tricks | No Comments »
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
So after I have fixed problems with WPG2 and permalinks I have updated gallery with some pictures and albums that I made before.
You can view them by clicking on page Gallery on right side or here.
Tags: bikes, blog, gallery, images, kids, motorcycles, panorama, people, Photography, photos, pictures, plants, wpg2
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
This morning I have decided to upgrade version of WordPress installed to the latest one.
Everything went ok, backup, upgrade procedure and so on.
Suddenly I have realized that none of the links that are permalinks doesn’t work.
I have tried all possible things that I could remember how to fix it including reconfiguration of Apache and different .htaccess files.
After some time when any of these things didn’t work I got idea to delete all files and install WordPress again with old database.
Directly after I deleted files and copied new ones, permalinks started to work.
Only one thing was different between new and old installations and that were plugins.
So next step was to copy all plugins back and see if everything works or error would come back with them too.
Plugins copied, error present, so next step was to disable plugins one by one and find the one that is causing this error.
Finaly, I have found that WPG2 plugin was cause of this error and that easiest fix for rewrite problem is to disable plugin and then to activate it again.
After this everything worked like it should, all plugins that I had, permalinks and I had the latest version of WordPress installed.
Tags: .htaccess, blog, gallery, mod_rewrite, permalink, plugins, rewrite, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wpg2
Posted in Tips and tricks | No Comments »
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
If you have ever tried to delete bunch of files at once you would in almost 50% cases get following error:
This can be really annoying when you work on servers.
Luckily instead of search-and-destroy-process action there is one FREE program that can unlock file for you and delete it or delete it after reboot.
Program is called Unlocker and it was written by Cedrick Collomb, it’s free and you can download it on this page.
Tags: cannot delete, delete, delete file, delete folder, file, folder, unable to delete, unlock process, unlocker
Posted in Tips and tricks | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
I needed today to convert some archive files from one format to another and while searching for the way how to do it fast and efficient without losing any content from them I have found one site that I have seen few times before.
Site name is Media convert.
On it you can online and free convert anything to anything.
You can convert sound files, video files, archives, documents, images and so on.
Number of formats that are supported is really huge.
Anyway from today on it will be in my top used bookmarks.
Tags: archive, Audio, audio converter, convert, convert to, flv converter, image, media, movie, mp3, office, sound, video, video converter
Posted in Tips and tricks | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
I wasn’t satisfied with windows defragment tool so I Googled little about possible replacements and among others found JkDefrag.
Here is a quote from web site of a JkDefrag:
|
JkDefrag is a disk defragmenter and optimizer for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/X64. Completely automatic and very easy to use, fast, low overhead, with several optimization strategies, and can handle floppies, USB disks, memory sticks, and anything else that looks like a disk to Windows. Included are a Windows version, a commandline version (for scheduling by the task scheduler or for use from administrator scripts), a screensaver version, a DLL library (for use from programming languages), versions for Windows X64, and the complete sources. |
 |
Program is very simple, just unzip and run it, no installation, no configuration and what is most important it works well.
On home page of JkDefrag you can download sources, executables and read some more info about it.
Read tips before defragmenting, they will increase speed of defragmentation.
Tags: defrag, defrag replacement, defragment, free, gnu, gpl, jkdefrag, replacement, windows, windows xp
Posted in Tips and tricks | 2 Comments »
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
I have recently reinstalled XP on my laptop and everything worked like a charm. I have downloaded 95% of windows updates including SP3 and .NET updates.
BUT suddenly windows updates stopped working. This means also that Windows Defender could not update as well.
The error that I received was 0×80004002 and in c:\windows\windowsupdate.log I have found that this error was explained with text: Error: 0×80004002. wuauclt handler: failed to spawn COM server.
Some Googling helped and I have found that .dll files that were used by Windows Update were not registered correctly. I think that update of Windows Installer caused this mess because I have used Windows Update after reinstallation until one point where I was trying to download 1 or 2 remaining updates.
Easy fix for this is:
1. Start->Run->cmd
2. paste following and type enter
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuweb.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wups2.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wups.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wucltui.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuaueng.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuapi.dll
3. Update
Tags: 0x80004002, COM server, error, update, windows, wuauclt
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