Bruce Atkinson

Archive for the ‘XP’ Category

I’m sick of Vista getting a bum rap, so I figured I would write a few posts about what I like about it.  My first post is just me complaining and starting to explain about my experience.  I will have several posts in the future explaining about the things that I like and find useful in Vista.

What’s wrong with Vista? Nothing.

I’ve been a user of the MS SendToX PowerToy utility for years. I especially like the Send To–>ClipBoard (As Name). I use it everyday. One problem though it doesn’t work in Vista. Instead I’ve been using a feature of SmartStartMenu which adds “Copy Pathname” to the explorer context menu. This is useful if you need to copy only one fully qualified filename to the clipboard, but doesn’t help if you have several filenames to copy.

I recently had to copy many filenames multiple times and ended up resorting to doing DIR /b “*.whatever” at the command prompt. So I looked around and found that someone had come to my rescue and had made a replacement for SendToX and it works for Vista and XP. He also added a few extras by giving you several options in how those clipboard entries are built.

One option is to have filenames that contain spaces get enclosed in quotes. You can also have multiple files end up as a list of files or all on the same line. Very useful if you are constantly copying and pasting filenames and paths.

This utility has several other useful functions that replace or enhance the features included in the original SendToX powertoy.

• Send To “Clipboard (as name)”
• Send To “Command Prompt”
• Send To “Default Mail Recipient”
• Send To “Favorites”
• Send To “Folder…”
• Send To “Quick Launch”
• Send To “Recycle Bin”
• Send To “Run…”

There is also a Send To “Clipboard” command line utility.

You can get Send To Toys at http://www.gabrieleponti.com/software/

The configuration utility that comes with let’s you manage what is in your “Send To” menu and the options of the included features in Send To Toys. So goto Gabriel’s site and if you like the utility click on Donate.

PowerShell is Microsoft’s CMD.exe replacement. It is a very powerful shell that does an excellent job of bridging the gap of the DOS command line, COM objects, vbscript, and .NET. It is hard to describe it’s capabilities. You really have to experience it for yourself and have your own epiphany.

For my first PowerShell script I decided to replace the combo batch file and javascript file that I currently use to load all of the podcasts that I subscribe to into my iTunes. The old way was to run the batch file which scanned a folder and all subfolders looking for files with the archive bit set. For each file that it found it would then call the javascript file, which would load the one file into iTunes. The whole process was kind of crude. It would load any file modified in that subfolder. The files would sometimes include jpg or pdf files or even partial downloads.

Using Powershell I was able to easily include in one script the recursing of the folder structure for files with the archive bit set, selection by file extension, and calling the iTunes COM object api. It works quite well.

I basically have a server that runs Juice 24 hours a day collecting podcasts. When I get ready to synch my iPod I just run the PowerShell script and iTunes is updated. I have smart playlists that automatically organize the podcasts when they are loaded.

For links to the script and a detailed explanation go here.

FileMon is a utility by Sysinternals. It is simple and easy to use and may help get you out of bind when you don’t know why you are getting an error message. It is amazing how many different problems this utility will help solve. You can read more about Sysinternals utilities here.

Last fall I used FileMon to help us solve a perplexing problem. We had an important piece of software that wasn’t performing well, so they upgraded the workstations that it was running on. Even though the workstations were now more than powerful enough, they would still pause and miss collecting some of the important data that they were collecting. The vendor wasn’t any help, and the users were losing faith in the software.

I figured I would just sit down and monitor the software using Regmon and Filemon. As I watched the application it became obvious to me that it was looking for a file called none.wav. One of the things that happens when you look for a file that doesn’t exist, is that each folder in the path is searched. If you have large folders, or folders on a network drive, and folders on a network drive that is on a server on the WAN somewhere, that search can take a while. It might even cause the system to hang a little while the search is going on.

The application had the ability to play sounds to alert you when an event occurs. If you didn’t want to hear a sound that event was set to “none”. This caused the application to constantly search for the file none.wav. The vendor was unaware of this.

Creating a short silent file called none.wav and putting it in the application folder, stopped the constant searching and cleared up the problems we were having. A problem that had been researched for a long time without coming up with a solution was solved in a few minutes with Filemon.

Filemon
Regmon (like Filemon but for the Registry)
Process Monitor(FileMon and RegMon combined)

I frequently use “Send to Desktop” by right clicking on something and sending a shortcut to my desktop. Today I went to do it on my XP desktop and it didn’t work. This specific workstation’s XP has been resident since XP first came out and has been heavily upgraded (multiple motherboards and hard disks). I figured I was out of luck on getting it fixed. I did a search and found a great site containing a bunch of tips and fixes for XP. If you are still using XP it’s worth checking it out. Maybe you have something broken and don’t realize it.

There are so many little things like this that can drive you nuts and waste your time. I expected to end up on what I call a Star Trek mission. It’s when I end up taking many detours to find a solution and get carried completely away from my original intended goal. I hate when I’m looking for solutions to problems that have nothing to do with what I’m trying to accomplish. The sad thing is that it seems to be the norm when working on computers, especially your friends and relatives computers that seem to have so many things wrong you don’t know where to begin.

It’s always nice to find solutions in just a few minutes. Thanks Doug for creating your site.

http://dougknox.com