The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

Installed this on my laptop and it's working great. I am absolutely in love with win+left and win+right to easily make things side by side.

EDIT
Is there a way to open another instance of a program without middle clicking or right clicking and selecting the program? I usually use my laptop so no middle mouse button and the right clicking method is a click too many.

THF13 fucked around with this message at 10:04 on Aug 31, 2009

# ¿ Aug 31, 2009 09:38

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 03:52

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

Armourking posted:

Shift click?

Thanks, I was testing 'button'+click with firefox and shift click doesn't open a new window for me with FF or Thunderbird for some reason. Works with explorer though which is what I actually wanted it for.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2009 10:25

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

Does windows 7 auto-reset after updates that require it? I installed the updates today and it was bugging me to restart, very annoying that you can't tell it to be quiet permanently from the box it pops up, but I set it to 4 hours and left it alone. Later though it reset while I was streaming video to my mediacenter downstairs and I want to know if it was Windows deciding to reboot for me or if I had my first 7 crash since installing about a month ago.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2009 08:37

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

Disclaimer: I have read the OP and know that disabling the page file is a bad idea

I'm on a windows 7 64bit machine that I just upgraded to 16gb of ram with a 160GB SSD, is their any downside to reducing the page file size manually from the 16GB windows set it to automatically (1xRAM size) to something like 4 or 8gb? Getting that hard drive space back isn't urgent but it would be nice.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 06:19

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

You can add periods into your gmail address and it will ignore them. So if you have the gmail address UrGetiingFatter@gmail.com you can use Ur.Getting.Fatter@gmail.com or even U.r.G.e.t.t.i.n.g.F.a.t.t...er@gmail.com and they both will just go to the original gmail address. I don't think there's a replacement for + if the site doesn't allow it though.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2014 19:44

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

A good list

Foxit reader is kind of lovely now, use Sumatra PDF instead.
I use wizmouse instead of katmouse. I don't know which one is the better of the two, but you should absolutely use one.
CutePDF is great for printing to PDF. Lightweight and simple, but I think the installer tries to sneak in a toolbar.
Greenshot Is great for taking, editing, and annotating screenshots.
Irfanview Is the go application to for bulk image converting, renaming, resizing, and just about every else you would ever need to do with a group of images.

# ¿ May 13, 2014 11:13

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

Thermopyle posted:

If your SSD supports eDrive the performance hit is effectively null (a percent or two).

SSDs already encrypt data with their own encryption key as a function of how they minimize wear. In the past when you use bitlocker you were effectively encrypting twice. When you use bitlocker on a drive supporting edrive, bitlocker manages that encryption key and thus it uses the drive's encryption and thus there's basically no performance hit.

https://www.lullabot.com/articles/adventures-with-edrive-accelerated-ssd-encryption-on-windows

This is all true, but wanted to give some first hand account of actually setting it up. It can be a pain.

If you don't have things setup correctly Bitlocker won't take advantage of your hard drive's built in encryption and it will fall back to using slower software based encryption when you enable it. You will have to reinstall windows from scratch if everything isn't setup just the way Windows wants.

Make sure you have a TPM module chip in your computer. Most laptops have one, many desktop motherboards do not, though some include a slot for one so you can add it.
Make sure you use UEFI/Secure boot to install windows
Make sure the hard drive is provisioned properly. The Samsung 840/850 series for example has to be Secure Erase'd before you install Windows on it.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2017 16:33

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

Tiny Tubesteak Tom posted:

a few pages ago someone said nobody should use Adobe Reader/Acrobat for PDFs these days and I'm just wondering why

I have been using the same version of Acrobat XI for a pretty long time now and I have no idea about anything about PDFs other than Acrobat has done everything I have needed it to so far. just curious if I'm missing out on some real goodies with other apps

I don't think there are "goodies" really in the Acrobat replacements, rather the general advice I see is to use Sumatra which is trimmed down so it opens exponentially faster and is less likely to have some critical remote code execution vulnerability.
I keep Adobe Reader/Acrobat installed for when I need to work with a form fillable PDF, but 99% of the time I work with a PDF I'm just reading it and not interacting with it in any other way.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2018 04:22

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

I haven't used it in years but I remember Abiword being a decent lightweight word document editor. It's on PortableApps and installs out to just 15mb.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2018 03:34

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 03:52

THF13: Sep 26, 2007; Keep an adversary in the dark about what you're capable of, and he has to assume the worst.

I had a sata M.2 in a spot without much airflow and even that would hit 70c and throttle pretty quick under load. Slapped a $6 heatsink on it from Amazon and it completely solved it.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2020 07:49

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