The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

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Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Solly posted:

I remember seeing this program that would split your desktop into multiple frames that you expand windows into. Essentially so that if you have a big rear end monitor you could make it behave like two monitors. Now I have said big rear end monitor I cannot find the program, does anyone happen to know what its called?

Winsplit Revolution?

It's not exactly what you describe, but it might do the trick. It should work great using the numpad-shortcuts.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2011 20:51

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 19:34

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

crm posted:

Can anyone recommend an app that will lock or at least remember window locations in Windows 7?

Among other things, you can couple window size and position to a program's process name with Winsplit Revolution.

I used it to tame Skype for a while, and even though I don't run Winsplit anymore, Skype's window size and position stay remembered through reboots and updates :iiam:

# ¿ Dec 7, 2011 22:00

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

crm posted:

Unfortunately it always crashes on me, any time I open the options dialog.

Since just saying that I never had that problem isn't really all that helpful, I googled a little, and this alternative came up: WinSize2

I haven't actually tried it, mind you.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2011 01:55

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

fuf posted:

Is there some software that makes it easy to share files on a home network?

I want to swap movies etc. with my housemates and I don't really know how to do it. I remember sharing folders on Windows used to be really tricky, and one of our computers is a Mac so I'm worried that might make it even trickier.

I thought maybe I could use an FTP server on my Windows 7 PC that the others could connect to, but is there a way to do this so they get a nice web interface or something?

Great starting point here and here for sharing files with other windows 7 computers.

Alternatively, HFS is more like what you describe. I've always had a fondness for this program~~, but it hasn't been updated in a while. Also their website seems to be down. I don't know what's up with that. In any case, you still can find it here~~.

Edit: Official HFS webiste is back up now and the program is still being updated. It has excellent documentation online as well.

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Dec 11, 2011

# ¿ Dec 11, 2011 04:36

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Meskhenet posted:

Ive set up a windows xp MAME machine, now whenever i press buttons 1 and 2 on player 1 the screen roates. This is a problem for quite a few games (never realised how commmon A+B is)

The IPac controller maps 1 sw1 to l ctl and 1 sw2 to l alt by default

Is there a was to disable this in wondows at all?

I think this isn't part of Windows, but part of your video driver. I'm not entirely sure, nevermind if I know if it can be disabled. But I suggest at least looking there as well.

I remember reading about it and being disappointed my driver (ATI) didn't offer this keycombo, whereas it was standard for NVidia, as far as I recall. I read a lot on my laptop lying on my side

# ¿ Dec 11, 2011 07:32

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Salty Whiskey posted:

I need to be able to play audio in a Skype call, as I would via my speakers but also streaming to whoever I'm on the call to at the same time.

Anything that would be able to do such a thing under Windows will need a driver presenting itself to the system as a virtual audio device. I believe there is some native support for rerouting like this on macs, which is why it's easier to find software that does this for that platform.

Virtual Audio Cable can do this in Windows, but it's a bit of a mindfuck to set up, because you'll have to use input devices as output devices and vice versa. Also it costs $30.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2011 18:50

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Salty Whiskey posted:

Thanks a lot - I did try VAC a while before I downloaded PrettyMay but yeah, mindfuck galore so I gave up pretty quickly. I'll make sure to give it another go. Cheers for the explanation my good man!

The way it works for me:

In Skype:
"Line 1 (Virtual Audio Cable)" as the microphone.
Speakers as whatever it was before.

Then start up the included Audio Repeater and set
Wave In: Microsoft Sound Mapper
Wave Out: Line 1 (Virtual Audio Cable)
and click start.

Apparently the Microsoft Sound Mapper stream includes the built in microphone in my laptop. Couldn't possibly say if this would work with other soundcards, external microphones etc.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2011 22:24

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Salty Whiskey posted:

I have a sneaking suspicion this wouldn't work for me though. The whole, on board sound deal with no stereo mix available would probably screw it up I think. I'm not one of the people who just have 'Disconnected Devices' unticked in recording devices.. Stereo mix literally is completely unavailable for me - I can't record just audio from my speakers whatsoever. If I absolutely need to, I have to fraps it and convert the video to mp3. Bonkers I know, but after trying to come up with a workaround for a year, I really have given up on that one. That's the main reason I was looking for a skype addon - something I could plug mp3's into directly could work in theory, but meanwhile my Microsoft Sound Mapper ain't mapping too much.

As I say I'll definitely give it a whirl, but it won't be the first time my crappy onboard sound has mucked things up. I would just get a sound card but I'm reluctant to shell out the cash for something I'm not sure would work (granted it probably would, but all the same, I wouldn't otherwise get a new one at all if it weren't for this).
I'll try and grab hold of VAC after Christmas and give your setup a try and see what happens. Thanks again!

For what it's worth, on my computer Stereo Mix is a completely separate entry from Microsoft Sound Mapper in the replicator. Also VAC would allow you to record from other programs as well, although it might require you to set one of the virtual cables as the default output device temporarily/not hear what you are recording while recording.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2011 02:21

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Salty Whiskey posted:

Sorry if I'm missing something, audio stuff is definitely not my strong point unfortunately. That said, I find it kind of weird then that even when I try to record on say, audacity using the sound mapper, I never pick up anything?

Sorry, it didn't make sense, but it seemed to work for me. Then it hit me that this was working because the microphone was picking up the sound from the speakers :downsbravo:

So, you know, forget what I said. Messing around a little more with VAC reveals that it's totally possible to do this the proper way. If you have "Stereo Mix" as an option :suicide:

As it stands, I think your options are severely limited to something that's specifically aimed at Skype. For the love of god, do not try something called TunesUp, there's no download without crapware available and it kept bluescreening my computer even on uninstall and I had to do a system restore to get it back into a working state. And I couldn't find anything else that even said it would do what you asked for.

To summarize: I'm retarded and you're back at square one. :negative:

# ¿ Dec 26, 2011 02:08

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Hanks Lust Cafe posted:

Is there some way I can fiddle with the settings or otherwise mess around with my PC to match the "oomph" of my Macbook's sound?

Unless the driver of your current soundcard offers some options, I'm going to say no. Nothing that is remotely practical. And you're not going to improve sound quality with those in any case.

"Weak" sound could purely be a side effect of the output not being loud enough, or there could be a quality problem as well. There's no way to tell from the way you describe it.

The fact that you mention headphones, is that just for an all-other-things-being-equal comparison, or do you actually use headphones most of the time?

A headphone amp (or any other old amp serving as one) might be something to look into if this is purely about loudness. Another soundcard might help on the quality front. It depends on what the real problem is.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2011 03:56

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

fletcher posted:

What program can I use to identify duplicate files that don't necessarily have the same filename?

Duplicate Cleaner worked for me when working through thousands of jpegs. I've tried some alternatives, but they always seemed to lack the ability to prioritize copies in one folder over those in another.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2011 01:33

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

decypher posted:

What the gently caress is going on ?

Have you verified that the sliding button on the camera is set to the right mode?

I don't know anything about this specific camera, but some camera's can also serve as webcam and poo poo and won't show up as mass transport device when they are in video mode and such.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2012 21:00

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Lord Solitare posted:

I have a really nitpicky and dumb question.

See how the Windows icon is a bit bigger than the bar and it's chilling outside of my taskbar? Is there a way to solve that and make it smaller?

Turn off "Use small icons" in the taskbar properties, if that's a compromise you're willing to live with. It's not actually saving you any horizontal space on the taskbar anyway.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2012 16:37

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Noni posted:

-Antivirus - Avira.
-Firewall - Comodo
-Notepad alternative: Metapad

* Microsoft Security Essentials works great for me and I've seen it recommended quite a bit around here.
* The windows 7 firewall is decent for general use, unless you have very specific needs. I use Netlimiter (not free).
* I'm very happy with Notepad++

This thread hasn't been posted in since november, but might contain useful suggestions nonetheless.

fake edit: Been beaten a bit.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2012 18:13

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Jaros posted:

This may be a dumb question but is there way to quickly create a number of folders all named after individual files? I have a bunch of video files with different names that I'd like to put in seperate folders but it'd be really tiresome to make a folder for each.

For those not wanting to install yet another program to do a rather simple thing:

code:

@ECHO OFF
:Loop
IF "%~1"=="" EXIT /b
MKDIR "%~dpn1\"
MOVE "%~1" "%~dpn1\%~n1%~x1"
SHIFT
GOTO Loop

Copy the text above into notepad and save it on your desktop (or pinned to taskbar or wherever's convenient for you) with a filename with the extension .cmd

You can now drop files on top of it and a folder will be made where the dropped file is, with the name of the file (without extension) and the file will be moved into it.

In the case of identical filenames apart from the extension (eg. video file and srt file), both will be copied into the same folder.

You could even add this to explorer's right click menu if you knew how to work the registry, but I'm too lazy to look it up. It doesn't seem worth the clutter.

Tested with a buch of photos with different naming schemes, but it should just work in any folder you have permissions for.

EDIT:
Change

code:

MOVE "%~1" "%~dpn1\%~n1%~x1"

code:

MOVE /Y "%~1" "%~dpn1\%~n1%~x1"

if you want to suppress asking for overwriting already exisiting files.

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Jan 15, 2012

# ¿ Jan 15, 2012 14:16

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

thegloaming posted:

Did the link to the Useful Windows software site get moved? I'm a long-time Mac OS user that just switched to Windows 7 and other than my limited experience with XP at work (using only specific programs), I don't really know what's out there or recommended nowadays for home users.

Check out this oldish thread. Ninite is a common suggestion to easily populate your software list. If for nothing else, it's a good way to avoid installers with toolbars (last time I checked). FreewareGenius is a fairly informative freeware review site if you browse by category (beware of the date posted though, some of the articles are pretty old).

It's certainly advisable to opt for Microsoft Security Essentials as your anti virus program.

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jan 16, 2012

# ¿ Jan 15, 2012 22:38

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Revol posted:

I'm looking for software that can allow me to use (hopefully multitouch) gestures to send keypresses to the system.

StrokeIt won't support multitouch, but appears to have a keystroke simulating plugin, looking at their wiki.

Disclaimer: no experience with any of it.

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

Anyone know some piece of software that limits access to the internet on an process-by-process basis temporarily? When I'm out of the country I can usually wrangle up a tiny bit of data to check mail and such, but sooner or later some stupid program decides to auto-update in the background, blowing the entire quote immediately.

That's essentially a firewall, isn't it? With default action "block" for all outbound traffic and some exception rules for browser, e-mail software and anti virus. Should be possible with the Windows Firewall advanced settings, I guess.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2012 23:11

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

Ideally I would manage to do this without having to trash my firewall settings, but yeah, good thinking. Might be able to install a secondary firewall just for this purpose. Still open for suggestions for a more specialized application if anyone has it though

Are you on a 32bit Windows edition? Because in that case Windows 7 Firewall Control seems a pretty good option. In that it runs from the Windows Firewall engine (so no need to install a driver) and has a free portable 32bit edition. It seems (in basic testing) to keep its own rules separated from those in the Windows Firewall.

There's a free 64bit version as well, but it isn't portable, which may or may not make it lose its edge over other solutions.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2012 00:23

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

TLG James posted:

Is there a way to "reserve" drive letters? It seems like if I stick a USB drive in while windows is booting, it'll override my USB HDD.

My USB HDD is E.

Thumb drive came up as E, and maybe F (one of those ones with autoboot software on it) and it moved my HDD to K. Easy fix to go in disk management and rename it, but it is still quite annoying.

Assigning a letter in device management should generally stick between boots and between unplugging and replugging. However, if a device is slow to announce itself to windows on boot, the letter is still up for grabs on a first come, first serve basis. A USB HDD would generally need time to spin up, in which the thumbdrive has a chance to snag the letter. The HDD then gets the next available letter. If the devices were equally fast in announcing themselves, the drive letters could be different on every boot.

You could 'reserve' drive letters E and F for things not plugged in (semi-)permanently by assigning your USB HDD a letter higher in the alphabet permanently. I used to give my DVD drives the letters X and Y and the USB HDDs O, P, Q and R (room for expansion :downs:

). Z was a network share. Anything plugged in temporarily, even if it was something never plugged in before, would just get the lowest letter available, which in my case was E.

You may not want this, or you could be one of the unlucky ones where drive letters don't stick at all, perhaps because one or more of your devices doesn't identify itself with a valid ~~device id~~ serial number. In that case, you could try USB Drive Letter Manager. I'm convinced I saw it recommended somewhere, but don't take my word for it.

EDIT: reading through the rather confusing documentation, it doesn't really seem user friendly, but at least I verified it should indeed be able to do what you want from it. That and a lot, lot more.

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Jan 18, 2012

# ¿ Jan 18, 2012 00:30

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Jolan posted:

What's a good freeware program to create an image of a Windows-partition?

Use Tuxboot to make a bootable Clonezilla thumbdrive. It will work great for backup purposes, but if you're cloning to an SSD to boot from it, there's a need to align the partition or somesuch. In that case I advise to read/ask in the SSD Megathread whether Clonezilla will do the trick.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2012 18:01

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Jolan posted:

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll check these out. I'm just re-installed my old gaming rig to serve as a browsing/word processing computer, but I wanted to check the hard drives for errors (one had a CRC issue, and I'm pretty sure they're already 10 years old so it might not be a bad idea to do some maintenance anyways) and wanted to make an image just in case something went screwy and I had to re-install everything again.

(I only just realised that those drives have withstood at least ten years of intensive usage. Too bad Maxtor isn't around anymore.)

CrystalDiskInfo will help you assess whether the drive is on its way out. Good = Functional, Caution = hosed.

Making an image is never a bad idea, though.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2012 19:56

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Revol posted:

I need a program that is a go-between for the controllers and Windows, to simplify the port numbers.

XPadder might in a roundabout way do what you want. I use it to play old dos games with a controller. Even if it doesn't help in any other way, you'll have all profiles for all your controllers in one place, instead of in the different emulators that apparently depend on some sort of port number.

Must warn you that it's :10bux:

up front to download it, so you can't really try before you buy. That said, I'm happy with how it works, especially because dosbox doesn't really have great joystick support in and of itself and most of the games I play actually expect keyboard input only. Not sure if that's the case with your emulators/games.

Revol posted:

In closing, why does Microsoft make things that should be simple, so loving difficult?

I get your frustration, but the things you're doing are actually pretty niche.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2012 16:27

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Noni posted:

Flipperwaldt, I just want to say that this is genius and thank you.

Combined with Ant Renamer to clean up folder names, this is a huge efficiency boost for me.

Glad to be of help!

I'm a Den4b Renamer man myself. It supports presets and in addition to a lot of what Ant Renamer can do, it supports regular expressions to a degree (slightly buggy, but useful for conditional renaming nonetheless). It can also be called from the command line, so the possibility of creating a shortcut to drop files on is there. It can even do the same thing the batch file does, although it's not self evident how to change the name of the newly created folder without manually loading the folders after creation (ie. everything in one step).

I'm not saying it's better or more efficient, it's just what I had an excellent experience with

# ¿ Jan 23, 2012 22:12

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

PaulC posted:

I'm dealing with some large text files in various foreign-language character sets and could use help with Notepad++ or recommendations for a text editor more suitable for what I need. I want to be able to view files side by side and compare differences, which Notepad++ does adequately with a plugin.

The most annoying issue is that Notepad++ is apparently dumber than windows notepad when it comes to character sets. Any file I open with special characters is garbage until I manually select the correct option from the encoding menu.

I also need to be able to replace characters with line breaks, but ^p doesn't work in find-replace.

If there's a way to enable custom folding (at user-defined spots, rather than according to rules of a programming language) this would also be a huge help.

As far as I know, no plugin is needed to just view files side by side in Notepad++. It might depend on what you call adequately, perhaps.

I don't know about the encoding issue, although I know Microsoft's Notepad does a lot of guessing and some uptight nerds get upset when it guesses wrong. Which is why I think Notepad++ skips all that, proud that no assumptions were made. Or something like that.

Replacing characters with line breaks can be done by setting the search mode to 'extended' and replacing with \r\n or \r or \n, the correct one annoyingly depends on your encoding, I believe. Check what you need by making hidden characters visible.

From looking at it, custom folding is indeed impossible.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2012 22:33

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

MisterBibs posted:

I'm looking for a sound editor. There's tons of em, and I'm kinda picky / want the best bang-for-my-time one, so I figured I'd ask here as part of my preliminary research:

I'm looking for a solid sound-editing software for something. Something I can load a waveform, see the whole thing visually, and select parts and change how it sounds / etc. Ideally free, or something that I can use without nags or feature loss during a trial.

There isn't much choice per se once you go beyond the mp3 ringtone cutting and fading stage of things. As mentioned above, Audacity. Wavosaur isn't bad and has a free portable version, which I find a plus. If you're adamant you want to try as many options as possible, you can try GoldWave. I haven't used it in over 15 years, but it was a mature and stable wave editor then. (It still looks the same :corsair:

) At 50$ it's a bit expensive, seen as you can get most of the functionality for free in Audacity. Some more suggestions here.

Adobe Audition, as the unofficial choice of professionals, deserves a mention. Some of the previous versions were crap, but 5.5 is back on top. It has a trial version, but I don't know if it's crippled. I'd say it's worth the ~350$, but only if you work with audio daily. Considering what you wrote, that's probably not the case.

From your description it's not what you're looking for at all as well, but I can't not mention Reaper as the best option if you want to record and produce music. It can do all edits non destructively. It has an unlimited, uncrippled trial and it's still a steal at 60$ for home use. It competes with programs costing 300$-2500$. Steep learning curve if you have no experience at all, though.

tl;dr: Lots of rambling, Audacity is likely what you need.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2012 14:45

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

decypher posted:

Is there a program or perhaps registry setting that will automatically open folders which were open when Windows restarts?

Start > type "folder options" + enter > "View" tab > Check "Restore previous folder windows at logon"

That, at least, sounds a lot like it would do that. Let me know how it works out.

e: BEATEN in the two minutes it took to write this :argh:

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jan 24, 2012

# ¿ Jan 24, 2012 18:46

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

EightDeer posted:

Two things: Can someone recommend me a good registry cleaner? I've heard numerous horror stories about reg cleaners that come loaded with malware, so I'm a bit hesitant to pick one myself.

Also, is there a program that will clean up the Documents and Settings and My Documents folders? On my PC, those folders are packed with garbage from programs that have already been uninstalled.

I'm running XP SP3.

Thirding CCleaner, I guess. I haven't really felt the need for one since Windows 7 :v:

I'm not aware of a program that will clean up those folders. If it's a matter of diskspace, SpaceSniffer will help you find out where the quickest and largest gains are to be found. If it's a matter of elegance, move everything you believe shouldn't be there in a subfolder and see if anything breaks, basically. Programs that need those folders will generally recreate them when used. If something is out of the ordinary, like a reset to factory settings for a program or lost save games, move the old folder back. After a while all that's left in the subfolder is deletable crud. That, as a principle, should work, but if you have no clue what you're doing, it's still possible to gently caress up. So, at your own risk.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2012 05:10

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

GreenNight posted:

Is there a command I can run from cmd that will dump the directory names into a txt file?

Basically this:

code:

dir *.* /s/b/ad > file.txt

Drop the /s if you only want the folders found in the folder where you are at that moment, not their subfolders too.

You can put a path before *.* and before the output filename if that helps somehow. Like:

code:

dir "C:\Program Files\*.*" /s/b/ad > "C:\Users\Billgates\Documents\List of Program Folders.txt"

Please note the need to put those in quotes if there are spaces.

There's also:

code:

tree > file.txt

if you're more visually oriented :v:

EDIT: Correction for edge cases where folders have a period in their name. Dir has the /ad switch for that. Expanding that to /adhs might be necessary to see hidden and system folders.
EDIT2: Clarification: method before the edit would not list folders with a period in their name and would list files without extension.

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jan 27, 2012

# ¿ Jan 27, 2012 16:48

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

GreenNight posted:

That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

Please, check the edit above!

VVVV Well, it might have made a difference if you were using it in a batch script that got deployed in a corporate environment permanently or something. I had no way of knowing how mission critical it was and how foolproof it had to be. So I thought: better safe than sorry.

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jan 27, 2012

# ¿ Jan 27, 2012 17:03

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Terpfen posted:

Someone? Anyone?

EDIT: Very stupid suggestion, please, please, please disregard.

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jan 30, 2012

# ¿ Jan 30, 2012 03:30

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

stubblyhead posted:

Please do not do this, we will call you names if you do.

I apologize deeply and sincerely. If anyone deserves namecalling right now, it's me.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2012 03:46

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

mobby_6kl posted:

Now it's actively trying to shove adware and toolbars down your throat during installation, and through various links in the app itself. It doesn't even want to run from the exe copied from program files, and instead forces you to reinstall it. I'm about this close writing my own torrent client in assembly.

Adware, toolbars, yes. But as said, the links in the app and the other bloat can all be made invisible. Making it portable still works as well. Doing that, it didn't force me to reinstall, it just asked for the interface language again and then started up. You can uninstall after that and use the copied exe as long as it's in the same folder as the settings.dat file.

I don't like what they're doing to it, and it's becoming a lot of hoops to jump through to get it set up the way I like, but when that one time deal is done, I have no real complaints.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2012 23:36

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

univbee posted:

I might also be keen for some kind of application that sets system-wide network speed limits that I can turn on and off as needed, so I can queue up some downloads that will go at 20 kilobytes per second or something until 2 A.M. when it rams up.

I'm in a similar situation where downloads only count half towards my monthly limit between 1AM and 1PM.

Take a look at Netlimiter Pro for exactly this. It's 30$, but it works really well. The interface has its quirks, but it's very workable. For any bandwidth limiting rule you can edit them to add start and end times. It's also easy to temporarily suspend all rules. You can (but don't have to) use it as a firewall too. I do, because I find it easier to understand than the Windows firewall, since everything is visually organised by program instead of by type of rule.

Maybe it's overkill, on the other hand it leaves you free to use whatever FTP program you like, limit in-browser download speeds (for specific IP addresses if you like), bittorrent, limit LAN speeds so you can still watch youtube while copying large files over the network, idem for automatically updating games and programs, whatever. I like it and recommend it.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2012 19:16

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

^^^^^ I understood it as "She wields enough influence/power around here", if that helps.

Not an Anthem posted:

I've never sorted my mp3 tags and its DAUNTING. Tag&Rename and Picard MusicBrainz seem most popular- am I going to have to go through folder by folder and perform operations on each one or is there something that will search through and pretty much do it without having to select each and do a bunch of searches?

I opened Tag&Rename and so far did a few manual entries and its tedious as gently caress.

I have my stuff organized Drive:/Artist - Album, although the folder names sometimes include year or whatever else I've swapped around over the years.

Although Picard theoretically somewhat promises to deal with just adding a wad of files, I've found it to be more useful to complete a few missing tags, rather than deal with completely untagged files. Also, if you don't cluster the files to let it know the files belong together (or work folder by folder), the results will be dissapointing. It doesn't really seem to be aware of folder names. The whole comparing audio signature thing has yet to yield me another result than "no match found".

So I'm gonna echo the sentiment to extract as much information as possible from the folder names first. This will work best if you subdivide your music collection roughly by which naming scheme the folders use. Then manually edit out leftover anomalies in the folder names. Then use MP3Tag to extract the information ("convert > filename - tag") for each subdivision. It may seem like a lot of work (depending on the size and consistency of your collection, obviously), but it's still a great lot less than typing that poo poo in. From that point on, any (semi-)automatic method of completing the tags will be noticably more reliable, be it Picard, MediaMonkey or even Windows Media Player.

An alternative to some degree can be re-ripping the cds you actually have in physical form, as with access to the cd's ID, matching and tagging is a lot easier for the software. That might seem dumb at first sight because it's a lot of work too, but it doesn't require the same amount of concentration. All you need to do is swap out discs every few minutes and click a button while you work/surf/whatever.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2012 17:07

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

IT Guy posted:

Is there an open source or free PDF editor out there that isn't poo poo?

We have a user that just want's to move pages or extract/separate pages out of a large PDF and we don't want to buy a full version of Adobe for this purpose.

If it's just splitting and merging, take a look at Hexonic PDF Split and Merge. Probably more basic than what you had in mind, I guess.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2012 16:16

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Hamburglar posted:

Is there a free program to view or convert .CGM files? The closest I came so far was InfranView which required I downloaded a plugin, but the plugin displays a huge "BUY ME" watermark. I've been searching for quite a while, and even tried for a few hours attempting to get Word (from Office 2007) to accept the files to no avail. Thanks!

A quick Google brought me to this list. Vizex reader seems to be a free option, but they require a lot of personal information before they allow you to download it, so I didn't try. Wouldn't have CGM-files to try it on anyway. I guess it's worth a shot with some bogus information and a thrwoaway e-mail address.

The Dregs posted:

Anyone know of a similar list of nice software and aps for windows 7?

Freewaregenius is a fairly good site, because unlike some other reviewer's sites, stuff has really been tested and the guy isn't so lame as to leave out the negatives. Beware of really old reviews, though, they may not apply anymore.

I used to recommend a look at the "Post your favorite obscure applications"-thread, but it hasn't been updated since september or so and seems to have slipped into archives, I think

Flipperwaldt fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Feb 10, 2012

# ¿ Feb 10, 2012 15:40

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Hamburglar posted:

Thanks, I wasn't being lazy with the Googling, as you could see I tried a ton of different things (even editing registry files to get Word to read them). It's just that there doesn't see to be a free viewer for the files, because everything seems to want to edit and alter CGM files, while all I want to do is view them

Didn't mean to put you on the spot or anything (I wouldn't care either way), just indicating that this advice wasn't from personal experience. I hadn't heard of CGM-files before today.

I'm eager to help and I've got way too much time on my hands, but I've gotten into trouble before by recommending things I didn't know much about and got called out on it :supaburn:

. So I just try to add some context, so people know I'm not pretending to be an expert in everything and know when to overrule my advice based on their own experience.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2012 16:08

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Vidaeus posted:

Is there any way I can turn off auto-focus on Windows 7 64 bit? Or is there a program that can do this?
e.g. When you are typing away in a document or webpage, and some program you are installing or any other dialog box pops up and you hit space while you are typing thereby agreeing to whatever it is that just popped up?

I HATE IT

The wikipeda page on focus stealing posted:

Microsoft Windows-based systems use pop-up dialogue boxes, which can steal focus from the current application. On modern versions of Microsoft Windows, there is a system-wide setting that will by default prevent a cooperative application from stealing focus when launching another program or popping up a new window or dialogue box.[5] It is not possible to prevent an uncooperative or malicious application from either changing the setting, or bypassing it.[6]

For good measure, check the registry setting in the link and test using the method proposed on the wikipedia page.

But basically, I think the answer is no (would love to be corrected on this, though). Installers are generally crappy on this front. I haven't had this problem with many other programs recently.

To be fair, most installers warn you to close all other programs while installing, I guess :v:

# ¿ Feb 15, 2012 02:50

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

deong posted:

edit: I'm not sure yet; but while typing this up I just had the thought of maybe using auto text correction to do P&C -> Private Confidential BLAH BLAH Lawyer speak automagically.

Seems like a creative solution, anything else will likely be harder to turn on and off on a case by case basis.

Agreeing that confidentiality agreements are annoying and not legally binding anyway, but I guess it's not your decision.

Insurrectionist posted:

Help my volume won't show up on my taskbar. It's greyed out in the system icons tab, and my normal solution when that happens (regedit->HideSCAVolume 1->delete->relog) doesn't work for the first time ever. On Vista, any ideas on how to fix it?

You can tell it to not show the icon in the system tray and make a shortcut to sndvol.exe in the quicklaunch bar as a workaround. This used to happen in xp a lot, assumed it was fixed. Never knew of a decent fix apart from what you already tried.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2012 14:06

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 19:34

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Mr. Bonky posted:

I don't know if this is a question for this thread or not, and I didn't find a topic on it when searching for it, but I was getting this error a lot in the Event Viewer:

Source: Term DD - Event ID: 50 "The RDP protocol component "DATA ENCRYPTION" detected an error in the protocol stream and has disconnected the client."

I figure it's just failed attempts at connecting to Remote Desktop from an outside bot or something, but it's got me a little paranoid. Would that error appear or has someone actually successfully connected to my desktop through the RDP and been spying on me?

Remote Desktop FAQ posted:

You can't use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to computers running Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Basic, or Windows 7 Home Premium.

If by any chance you are running another edition of Windows 7, here are instructions to change the basic settings. You can also block port 3389 in your router/firewall.

This is all assuming you have no need for Remote Desktop yourself, obviously.

Also,

AlexDeGruven posted:

RDP locks the physical screen when someone is connected (on desktop versions, that is).

Save your tinfoil hat for other occasions.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2012 15:57

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

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