Windows XP, Vista, Linux and Ubuntu computer PC software hardware tips

Here are other applications I recommend:

WinDirStat

View file space utilization of a drive using tree and block views - this interface allows you to quickly get an overview of what is actually using up most of your drive space. It is available free standalone or as a portable App.
Further Review of WinDirStat on HOWTO: Clean Disks in Windows and Linux.

 

Defraggler

The defragmenting tool in Vista is somewhat broken. Defraggler is a free tool which brings back defragging properly.

 

Lavasoft Ad Aware Free

Picking up adware and spyware can be a real pain. I occasionally run this to try and keep anything I don't want away from my PC's.

Synergy

If you have a laptop and desktop, or multiple desktops, this allows you to use one keyboard and mouse to interact with them all. It is also free. What is really great about this though, is that the clipboard is shared too - which makes it really convenient to quickly scoot data across between them.

 

FileHippo

FileHippo, on the face of it seems to be a website with some free apps. However, the cool thing is a tool which detects updates for all of those free apps. These apps are common free apps, like Firefox, Pidgin, Defraggler, CCleaner, Filezilla, Notepad++, Speedfan, Truecrypt, Winamp, VLC Media Player. The app simply sits in your system tray, and scans for updates. My only gripe is you still need to download individual updates, but this is a step in the right direction for single tool management of apps.

I recently came across a laptop which had a problem of seemingly random reboots, often at inconvenient times. If you find a computer reboots just when you are starting to do a lot - having a browser, an MS Office program and other things running, then you may be seeing what I saw.

If any windows XP Machine is spontaneously shutting down or spontaneously rebooting - this will help.

Check the virtual memory setting - the machine in question has a nice 1Gb of RAM, and is shared among a few developers, who being smart Alecs (we all are - can't really help it), do things like turn off the virtual memory assuming 1gb is enough for anybody and that it is better not to swap. The debates on to swap vs not to swap aside (there are good reasons to leave this alone, even if you think you have enough memory not to need it), when the machine runs out of memory, it has little choice but to just die.
To check this setting:

• Go to the desktop (Windows Key+D) or summon the start menu.


• Right click on "My Computer" and select properties.


• Click on the "Advanced" tab.


• Locate the "Settings" button in the "Performance" group on this page. Press it.


• Select the "Advanced" tab.


• Look at the line that says "Total paging file size for all drives:". The value after this should be more than the physical memory in the machine. If it is more, then this is not your problem - you need to try another solution.


• If it is significantly less than your memory size, or 0, then you should change it. Click the "Change" button.


• You will see your drives listed. Select at least one drive, and unless you really know your stuff here, select the option that says "System Managed Size" for that drive.


• Click "Ok" on each dialog until they are closed.


• Your computer WILL ask you to restart here. Please do so - I know restarting is annoying, but this one controlled restart will prevent the seemingly random ones.

This certainly solved the problems on the laptop in question. I hope it will help someone else.

When working with outlook in a corporate environment, you may get that dreaded email telling you your mailbox is too big and you need to reduce it.

There are two main approaches to this - archive a whole chunk of mail to a pst file, or delete a lot of mail.

Deleting mail, if there are lots of things which are not mission critical or covering your own back, if you find things with large attachments or emails from automated services and mailing lists, is the first best option. But it takes plenty of time, which not all of us have sometimes.

The option of creating an archive PST file and storing it locally instead is a good measure to quickly deal with the warning from the admin, and then tackle deleting mail later.

However, when you start deleting mail - when the archive file gets too big (older outlook version have a size limit of around 2 Gb) or you just want to save a bit of disk space, you may notice that the files are not going down.

Here are some steps for successful reduction of Outlook PST Mail Archive file sizes:

• If you find an undeletable item (like a task or something), create a temporary folder, move it to the folder, and move that folder to the trash folder.


• Click on properties for the PST file in outlook. If you click on "folder size..." you can quickly see which folders are eating the most space.


• Once in a mail view, right click on the top of the columns, in "arrange by" and select size. It will be conveniently grouped in "Huge", "Very large", "large", "Medium", "Small" and "Tiny". Go for those "Huge" ones first - they are likely to be multi-attachment mails, and Friday afternoon joke circulars.


• Once you have deleted plenty, remember to empty the deleted items folder. In the archive area.


• If the file size persists, this is because outlook keeps it size large for a while. It tags things for deletion, but does not physically remove them. To force this to compact - select the folder, then click on "File". You then need "Data File Management.." - you will probably need to use the double down arrow to see all. Your data file should be selected in the screen that pops up. Click on "Settings..", then "Compact Now". This will take a while as outlook rebuilds the file and its indexes. Once it is done - your file size will have been reduced to reflect only what is in the folders.

On another note, in the interest of privacy if you do not compact folders, mail that was sent to the recycle bin and deleted from there, may still be retrievable. So if you have something you want to remove properly, I suggest compacting the PST file, and then defragmenting your hard drive - which should improve its chances (but still not guarantee) of being gone. It is worth noting that it is difficult, if not near impossible to get rid of anything sent in outlook - as your admins will have logs, backups etc.

I regularly hibernate my PC to save electricity. However, this generally requires a bit too much faffing around, and more importantly, does not plug into Launchy.

I spotted this handy info on building a shortcut to hibernate. Once hibernate is enabled on your machine, right click on your desktop, click create and new shortcut.
In the shortcut location add:
rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll, SetSuspendState

Click next and I recommend naming it Hibernate. You can then drag copies to your start menu, quick start bar or what ever, and you can launch it with launchy once it has indexed it.

Original info came from The Computer Kid: Hibernate shortcut for XP.

Get more tips like this on power saving - HOWTO: Save Electricity Used By Your Computer

Mozilla Thunderbird is by far one of my favourite mail clients. As I have used it for some time, I have got to know some of its quirks and shortcomings, and gathered info and tips to help other users as well as my own reference.

If you use multiple OS's, and keep Thunderbird as Portable Application on a USB drive, you may wish to share it with a Linux computer without needing to use WINE or some other kind of Windows virtualisation/emulation.

It is worth noting that Portable Thunderbird will run in Wine on recent Linux distro's with pretty much no problems.

To do this, you will need to apply the steps in the article Sharing a profile between Windows and Linux, which refers to an old thing on the wayback machine which has long gone.

The main thrust of it was to copy the mail folders and basic prefs, but leave extensions (which may be OS dependent) behind.

So for future reference, here are the steps (with a few of my own refinements):

• Install Thunderbird on the target Linux machine. Chance are, you already have it, many distro's have it as standard.


• Start it once, so it creates a profile. Cancel when the create account screen is reached.


• Locate the new profile folder on your machine. It will be something like /home//.mozilla-thunderbird/.default/.


• Insert the USB drive with ThunderBird Portable on it. Locate the prefs dir - it should be under /Data/profile. A modern distro will have auto-mounted your drive.


• Symlink shared files to the new profile - this means they will only be available when the drive is plugged in, but will always be synchronized - as they are references to the same files.
  
  • Symlink newprofile/Mail to the target oldprofile/Mail
    ln -s /Mail Mail
    This will link the actual mail folders. Very important.
    
  ln -s newprofile/abook.mab newprofile/abook.mab
  This links the address books.


• ln -s newprofile/training.dat oldprofile/training.dat
  Links the spam filter training.

Copy the prefs.js file from the USB drive profile to your new profile.

Open the new copy of prefs.js in a text editor. I recommend gedit unless you are happy and familiar with some other LInux text editor. DO NOT USE A WORD PROCESSOR!.

Search for and remove any lines with "[ProfD]", which are auto-generated relative paths.

Now edit all the remaining absolute paths to ensure they use the Mail directory in the new profile.

Save the prefs.js

Now start Thunderbird - and all the mail, addressbook and training should be shared.

Virtual box is a great system for hosting multiple things on one machine - my main machine runs Windows Vista, XP and Linux in this way. It has its quirks, so here are tips I have gathered for it.

Script to add a port forwarding rule
Networking out in virtual box is really easy, but networking in is harder. Normally you need to issue a set of commands to get it to work. I decided to make my life easier by creating a single script to forward a host port to a port on one of the guest virtual machines. This is a windows batch file.

rem vboxaddroute guestname portname tcp/udp guestport hostport
VBoxManage setextradata "%1" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/%2/Protocol" %3
VBoxManage setextradata "%1" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/%2/GuestPort" %4
VBoxManage setextradata "%1" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/%2/HostPort" %5

I place it in the Virtual box program files directory (Program Files\Sun\xVM VirtualBox), and it must be run as an administrator to work.

If you use Linux and Ubuntu as often as I, then you will probably have some Windows apps you want to pull over.
Spotify
Spotify is a top program for listening to music you like. It works really nicely in WINE. What is really good is that spotify themselves support installation in wine
Ldraw
A number of the LDraw applications - designed for working with Lego Cad models, and POVray work well in Wine.

If you develop on Windows boxes and use SVN, you probably use Tortoise. However, Tortoise can sometimes be slow as it tries to index drives to place the tortoise state icons on folders.

By limiting which folders it indexes, Tortoise will run much faster.

Optimize Tortoise SVN Cache (TSVNCache.exe) Disk I/O

Motherboard title picture sourced (with permission from FreeDigitalPhotos.net.