Archive for August, 2007
Thursday, August 16th, 2007
Back Into Vista – Video Conversion Anyone?
I fired up the Vista machine again, after a couple days off from it. My plan was to see how well it did playing a DVD out of the box. The answer: Excellent. I played a couple segments from Serenity. It would be perfectly viable, if I wanted to watch something nobody else did, for [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Computers,Software by Marshall
Saturday, August 11th, 2007
Junction Points
And in the process of showing Wayne Vista and geeking out some more, I noticed that in DOS the hidden folders that can’t be accessed and are in some cases obviously for backward compatibility are labeled [JUNCTION] instead of [DIR]. They are NTFS junction points, which act like folders (or files) but are pointers to [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Security,Software by Marshall
Saturday, August 11th, 2007
DOS Games on Vista
I finally tried some of the old DOS games on Vista. Most of them demand to be in full screen mode. Vista doesn’t support full screen mode for DOS, which I already had found but forgotten. I am used to clicking Start, Run, typing CMD and then if it’s a window, pressing Alt-Enter to make [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Computers,Software by Marshall
Friday, August 10th, 2007
Vista the Fourth
Not much more to report. A lot of my dabbling the past day or so involved the old machine. I did install OpenOffice.org on the new machine, and I let it install updates and the lame Ultimate Extras that were available. I’ve backed up craploads of stuff from the 2000 machine. One of the things [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Computers,Software by Marshall
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
Vista, Take Three
Obviously this is going to turn into a whole series of posts. I feel like I should do some really absurd things, like trying to install ancient programs, running old DOS games, that sort of thing, but we’ll see. I think the hidden folders not showing is a matter of permissions. Shouldn’t be a biggie, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Computers,Software by Marshall
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
Tricksy Vista
I played with Vista further, after writing about it yesterday. Got the machine on our router. Making it see the network and the internet was sooooo hard. It meant – ohmygod – plugging in a cable. Well, then to see the share on my old computer, I had to adjust the built in protection, which [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Computers,Software by Marshall
Tuesday, August 7th, 2007
Vista
I swapped the SATA drive into the new computer, changed the jumper on the DVD-RW drive back to master and plugged both it and the plain DVD drive in on the IDE cable, fired it up, and with minimal fuss was installing Windows Vista from the DVD drive. That went smoothly enough. The hardest part [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Computers,Software by Marshall
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
Aborting Forced Shutdown
It’s interesting to see this post about a stubborn, automated reboot in Vista. I haven’t setup my Vista testbed machine yet, but I’ve seen a shutdown countdown on older Windows. You can even provoke it by accidentally ending the wrong process. That’s how I learned about “shutdown /a” for aborting such a thing (by being [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Geek Tips by blog
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007
Amiga History
Over at Ars Technica they are working on a superb history of the Amiga. Sadly, I never had the pleasure of using one, but I have heard nothing but raves about them over the years, and I know there are many still in use and software still being written or adapted for them. Check out [...]
