Computer Upgrade Doesn't Create a Millon New Problems

You know what makes my day? When I upgrade the computer and it doesn't create a million new problems!

Decided it was time to add some pep to the old dependable home PC I put together in 2000 with a new motherboard, processor and memory. But I didn't want to have to re-install Windows or all my apps.

Purchased a new Asus A7N8X motherboard, AMD Barton 2500+ processor, and 512MB of Corsair 3200 XS RAM from NewEgg.com. This would about double my processor speed, improve overall performance with faster memory and bus, and would let me install a newer GeForce 4 Ti 4200 video board I already had. By not buying the absolutely "latest and greatest" equipment, the upgrade equipment was very reasonably priced.

This first experience with NewEgg was great. All items arrived even faster than quoted and everything worked right out of the shipping carton. They'll definitely get more of my business in the future.

Backed up my drives, did the hardware swap, upgraded the BIOS on the new motherboard, disabled the onboard audio in favor of standalone card (no problem, just preference), did a repair install of Windows XP to upgrade/update drives (covered very well here), and finally reinstalled Service Pack 1 from the Microsoft site. No snags. Everything worked fine. Big sigh of relief!

No Browser Innovation?

"People say there's no innovation in the browser space," said Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker, "but that's only if you're using IE..." from 7/16 Wired article.

While you can't forget the source, you also can't argue with the accuracy.

I've got to say I was pretty disappointed to hear Microsoft say that Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 would be the last standalone version of IE they'd do before the release of the next version of Windows, Longhorn (expected in 2005). It was especially galling to hear the reason was that Microsoft felt there was point in improving IE before then:

"Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," [Microsoft representative] Countryman said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS. CNET

Funny, I can think of lots of improvements that Microsoft could make to IE without enhancing the underlying OS: true support for PNG, additional improvements and bug fixes to it's already good support of CSS, the ability to block pop-up ads, improved management of favorites, the zoom text feature found in almost every other browser (including IE 5 for the Mac -- which Microsoft also has abandoned), etc., etc.

I know there are lots of excellent alternatives, but the fact is that IE is the standard for probably 80-90% of the browsing public and will act as the lowest common denominator for web design standards into the forseeable future.

Photoshop: Handle is Invalid

Here's one that doesn't come up every day: if you upgrade your computer to Windows XP Professional and find Adobe Photoshop 7 stops working and gives you a "Handle is Invalid" error message, check to see if you have a Wacom tablet driver installed. If so, delete it and you'll be all set.

Spirited Away by Anime

Maybe I've been watching too many cartoons with my son, but I really like some of the Japanese anime flicks. Recently, I saw a few really superb examples that are aimed more at adults: Metropolis, Cowboy Bebop and Spirited Away.

Metropolis turns Fritz Lang's epic of class struggle into a more personal tale of what it means to be human. Based more on classic Japanese graphic novels than the famous film, the new Metropolis does a great job creating a retro-sci-fi world that mixes the 1920s and the 22nd century.

Cowboy Bebop follows a mismatched group of future bounty hunters trying to prevent a madman from releasing a deadly plague. Pure escapism, but a fun to watch. The characters range from zany to uber hip, the action is as fast and slick as any John Woo movie, and the eclectic jazz/rock soundtrack is fantastic.

My favorite was Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki's story of a little girl who is separated from her parents in an abandoned amusement park only find herself trapped in a resort for wayward spirits. Every scene is filled with imaginative situations and characters and the art is simply stunning. It's not surprising that Spirited Away has been the top-rated movie in Japan for a while (knocking Titanic out of the top spot).

Getting around Win XP search limitations

Our organization is migrating from Windows 98 to XP. Behind the scenes XP delivers a lot of advantages over our previous operating system, but finally working full-time in XP has introduced me to some of the minor annoyances I'm sure many others have long since worked around.

Case in point: XP's revised Search feature. Not only has the interface become much more cramped and confusing (even after you disable the annoying "search pooch"), but when searching for text within a file, XP's Search purposely ignores a tremendous number of file types.

The good news is that we found a quick solution in Microsoft's online help system (Knowledge Base article #309173):

"To configure Windows XP to search all files no matter what the file type, obtain the latest service pack for Windows XP and then turn on the Index file types with unknown extensions option. If you use this method, Windows XP searches all file types for the text that you specify. To do this:
1. Click Start, and then click Search (or point to Search, and then click For Files or Folders).
2. Click Change preferences, and then click With Indexing Service (for faster local searches).
3. Click Change Indexing Service Settings (Advanced). Note that you do not have to turn on the Index service.
4. On the toolbar, click Show/Hide Console Tree.
5. In the left pane, right-click Indexing Service on Local Machine, and then click Properties.
6. On the Generation tab, click to select the Index files with unknown extensions check box, and then click OK.
7. Close the Indexing Service console."

Microsoft says this can affect performance of searches, but as far as I can see only because it now searches all files instead of skipping some. I'll take a slower, but more accurate, search any day.

De-cluttering Drives with Foldersizes

One of the immutable laws of computing must be that, no matter how much disk space you have, it will eventually all fill up with junk. Regular review and "pruning" are required. But if you're running Windows like I am, it isn't always easy to see what's hogging up all that space.

A fantastic solution I ran across the other day is Foldersizes, a freeware gem by Mark Richards of Key Metric Software, LLC. The program lets you browse your drives and directories and shows you both in table form and/or as a graphical chart, which directories and files are using up the most space. You can also export your results as HTML files for viewing and printing.

Foldersizes is still a beta version, but I found it stable, incredibly easy to use, and immediately helpful. The day I installed it, the call went out to the 20 or so people in our office to clean up space on our shared network drive. Foldersizes to the rescue! In a minute I had a nice report to share showing which directories were using up the majority of the space so people could focus their efforts most effectively.
Highly recommended * * * *