Omar Shahine's WebLog : Windows Tips

Get to the root of an Explorer window

omars — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 06:23:11 GMT

Found this great tip from Ed Bott. You can take advantage of the explorer.exe command line switches to scope a view to only contain the subfolders. For example:

explorer.exe /e,/root,"C:\Windows"

will open the Explorer Shell showing the Windows directory and all it's subfolders while hiding the other namespaces.

Show/Hide Filenames in XP Thumbnails View

omars — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 22:48:31 GMT

Did you know that if you hold down the SHIFT key when selecting Thumbnails View or opening a folder, the Filenames for the items will not be displayed? I didn't, but just found out because for some reason I had no filenames in any of my Thumbnails view and could not figure out why. This seems like an obscure feature since I could find no mention of it anywhere, and it took me 15 min to search for the answer on the web.

Here is an example. While this is usefull for Picture Views, it's usless for looking at folders/files.

[via MalekTips]

Digital Audio Tools

omars — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 04:51:00 GMT

Eric Virro has a great site that covers all aspects of ripping digital audio. Highly recommended reading if you are curios about lossless, transcoding, cleaning, converting etc.

Groove Virtual Office

omars — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:16:00 GMT

Wow. I installed Groove a few days ago on advice from Dennis and tried the File Synchronization feature. There are few things I will say this about. It's Magic. I can just drag stuff to a folder and it replicates to all my machines, w/o the use of a centralized server. Yes, this is basically doing P2P File Sharing from anywhere on the Internet to anywhere on the Internet (running the Groove Software of course). It doesn't get easier than this. The other day I tried to tell my parents how to copy pictures from their laptop to their desktop. They didn't know how, so they literally emailed them to themselves (cause they know how to do that). It didn't work though cause hotmail didn't take their 200 MB of attachments. Ack!

Groove is awesome and I'm at a loss for words. I can now have all my stuff w/o doing the hack of a job I was doing manually dragging folders around using Windows File Sharing (painful).

The Groove feature is a lot like the Castle feature in Longhorn (the file sync aspect of it). I don't even care what else the Groove software does. This feature alone is worth the money. Oh, it also sync's Favorites across all your computers. So long FavoriteSync. Groove even uses less RAM than FavoriteSync.

Guide to ripping CDs

omars — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 08:55:00 GMT

Chances are, you have ripped some of your music. More than likely you chose a lossy encoding. Probably it's in MP3 format. Maybe not. Anyway, I have continually refined my ripping strategy. It's optimized for getting the best audio quality on the device I am using. This includes:

Windows Media Center
Windows Desktop PC
Windows Tablet PC
Creative Zen Micro or other PlaysForSure compatible device
Apple iPod (yep, still have one)

I've ripped my cd collection a total of 3 times in my life. The first time I ripped my audio I did so in MP3 format on my Mac. It only supported 32 character file names, and I ripped 160 KBps. The second time I ripped everything in Windows Media Audio Lossless. A few months later my hard drive died and I lost all 200 GB of data. Ouch. This is when I adopted my new strategy.

Requirements:

Sleeves to store CDs in after ripping. Why keep the Jewl boxes? They weigh more and take up space.
Redundant storage. I utilize a RAID-1 setup with two 200 GB drives. I have a third 200 GB drive that is a slave to this data. The drive is in my Media Center PC.
Ability to RIP in a compressed lossless format (either WMA or AAC). I say compressed because if it were not compressed the ripped CD's would be huge.
Ability to transcode (downsample) the lossless audio format to a lossy one suitable for use on a laptop or portable device. Windows Media Player does this automatically when you connect a portable player. You can also use the Plus! Audio Converter to convert WMA lossless to WMA lossy or mp3. This product is also available in the Plus SuperPack.

When it comes to storing and archiving your CDs, I highly recommend the products from DiscSox. I utilize Eurolite4 CD/DVD Case with DiscSox Classic CD storage sleeves. Each CD gets placed in a sleeve and placed alphabetically. Any CD that is ripped gets an Avery Color Coded Label. Because my drives are only 200 GB I only rip albums that I really plan on listening to. When I get my 500 GB drives I'll rip more stuff and it will be easy to find albums that aren't ripped.

So, assuming you are using Windows Media Player 10, set the player with the following options (Tools->Options->Rip Music)

Format: Windows Media Audio Lossless
[ ] Copy Protect Music (unchecked)
[x] Rip CD when inserted
[x] Eject CD when ripping is complete

I set the location to D:\Files\Music which is where I have my big drive.

Once you have all your audio ripped I recommend that you run Album Art Fixer to get Album Art for any obscure CDs. This is an awesome app and will also fix other weird problems with the Album Art Meta Data.

Now, you can run the Plus! Audio Converter and convert to another format. If you plan on using an iPod as a portable music player then convert to 160 KBps MP3. If you plan on using a PlaysForSure compatible player then Windows Media Player will automatically convert the WMA lossless to a format that will be suitable for your device. You can optionally select the bitrate manually, or running the Plus! Audio Converter and selecting an appropriate WMA format (I like the VBR variants).

Now for you Mac folks, I don't believe Apple offers this feature in iTunes, and I don't know of any Mac software that can take a lossless AAC file and convert that to anything else. If there is then you would simply follow the steps above except rip to AAC Lossless, and then convert them using whatever software to a lossy compressed AAC format for your iPod.

As a result of this strategy, you will have all your CDs archived away in a nice compact case, full fidelity audio on your pcees, and compressed audio for portable use.

Make ico files from png

omars — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 12:14:00 GMT

I found this great freeware utility, png2ico, which will take a png and create an ico file. I wanted to create a favicon for my web site, and this made it super simple.

This will also come in handy when I need to make icons for my .NET applications. the VS.NET 2003 editor can't handle 32 bit icons.

Skype 1.1 Install Problems

omars — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 04:10:00 GMT

Jeff is having problems installing Skype 1.1. I am having the same problems. This is the first time I've ever used Skype, so this is not leaving a good impression.

Anyway, booting into Safe Mode allowed me to install it. Not sure why.

Microsoft AntiSpyware

omars — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 06:35:00 GMT

Not very often does a piece of software come along that blows me out of the water. A few months ago I got a very real experience dealing with spyware. Even after coaching my sister through fixing her computer, on my visit home over thanksgiving I found that all the spyware she had was still installed. When I looked in Add/Remove I was horrified at the number of strange entries in there. My attepmpts to remove them were difficult as well as the uninstallers for these products did such things as:

"Are you sure you don't want to not uninstall this program as it does x y or z for you"? [Yes] [No]

Basically they tricked you into not uninstalling the software by confusing the heck out of you with double and tripple negatives and the like. Eventually I got rid of all of it, and my sister now runs AdAware every few days, but it appears that she still has SpyWare issues every so often.

With my parents it was a lot easier. They had a 3 year old Compaq PC that was falling apart, and so we got them a new Dell that is super sweet. On this machine I made everyone a Limited User, except for my father's account since I've found that some programs just don't install correctly when you try (even though I try and authenticate during the install by running them with admin permissions). Anyway, on their machine, spyware will find a harder time making it's way there since my Mom can't be tricked into downloading something that is not good for her.

But I was still left uneasy knowing this could happen again. Well a few weeks ago I started beta testing the GIANT AntiSpyware software. I admit, my expectations were low having used some of the other stuff our there. However, I was BLOWN away by how nice a piece of software this is. Not only does it protect you from AntiSypware but it tells me what the heck is going on with my computer. I love knowing when applications are adding themselves to the Startup process, adding Contextual menus, modifying x, y or z. It just leaves me feeling like I'm in control of my PC when installing programs.

It doesn't stop there. My Dad installed the software and called me up telling me how much he loved it! I really hope this gives assurance to all those people out there that have been burned by SpyWare to not be affraid of their computers any more (or screwing them up). I'm really proud and happy that Microsoft is providing good tools to protect our users.

Download it now.

Do Not Deliver Before

omars — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 17:08:00 GMT

My buddy Reeves just pointed me to a sweet Outlook feature that I never knew about called Do not deliver before. In a recent post I commented on how I'm trying to get in the habit of not doing work email on weekends, vacations etc. Well one problem with this is I could be on a plane or a train and I want to hammer out some mails from my inbox (but don't want to send them, because that sets a bad example). Additionally, if people are on vacation, I know that my email will just sit in their inbox and drift down to the bottom and possibly get lost. Worse, if they check their email over their vacation, I don't want to create work for them and stress them out.

Here is a good example. It's 1 am, and I just thought of something I want to tell my manager and our admin. Well they are both on vacation till Monday. So what is the point of sending this to them now? It could get lost, or read and left in the inbox. Instead I have scheduled to have it delivered Monday afternoon.

So, using "Do not deliver before", you can just tell Outlook not to send the message before a specific date and time. To do this simply:

In a new mail message select Options from the Toolbar (if you are using Word Mail)
Click the Do not deliver before checkbox and enter a date and time.
Hit send

Viola!

Update: Thanks to Chris Graham for letting me know that if you have an Outlook Deferred Deliver Rule this will override the per message option and deliver the mail according to those settings.

Windows XP File Association Fixes

omars — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 16:49:00 GMT

The other day I was unable to open a .cab file on my PC. I had no idea how the file association got messed up. At the same time my .zip file associates were bad. I stumbled onto this great site that has some registry entries you can download to fix some of these common problems.

Microsoft DigitalPersona (Biometric Fingerprint Reader)

omars — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 12:28:00 GMT

Who ever said Microsoft doesn't innovate is just full of it. I just picked up the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader. This thing is so utterly cool. The software it comes with is awesome.

Basically it works like this. You install some software, reboot, plug in the reader and train it on any of your fingers. Now if you have a PC at home that is configured to use Fast User Switching, you just place your finger on the device and it automatically logs you in. It even knows which user to select.

But it gets better. On any web page, or Application, you can configure the device to enter your credentials. The UI is super cool, and it does an amazing job at guessing where the right text boxes are, and places this nice halo around the box to make the selection explicit. You can also point it to things if it cannot figure out what the username, password or signin buttons are. Finally you can configure it to select “Remember my password” and such. Below is a screen shot of what this looks like for logging into my blog.

I have also configured the device to enter my Microsoft Money Password, which is super cool.

Kudos to the Microsoft Hardware folks. This thing rocks. I wish my laptop had a biometric reader.

CD/DVD Burning in XP

omars — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 08:52:00 GMT

<rant>

I really want to know why the top two windows CD/DVD burning programs as such big fat junky programs. For many years I used Roxio Easy CD Creator. In fact, I used Toast on the Mac for many years (same company) and was super pleased with it. For a while Easy CD Creator annoyed me so I switched to Nero for a while, but I growingly got annoyed with all the junk they installed.

So after I got a DVD Burner and wanted to burn DVD Videos from my DV Camera I switched to Roxio Easy CD Creator 7. Now this looks like a nice program on the back of the box, but when you load it up you realize that it's one bloated unusable buggy program. For one thing they decided to rewrite all the standard windows controls like tabs, buttons, and menus. Now, when I see a program do something like this I wonder what a huge freaking waste of time it must have been for their developers to basically rewrite a bunch of UI Widgets that the OS gives you for free. Additionally, when you re-write OS widgets you introduce bugs and behaviors that the OS does not have, which in turn confuse your users. So, this is an immediate sign that the software is probably junk as those resources should be spent making a decent program.

Well the final straw for Roxio happened last night when I launched it to burn a DVD and it would not launch. I went to the web site and there was a honking 50 MB download that fixed this problem. Ugh. Not only that, but after installing it Roxio broke my CD Drive. Lucky for my google skills I found a KB article that instructed me to hack my registry to fix this problem. The KB article mentions version 5, but I guess Roxio still didn't learn it's lesson in Version 7. Even worse was I found this after 2 hours of taking my PC apart and fiddling around thinking my drive was dead.

Now none of this would be a problem if Windows was able to write to DVD like Mac OS X. And none of this would be a problem if Microsoft made a program like iDVD that allowed me to burn high quality DVDs of my Home Videos, or backup my pictures to DVD+RW. Longhorn will surely deliver some acceptable level of DVD writing as it does with CD-ROMs, and expose APIs to do this so developers can spend less time writing DVD burning code, and more time writing quality software. However, we all know that in the case of Easy CD Creator it won't matter as they will do all this anyway.

Well, now that I have ranted this topic off my chest there is good news. I found an excellent program called CopyToDVD which behaves and acts as I expect. It looks and feels like a Windows program, installs in under a minute, and does it's job nicely. It doesn't hack up your system, screw up your DVD drive, nor does it require that you reboot to use it. And best of all it's $40.

</rant>

PDF SpeedUp

omars — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:34:00 GMT

I have previously written about how darn slow Adobe Acrobat 6 is when launching. I don't understand why Acrobat is so darn annoying. Here are some things I don't care for:

Don't create a “My eBooks“ folder in My Documents when I have nothing to put there.
Don't load 500 plugins when none of them are necessary to view a PDF
Don't place shortcuts for some lame Internet Printing thingy in my Start Menu (I loathe Start Menu Advertising)
Do install a PDF IFilter so that indexing products like Lookout can index PDFs w/o installing it seperatley
Don't load PDFs in IE because it is god awful slow
Don't make copy and paste so freaking hard
Don't ask me to install other Adobe software when I boot Acrobat
Don't create an updater (6.0.2) that creates an additional entry in my add/remove programs

If you want to fix most of these things, PDF SpeedUp is a free application that should come bundled with Acrobat. It's a must have piece of software to make Acrobat behave (as much as you can anyway).

Spyware

omars — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 12:41:00 GMT

A few days ago I got one of those dreaded phone calls from my sister. It went like this:

sister: “My internet is broken”
omar: “Huh?”
sister: “When I launch Internet Explorer it quits right away”
omar: “Uh oh. Did you do anything unusual the other day?”
sister: “I saw this pop up dialog thing, and I clicked something, and since then it stopped working”
omar: “You are 0wn8d”.

Seriously, I freaked out. Being 3000 miles away and being the technical life support for my family, extended family, friends of friends etc meant I could not use Remote Assistance to fix the problem. I thought of a variety of things she could do but ultimately decided that she needed to salvage and pave her machine. What a pain.

However, I went to some unrelated web page that day and it said that if you are experiencing a problem where IE unexpectedly quits then you have spyware and to go here. Great web site. I was able to direct my sister to our (Microsoft's) toll free PC Softy hotline (866) PC SAFETY where she got someone on the phone to help her out. Sadly because she didn't have an internet connection she could not download the anti-spyware tools. So she went over to my parents, burned Lavasoft Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy (S&D) which nuked all the badness from the machine. I asker what happened and she said that they cleaned up a million things.

Spyware should be illegal. Users like my parents and my sister don't know any better, and Windows does a poor job of protecting them. Having said that the site and tools (and PC Saftey) are fantastic.

Nikon RAW image thumbnails in XP Explorer shell

omars — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 08:51:00 GMT

I've been mildly annoyed by the fact that I can't see thumbnails of my Nikon NEF (RAW) image files in the XP Shell. Luckily someone has a product that takes care of this.

http://www.softwhile.com/product_nv.html

Update: check out this post for another software package: