Category: Windows

service packs

I installed XP SP 3 on my home desktop machine today, and Vista SP 1 on my laptop. I needed to do the fix I mentioned in yesterday’s post to get the XP SP 3 install to run, but it was smooth sailing after I did that. The Vista SP 1 install on the laptop went fine, no hitches. Both installs took about an hour. (In both cases, I was running the install off a CD/DVD burned from an ISO aquired via MSDN.)

I don’t expect much from the XP service pack; it’s mostly just a rollup of fixes I probably already had on my machine. I’m hoping that the Vista SP, on the other hand, might improve speed & reliability a bit. I guess we’ll see!

Windows XP SP 3

I downloaded Windows XP SP 3 from MSDN yesterday and installed it on a few machines at work, no problems. I tried installing it on my home desktop machine today, and got an error partway through the install. The SP removed itself cleanly, from what I can tell, so no harm done. Poking around on the internet, I think this article may provide an answer to my problem. I haven’t tried it yet, though. Maybe tomorrow.

keyboard macros

I’ve been using WinKey to manage system-wide keyboard macros on my Windows XP machines for awhile now. WinKey is a nice little program that simply allows you to launch programs by pressing a key combo involving the Windows key. I use Win-X to launch Firefox, for instance. I’ve had this running on all my home and work computers for the last several years, so I’ve really got these macros hard-wired into my brain at this point.

Unfortunately, WinKey doesn’t work on Vista (at least *I* can’t get it working), and is no longer being developed or supported by Copernic, the company that (at one point) wound up with the rights to it. (They didn’t develop it originally, but I don’t remember who did.)

I recently came across a program called AutoHotKey, which is a fairly powerful scripting environment for Windows keystroke macros and general automation. It *does* indeed work on Vista, and is being actively developed. And it’s open source! You do need to read at least a little bit of the documentation to get it to do what you want, but it’s not hard to figure out. For instance, this command:
#x::Run C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe
maps Win-x to launch Firefox.
And you can send keystrokes to the active window quite easily, so, for instance, this little script:
#+T::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, MM/dd/yyyy h:mm tt
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return
pastes the current date and time into whatever app you’re currently using when you press Win-Shift-T.
You can just put all your little macros together in one text file, and put a shortcut to it in your StartUp group, and off you go. Neat!

I’ve been thinking about keyboard macros on the Mac, too. David Pogue did a column on PC and Mac macro programs a couple of weeks ago. There are a few interesting options on the Mac, but I haven’t had time to try any of them out yet.

Office 2007

I finally got around to installing Office 2007 on my desktop computer today, only about 7 months after I bought it. I installed it on my Vista laptop a while ago, but I just hadn’t gotten around to doing it on the desktop XP machine. It seems to have upgraded Outlook fine, without screwing up my mail file in any way. I guess that’s the thing I was most afraid of: losing all my e-mail. And it doesn’t seem to be significantly slower than Outlook 2003, which is something else I was afraid of.

KeePass

I finally finished entering all my passwords into KeePass. I previously blogged about this here and here. So it looks like it took me a little over a month to get this done.

I see that the author of KeePass is working on a 2.0 version, rewriting it in .NET/C#. That’s pretty interesting; I’m curious to see if anyone will create a usable Mac version (running under Mono). Some of the features he’s including in 2.0 sound good too.

Now, I just need to come up with a viable way of keeping the database in sync between my PC and Mac. I may try doing it with FolderShare. I’m using that on my work PC and home PC right now, to keep some files in sync between the two, but not on my Mac. There may also be a way to keep the file in sync with .Mac; the challenge on that would be automating it on the Windows side, I think.

KeePass

I entered some more stuff into KeePass tonight. I’m up to the letter “B” now. Hoo boy, do I have a way to go. In looking through my Vault database, I realize now that I’ve been using Vault at least since 1999, which certainly explains why there’s so much stuff in there. In all that time, I’ve never had a problem with Vault’s database getting corrupted or anything like that. Oh, and I’ve always been able to run the program just by taking my c:vault directory from one machine to another. Nice and easy.

I’m almost talking myself into keeping it, but I need to remember that it does absolutely no encryption and isn’t cross-platform. Of course, now that I think about it, I haven’t tried KeePass on the Vista laptop yet. I should probably make sure it works under Vista before I enter too much stuff in there!

password managers

I was going to try copying all my passwords from Vault to KeePass tonight. I really like Vault, but it uses an unencrypted database, and it’s not cross-platform. KeePass runs on both PC and Mac (via KeePassX), and uses good encryption. Unfortunately, I just figured out that I have a little over 200 passwords in my Vault file. It’s going to take quite a while to do all that copying and pasting. Vault isn’t really structured like KeePass either, so there’s no easy way I could cobble together an export/import program. I have to decide whether or not I want to bite the bullet on this right now, or wait. I guess it’ll only get worse if I wait, right?

burning coasters

Well, I tried to burn some files to CD-R on my Vista laptop for the first time. I didn’t look too closely at what I was doing on the first CD; I just accepted the defaults. It looks like Vista now defaults to burning a “live” CD in, apparently, UDF format. On the second CD, I looked more closely at what I was doing, and noticed the UDF thing. The instructions seemed to indicate that the CDs would be readable under XP, though, so I went ahead with the burn. When I tried the CDs on XP, though, they appeared to be blank. I tried them on the Mac, just for yuks, and they were totally unreadable. I did some digging, and I figured out that I can read them under XP if I have a proper UDF reader installed. Here’s a Microsoft KB article on the subject. Digging a little deeper, it looks like maybe Vista uses a newer version of UDF that’s incompatible with the UDF reading capabilities built into XP? After reading up a little more, I figured out that the latest Nero InCD would probably read the discs. I’d been meaning to upgrade my Nero install from 7.0 to 7.7 anyway, so I went ahead and did that, and made sure to install InCD. I can now read the discs. I wish Vista had made it clear that the discs wouldn’t necessarily be readable under a normal XP install though.

desktop Vista upgrade?

Just for yuks, I re-ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my desktop machine. It seems that a few of the issues that were present the last time I ran it have been straightened out. And those that the advisor still listed are probably correctable. There are drivers for my scanner and audio card now. And there are new versions of Nero and Retrospect, which are really the only incompatible software packages on my system.

This leaves me in the frightening position of being able to upgrade this box to Vista, if I really want to. I wasn’t planning on upgrading this thing to Vista any time soon, but now I’m tempted. Especially since I just did a full backup. I really think I need to resist the urge for another few months though. I’ve got the new laptop to use to learn Vista, and there’s really no reason I need it on the desktop. I can wait for other people to work through some more of the oddball problems out there.

almost done

Well, the sun is setting, and the backup of my main desktop machine is done, with no errors. I’m creating a disaster recovery ISO through Retrospect right now. Basically, Retrospect has a process that reads your Windows install CD and creates a new CD image that re-installs Windows and restores your backup. I’ve had to use this once before (on my machine at work, after a hard drive crash) and it works pretty well.

The one weird thing that gave me trouble today is that Retrospect was having trouble reading my Windows CD. After going through a number of things to figure out why that might be, I wound up just copying the CD to my hard drive first, then letting Retrospect read from the hard drive. My best guess as to why Retrospect can’t read from the CD drive would be that it’s loading some special drivers to make backups go faster, and that’s screwing up the regular CD drivers.

I’ve also finished setting up the old Gateway laptop. I reinstalled Windows XP, loaded all the Gateway drivers and software, upgraded to SP2, installed 73 patches, then went back and installed IE 7 and WMP 11. It’s in a pretty good state right now, though I don’t have any anti-virus software on there. There’s a trial version of Norton Anti-Virus 2003 on one of the Gateway CDs, but I don’t think I want to install that. Maybe I’ll install the 90-day trial version of OneCare, or maybe the free Avast or AVG. Or maybe I’ll let the next guy worry about that.