I’ve found I get angriest when my expectations get altered. I think I”m going to have a nice leisurely weekend, and my computer loses a hard drive. Losing a hard drive is a slow, gnawing, exasperating pain. If you have data that you need like company books, tax or investment information and you lose that, there is a good chance that you’ve got addtional work to restore that data, or even more painful, recreate it from paper records.

It takes a good 12 hours or more to recover, reformatting or replacing disk drives, reloading the operating system, the drivers, your application software, and hopefully, your backed up data. Most folks, chuck it all, and buy a new computer, but even that takes time to shop, and you still need to reload applications and data. Then there is the expense of buying a new computer, or disk drive, or application software.

I lost my hard drive, because somehow my boot sector got corrupted. I found there are work arounds to repairing boot sectors, but a good majority of the time, you end up reformatting your disk and losing your data. I find myself getting more and more mad at Microsoft’s stupid, difficult to understand what’s going on menu choices, or menu choices that you want to be there, but you can’t get there unless you reformat the drive. I get irritated, because there could have been an easier way of doing all this.

You wonder why it takes so long, I counted over 40 application programs I use regularly on Windows. All of them need to be reloaded. Of those 40, eight of them are there only for Windows security. I’m talking anti-virus, firewall, disk cleaners, registry checkers, and malware removers. I trust them more that I do Windows security updates, which to me, just slow down my computer.

If you have ever considered Ubuntu, or any of the Linux distros, now’s the time that they come to mind. And actually, because they came to mind, I was able to save all my data before having to blow it all away. Here’s a reason to make yourself an Ubuntu boot disk, and try Ubuntu out, before your next disk problem.

Ubuntu sets up its boot disk so you can boot from the disk without altering the contents of your computer. This was a very smart move on their part. If you’d like to try their operating system environment without messing up your computer, make yourself an Ubuntu CD, load the disk in your CD drive and reboot. Up comes Ubuntu, without accessing your hard drive.

What’s nice about booting Ubuntu from disk is it has a file like explorer window that shows you the contents of your hard drive with all your files and folders. It is a full fledged file explorer, and you can copy files from one disk to another. That’s right, even though your running Ubuntu, you can copy your Windows files. There’s a good chance, even though, Windows cannot access your corrupted disk files, Ubuntu can. In my case, since the problem was in my boot sector, there was nothing wrong with any other portion of my disk and I had access to all my files.

I happen to have a 400Gb external USB drive that I use for just this type of backup situation. If you want you can take your entire drive to your external drive and your data is safe, but that’s probably overkill, go get your data. If you don’t have a large external USB drive, I recommend you purchase one. You’ll be surprised how handy they are when you need them.

And if you’d like to make yourself an Ubuntu boot CD, not DVD, download the Ubuntu desktop from the web site. It comes down as an iso file, download an isoburner, InfraRecorder, burn your CD. Try it out, you may find that Ubuntu is a very nice operating system. If you like to know a bit more about creating an Ubuntu cd, I’ve written a previous article on this topic, where I’ve discussed how to do this in detail and why you want a CD instead of a DVD.

I have more than one pet peeve about how Windows works. I’ll bet you do, too. Let me see, there’s boot time, the infamous Vista UAC, shut down time, and searching for files. That puppy dog in the XP search use to sit there and wag it’s tail at you, while it was searching with a big doggy smile on its face. I thought the dog was laughing at me. “You mean you want to find a file? Ha,Ha,Ha wait about 10 minutes and I’ll tell you no such file exists.” It use to piss me off. Sure Vista and Windows 7 are better, but not that much better.

If you’re like me, you put up with this agonizing long search for your file, because nothing else was available. But then again, every once in awhile, a ray of light shines down upon us poor, dumb, computer users, and you realize you’ve been blessed with a piece of software that works and works great.

This particular program grew on me, crept up on me, to the point where I now can’t do without it on Windows. It’s hard to change the way you work with a computer over all these years, so change comes gradually at times. Enough of the platitudes, let me paint you a scenario.

You are up surfing the Web and you find a new program to download, or an update to one of your existing programs, like Firefox or Thunderbird. Have you ever noticed how the download file name is a bunch of gibberish. You download the program, and your set to install. Ah, where’s the file you downloaded? It’s happen to me several times, even if I think its in my download directory, I’ve still lost it. What do you do? Watch the wagging tail again? No! I mean hell no!

You download a program called, Everything. It use to be called Search Everything, and that’s what it does. The program works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 7.

This search program works differently than other search programs. You install the program and during the install, it indexes all the files and folders on your computer. The indexing is fast. If you have a million files and folders, it will take you about one minute total on the install to build its index. After that, it automatically, updates its index on every new file and folder added, downloaded, or deleted from your system with out you doing anything.

So why is it so good. Let me count the ways. This is the fastest search engine I have found anywhere, and I mean fast. When you open the program a window opens, instantly, with all the files and folders on your system shown, yep, all million of them if you care to do some scrolling. But why do that when you have a search bar right up there at the top of the screen.

As you type in the search bar, you filter your files and folders out of the window. So every character you type reduces the list until you end up with the file you wanted. It is filtering the list as you type. Did I say it was fast. It is almost fun to search now to watch all the files melt away.

The user interface at first doesn’t look that great, it grows on you. Other search engines, ask you to put your search in a particular form field box for say, a file extension. I don’t find this helpful, as it makes me have to think about what I need, when all I really want to do is find the file. You do this all from the one search box in Everything.

If you want a png file, you could search on “*.png”.  You can use regular expressions, wild cards *, one character ?,  Boolean AND, OR, and NOT. You search every file and folder on your system, alas it does not search inside the file itself.  I could call it a drawback, but there’s other tools for that.

Once you find your file you can click on it and open it, or run it just like if it was in an Explorer windows.

Everything is not a system hog, it uses very little system resources.  Those million files and folders will take up 45Mb of memory, and 5Mb of disk space. 20,000 files uses about 3-5Mb of memory, and 1 Mb of disk space. With today’s memory being in the Gigabyte range this is a walk in the park.

I placed the program permanently on my Start menu by right clicking on the program and selecting “pin to start menu,” so its always on top. Any time I need to search for anything, I go “Start->Search Everything,” and I’m off and running.

I left out the best part of this program. It’s absolutely free. The author asks for a donation if you like the program. So give it a try, and enjoy!

I had an interesting discussion today at work. One of my co-workers arrived in the office with a couple of O’Reilly textbooks, and said they are on my bookshelf, if you’d like to use them as a reference. He said he was tired of looking up solutions to his coding problems on Google, fixing his problem, and then going on to the next problem without really learning anything. He wanted more information, thus the textbooks appearing on his bookshelf.

I had to admit, I was in the habit of not looking things up in texts, and just trying to find the answer to my one problem on the Internet. It usually works. I don’t know if you want to call this being lazy, or being efficient, maybe a little of both.

This led to electronic books and readers now available on line that can answer your problem and at the same time go beyond and give you the background information for future problem solving. We both agreed that we don’t like reading books on line and prefer a text in our hands. There’s something about the smell and feel of books in your hand that makes you treasure them, and enjoy the read.

The Kindle Reader for the Windows PC

Following our discussion, I downloaded the “new” free Amazon Kindle reader for the PC, and a free Kindle book from Amazon to check out the reader. This is currently just a Window’s application, and it is in “beta” which means there are some bugs. They ask you to put in your Amazon account id and password which automatically links the reader to your account. Now with one click of the mouse you can buy a Kindle book and download it to your PC reader.

There’s not a lot of free Kindle books available, but enough to check out the reader. You can find them on Amazon by searching for Kindle books, and a list of books are returned. A “Sort By” box will appear in the upper right side of the search results window, click on it, and sort by “Price low to high.” All the free books rise to the top of the pile. Sherlock Holmes it was. And the purchase at $0.00 was completed. Amazon’s hope is you’ll build up a PC library, and then buy a $259 Kindle so you can take it with you.

They did a nice job with the software, and the reader is nice. You can change font size and page width easily, to make it universally acceptable for all eyesight, and it keeps track of what page you are on in the read. You move pages by the arrow keys or scrolling and can jump via bookmarks and a table of contents.

Since I had loaded it at work and it seemed to work fine, I decided to try it at home and in the end unloaded it. I do not believe they have their syncs worked out yet, and maybe had problems with my loading it down twice.

One thing I did notice is that the books I “purchased” were kept at Amazon.  I had to share in my purchase in my account on Amazon, and then sync to ereader to read it.   A pain at best that does not work properly. If I understand this correctly, when I put down my money, I get a copy of the book for as long as I remain sync’d with Amazon, although this is done automatically by the software, a piece of me wants it both ways. Keep a record on Amazon, but also give me a copy on my computer or computers for instant set up and access.

The Kindle reader looks nice, but its not quite ready for prime time yet, and is still a beta. I think e-readers and by default PC readers will come into their own, but their still working out the kinks and are not quite ready for prime time.

I want to make a slight digression from building our new computer system to take a closer look at Windows 7 which is due out on Thursday, Oct. 22nd.  I find it curious that the next release of Ubuntu, 9.10, is due out on Oct. 29th one week later.  Is Microsoft starting to get a little worried about Ubuntu?  My thought is they should be.

To review Window 7. I looked at their features page. So here’s why you should spend money to upgrade from Vista, or if you were smart and our still running XP, from XP.  This is taken right from their Windows 7 feature page.

Windows 7 takes the headache out of sharing files and printers.  I thought your printer software took care of setting up a network printer.  My recent Cannon MX850 software went in smoothly with a couple of mouse clicks, since you have to install a printer driver from the printer manufacturer, what is Microsoft possibly adding to the mix here.

Speedy access to your favorite picture and documents.  Ah, didn’t Microsoft include this with XP.  Hello, what’s new?

Snap a quick and fun way to re-size and compare windows on your desktop. Wow! Windows finally figured out how to split a screen.  I have to admit this has been a pain when copying files between folders in explorer, I can’t think when else I have needed this feature.  Microsoft says it will be fun though.  I wonder if my 9 year old boy will think so?

Windows Live Essentials. 7 great programs for free: Mail, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, and more…I believe you can have any one of these programs for free anyway.  I’m thinking of Thunderbird for email.

Windows Search. We’ll finally we come to something that’s worthwhile. It’s taken Microsoft how many years to finally figure out they need a better search engine then the one they’ve been using.  Microsoft searches have always been slow and just plain awful.  So much so that I went to third party search utilities to do the same thing.  This is an improvement, and maybe worth the upgrade price.

Window Taskbar, better thumbnail previews.  Another area that Microsoft has been lame is allowing users to decide how to customize the taskbar.  What their pushing is easier-to-see icons and previews.  That’s questionable.  More ways to customize is an improvement, I think.

Full 64bit support. It looks like Microsoft is taking us into 64 bits.  We have the processors available, but until Microsoft supported it, application developers would not embrace it.  This is a good thing, but it will not affect your running of Windows 7 at home, it is more a gift to developers.

Remote Media Streaming.  So your going to log onto your home computer, which of course needs to be running, and listen to a song….why not just dial up Pandora?

Window 7 Touch…ah, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to touch my monitor and leave fingerprints on the display, that I constantly have to clean off the monitor.  I have to be convinced on this one.  Maybe…

You can run XP programs in compatibility mode…ah, pardon me.  We’ve been able to do this since Windows 95.  This just means Microsoft has added XP to the list of old operating systems to be compatible with, so they can retire XP and get more revenue,  to force users to upgrade their operating system.  They’re trying to force users off of XP any way they can.

So to sum up. This is typical Microsoft puffery marketing.  Telling you about features that you really all ready have in a new light.  My kids can’t stand their TV ads.  The big thing in this release is improved search, which is really a rework of the Vista search, and for the future full support of 64 bit, but as I said this should not be important in your use of the computer at home or work for awhile.

In the future, it will mean Microsoft will sell you the 64 bit version of all their applications.  After all, you always need something new to sell consumers to keep that revenue stream going. They’ll claim faster performance and quicker applications, you’ll see.

Windows 7 is just the next release of their operating system, just like a week later Ubuntu is releasing their next release of their operating system.  Only Ubuntu is free, and you do not have onerous registration licensing with Ubuntu.

I called Microsoft Customer Support the other day.   I was impressed.  I got an actual person to talk to in a relatively short time after going through the usual  telephone system automatic pick a number if it fits your problem.

I can’t say that I hung up happy, in fact, I finished the call  downright angry.  What was the problem?  About a year and half ago, I had built a computer. and paid for and installed the OEM version of Vista Home Premium as the operating system.

For those of you who have not looked at operating system pricing, the OEM version, as opposed to the Retail version,  is supposedly for system manufactures and integrators who build systems.

To continue the story, the system crashed and in the process took out the power supply and motherboard.  There was nothing wrong with the disk drives, and I still had Vista and all my data on the drives.   So I purchased a new power supply and motherboard, and connected everything up.

That’s when I found out my system wouldn’t boot.  What was the problem.  Well, in one word, Microsoft.  It turns out if you have an OEM copy of the operating system, It can only be reinstalled on a system with the exact same make and model of motherboard as where it was originally installed. My original motherboard was obsolete, so I was in a “Catch-22.”

What did Microsoft Customer Support say, “Well, that’s our policy.”  Which made me instantly angry.  To paraphrase heir policy, we know you build systems, and that you repair systems, but if your customer has a problem with his motherboard, which needs replacing, you’ll have to buy a new operating system, of course, you could have bought the retail version initially, hint, hint.  In order to get up and running I had to purchase another license.  Pay another $200 to turn a software switch on.

You would think that Microsoft would give its partners a break, which it supposedly does by making the OEM version about $100 less than the retail version.  But as you can see from this experience, you are better off initially buying the retail version.

Better yet, your better off boycotting Microsoft products all together.   Is that possible?  I believe so, yes,  I’ve just ordered the parts for a new computer.  It’s purpose is to prove to myself that I, or anyone else for that matter, don’t need to use Microsoft products.   That you can still have a fully functional computer without using Microsoft products.   I believe Microsoft is going the way of IBM, a has-been, and has peaked.  And I aim to do my part to help Microsoft along.  Yep, I guess you could say, “that’s my new policy.”