In my quest to avoid working at the mentally and physically draining night shift (especially the ungodly hours between 2 to 4 A), I’ve been going to the office in the afternoon for the past week or two. I’ve noticed the horrific traffic congestion that seems to be everywhere lately. It seems that every car, jeep, bus, and truck is out there. No doubt because of the price drop on fuel. I passed by the gas station last night and E10 is at about P30 per liter. At that price, I guess people decide it’s better to drive than take public transportation. But I’m wondering if things are better once you get stuck in traffic and burn all that fuel, and time, just sitting there idling.
My sister needed to install some medical courseware and it only runs under Windows so I took it as a chance to check out the recently released Windows 7 Beta. I had problems accessing the official site but after some searching here and there, I was finally able to procure a copy.
I installed the beta on my IBM Thinkpad X22 (it’s goodbye Kubuntu, for now). My Thinkpad only runs at 800MHz and has just 640MB and 40GB of RAM and hard disk, respectively. But it actually, surprisingly ran the beta reasonably well. We were able to run OpenOffice, Firefox, Quicktime, Flash, Acrobat Reader, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, and the medical courseware with no problems at all. One or two at a time only though.
Looks like Windows 7 is going to be better than Windows Vista. Well definitely, since it seems to be just Vista with the problems fixed :P
My sister needed a computer for reviewing for her medical exams so I lent her my old (ancient?) IBM Thinkpad X22 which is running Kubuntu. She needed Skype to be able to talk to her hubby who is in the US so we downloaded and installed Skype. Well, what do you know? It actually installed and ran without a hitch. Linux definitely has come a long way. If it we’re not for my games, I would have it on my Asus EEE PC 1000H. I wonder if it’s time to check out Wine, the Linux Windows Emulator, again. Hmmm.
Comment on source code:
/*
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
the following chunk o’stuff should likely be in common.jsp
since it’s used in several places.
When I get some free time, I’ll add it and will clean up
the pages that are using it. –MJ
I don’t believe that because MJ no longer works here. — TF
10 Mar 2001.
*/
RegEdit and Task Manager are two useful Windows tools for managing your computer. RegEdit allows you to edit the Windows registry, a global configuration setting repository. Task Manager, on the other hand, allows you to start and stop applications and processes among others.
What’s one use for these tools? Malware cleanup. Typically viruses, worms, and other malware would be hooked up into your registry to run upon Windows startup. You need to stop the malware process using Task manager. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, Select the Processes tab, choose the malware process, and click End Process. Of course you’ll need to know the name of the process. If I don’t, I would normally just stop everything I can and then run regedit :P
Once the malware process is (hopefully) stopped, you would want to be able to edit out their entries in the registry using RegEdit. Click Start->Run…, type “regedit”, and press Enter. Typically malware startup values would be under “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run”). Just carefully delete them.
Now here’s a problem: Some malware disables both these tools. The solution? Use alternate tools that provide the same or even bettter functionality such as RegAlyzer and Task Killer.