Well, here I am listing down the important tools and utilities I seem to use on the daily basis and without them life on internet & laptop really seems to be stuck, sort of 🙁

1. Winamp: No need to say anything. Winamp is possibly the best and lightest mp3 (these days videos also) player. Just run Winamp in the system tray and enjoy

2. Winrar: Utility to uncompress compressed files. Earlier winzip was my favorite but recently I swichted to Winrar as Winzip doesn’t support rar format. I am pretty happy using it.

3. Mozilla: I have almost stopped using Internet Explorer (except with some of the websites which say flat NO, sort of, to Mozilla). It is really good. With this I have stopped using any standalone download manager (DAP and Flashget have been among my favorites) also as Mozilla has one inbuilt and there are many addons also available.

4. Messengers: The latest communication channel: messengers. Latest versions of Yahoo, Gtalk and Skype.

5. uTorrent: Recently I started using torrents also. uTorrent, I am using as torrent client. It is light weight and pretty heavy to use. The only issue I have with it is that there is no feature like automatic bandwidth management. I have manually set a speed for download and upload as assiging the full badwidth to utorrent screws up normal surfing. And with manual settings when I am not surfing some of the bandwidth goes wasted 😉

6. Realplayer Alternate: I was a typical user who would stick with Real Player though its pretty heavy and eats a lot of resources. Sometime back my friend Vaibhav suggested me to go for Real Player alternate. I am happy using it now. very simple, small and precise 🙂

7. Replay Music: Just a new thing in my life too. A tool to record streaming audio, infact any audio coming out of sound card. Good one, saves as mp3 and has a very simple interface, just start, stop buttons and you are done.

8. RSS reader: Again a new item I am experimenting with. Till now I havn’t been able to find a good one. Generally the interface is clumsy and you don’t enjoy reading in that small window. I used RSS Reader first and using Omea Reader these days.

9. FSL Super finder: A replacement of windows search. I never liked (I seem to hate, indeed) windows search after Windows 2000. In XP it is totally screwed up. This one is a free utility with good interface and speed.

Use of all these tools makes me a happy user & surfer 🙂

Cheers
Sidhu

There are times when you just can’t do anything, I repeat, you just can’t do anything. In the evening I was working on my laptop and everything was fine. Next day in the morning when I got up, switched on the laptop and clicked on IE icon, it happily gave a beautiful error message “This application failed to start because msvcrl.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem.” So it was the time for Googling about the error. Thank God I had Opera installed. After 2-3 hits I came to know that it was a trojan. Finally, there was one dll which needed to be deleted to get rid of this error message 🙂 But after that there was some problem with IE in opening some of the sites. One option was to upgrade to IE 7 but don’t know why, I havn’t started liking IE 7 yet. So no other option left than restoring windows (I have Windows XP Media Center Edition installed).

On all the laptops HP creates a partition where they store all the crap to restore windows back to original condition. They call it recovery partition (It eats upto 11-12 Gigs of space and recovers nothing really 🙁 In the recovery tool provided by HP, there are 2 options one is called normal recovery which will restore the OS and won’t touch your data (They say so but I read many posts where people talked about having lost everything to this so called normal recovery 🙁 another is called destructive recovery (I just love the name :-* ) which erases everything on the hard drive and restore back the system to factory shipped condition (Term courtesy HP). Obviously I didn’t want to lose any data. So I tried with normal recovery and it didn’t work actually. So I contacted HP for the same and asked about any other option. They said NO in a very stylish manner as technical people are taught to do.

Now the only option left was to go for destructive recovery. I got some blanks DVDs and burned the data so as to free my hard drive. Finally after a few hours of work my hard drive was ready to face destructive recovery. I ran the tool and it worked out something for around 40 mins showing me a progress bar for which I waited to complete as a lover would wait for his watch to strike the moment when his sweet heart has to come 🙂 Finally it was 100% complete and system rebooted. You know to find everything intact as if not even touched. So started looking for why the hell this 12 GB recovery partition if it has to do nothing ?

I also had Fedora Core installed so one thought struck that might be possible it is not able to do because of those Linux partitions, so deleted those partitions also and then tried but of no use. Finally only one thing was left that delete all the partitions and give the whole space to one partition and then try. Thank God it worked and my laptop was back with a fresh installation of windows. (Later on I came to know that existing of more than one partition was the reason why normal recovery also didn’t work and few more interesting things – in all the cases it didn’t give any error that was not able to restore or something and in case of normal recovery they delete all the softwares installed later but their shortcuts will still be there ? ridiclous, foolish, stupid ). I already had made my mind to make Norton Ghost image of the C drive to avoid this operation again in future. Before making the image, many things had to be done like configuring internet connection, updating windows, installation of some utilities & uninstalling Norton Internet Security that I got pre-installed along with the OS.

I use Sify broadband for internet. So installed the sify dialer and when I tried to connect it gave one strange bloody,out of hell message that “You don’t have any anti-virus installed, click here to download updated antivirus from Sify”. I just can’t understand why the hell Sify is worried about anti-virus on my system. As I said at sometimes you just can’t do anything, had to install Norton Internet Security again to be able to connect to internet. Later on I got another command based dialer Supersify for Sify from internet developed by an individual (Many thanks to him (using it I can connect to internet with AVG Free anti-virus installed which is not recognised by Sify’s dialer as a good anti-virus) & one of my friend Vaibhav who googled this thing for me and was with me on voice during whole of this story which lasted for a day, a good short story it could make on a TV channel broadcasting peoples’ frustrations with the technology) So after sweating out for one full day my laptop was back to normal 🙂

PS: If you just got a laptop and Windows is in fine condition, please make an image of your C drive using some tool. Other wise probably you also have to write a blog 😉

Sidhu

When I got my Laptop, along with it also got Norton Internet Security and 2 months subscription for updates & all. Whenever I would boot up the laptop Internet Security would open the window for configuration. I kept on cancelling it for 2 weeks or so. But one fine (read not fine 🙁 day I configured it. It was very happy. Said Thank You at the end. But the best was yet to come. After 10-15 days Windows (XP media center is installed on my Laptop) started showing signs of strain 😉 It won’t start properly, after saying loading your settings it will stuck. Then I had to kill explorer.exe and start it again. With this also one strange problem that no startup items will be loaded 🙁 I was discussing the same with one of my friend. He said that Norton must be the culprit. So I thought about uninstalling it. When I tried to uninstall it gave some strange error. Anyways it also told about one URL from where one could check details of the error. Finally when the uninstall started it gave one beautiful message “You still have 39 days of subscription left, if you uninstall the product you will not be able to reuse the subscription” 😀

I was checking Tom Kyte’s blog. It was about an article titled A Note To Employers: 8 Things Intelligent People, Geeks and Nerds Need To Work Happily. Well first of all meaning of all three words from “define: * in Google”

1. Intelligent: having the capacity for thought and reason especially to a high degree

2. Geek: In computers and the Internet, a geekis a person who is inordinately dedicated to and involved with the technologyto the point of sometimes not appearing to be like the rest of us (non-geeks).Being a geek also implies a capability with the technology.

3. Nerd: A computer expert by aptitude and not mere training. Usually male, under the age of 35 and socially inept; a person whose tremendous skill with operating or designing computer hardware or software is exceeded only by his, rarely her, passionate love of the technology.

So all the three words refer to some exceptional class of people, not everybody 😉 Here are my views about all the points:

1. Yes flexible timings is a big thing. Different classes of people are there. One that can work in morning, another late night so and so and one that can’t anytime (but this article is not for those 😉

2. Yes everybody likes different kind of environment around. I like greenry and natural things, if possible 🙂 & the nap thing i strongly agree to 😉

3. Except while sleeping and listening to some classical genre of music, I need light 🙂

4. Nice idea. & I ALMOST HATE those people talking on the phone everytime, specially sales people & managers.

5. Yes. No suits and formals. It is upto you whatever you like. Reid & Taylor Suits are ok for James Bond in 007 series but are not going to help in bringing up a server from crash or catching an exception that has propagated to 5th-6th calling program because somebody didn’t handle it at proper place earlier 🙂

6. Not a big issue. Just need the company of like minded people and it is fine 🙂

7. Yes. No meetings just for the sake of meetings. We need work not meetings.

8. It hurts the soul.

So those are all my views about this. Do post what you think ?

Cheers !

Sidhu