Windows 7 ... hidden tasks

Few days ago I came across a site that shows tasks which are scheduled by Windows by default. Some are reasonable, but some are as usual useless. Here are few that I thought are good to be switched off:

AitAgent - Aggregates and uploads Application Telemetry information if opted-in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program.

ProgramDataUpdater - Collects program telemetry information if opted-in to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program

Consolidator - If the user has consented to participate in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program, this job collects and sends usage data to Microsoft.

KernelCeipTask - The Kernel CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) task collects additional information about the system and sends this data to Microsoft. If the user has not consented to participate in Windows CEIP, this task does nothing.

UsbCeip - The USB CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) task collects Universal Serial Bus related statistics and information about your machine and sends it to the Windows Device Connectivity engineering group at Microsoft. The information received is used to help improve the reliability, stability, and overall functionality of USB in Windows. If the user has not consented to participate in Windows CEIP, this task does not do anything.

ScheduledDefrag - This task defragments the computers hard disk drives. (If you are running Windows on a VirtualMachine, I guess this is useless)

WinSAT - Measures a system's performance and capabilities (Why measures it everyday?)

Windows MCE

There is one program that I really like from Microsoft and that is the Media Center. I have been using it since the XP version. For the most part, the XP version is working great after all these years. However, in few areas XP starts to show its ages, and that is in new hardware support and handling.

I have recently got an ATi 4550 card to replace my trouble 8600GT card. This card has HDMI output which should save me from have two cables for carrying video and audio separately. Despite all my attempts, I couldn't get the sound to work as XP would not recognize the HDMI as an output. Since my brother has a similar setup and the sound work well under Windows 7, so I decided to upgrade my XP to Windows 7.

Presto, sound works as it should be plus now I can use my MCE remote to change channels that have successive numbers, e.g. 112. I have this problem for a long time and finally Microsoft has fixed it!!

Data Recovery with PhotoRec

Yesterday I made a mistake to delete an important and have the joy of looking for ways to recover them. After a bit of search, I found this utility called PhotoRec. It seems recover files by searching for file signatures. It worked reasonable well but prepare to give it plenty of time to do it job! It took a whole day (24hrs) to go through my disk to savage files.



In addition, owning one of these can help too

C# Comments and Doxygen

Similar to Java, you can comment your code using special mark-ups, however, unlike Java, you need to source your own tool similar to javadoc to covert these comments into document pages. There are plenty of such tools for Windows, but for Linux, may I recommend doxygen to you. It is an open source documentation tool for a variety of programming languages, e.g. Java, C/C++/C#, php etc, and it is available through the APT package manager under Ubuntu. You can installed it by running

sudo aptitude install doxygen-gui

This would install the doxygen command line utility plus doxywizard, its graphical tool. To run the wizard, you run doxywizard in a command prompt, and after, you simply follow the simple step by step instructions. Presto, you have a well made documentation in minutes!

64Bit Windows 7 MCE and RMVB

While it is generally great to move to 64bit to take advantage of cheap memory, there is an exception. If you are using Windows Media Center to playback RMVB files, you may want to stay put to the 32Bit version as the 64Bit version cannot use the popular 32Bit Real Alternative DirectShow filter to playback RMVB video inside the Media Center. So, if you have lots of videos in RMVB format and you would like to use Windows Media Center to getting round things, you may want to still with 32Bit a bit longer ... at least till the 64Bit version of Real Alternative is available.

skype 4 and speed-dial

I have been using the USB-Skype adapter to allow me using my normal house dect phone for skype call for a while. It works great with Skype 3.8. However, skype decided to remove the speed dial from version 4 which is needed for my adapter to work. Hence, until today, I am forced to stay with version 3.

Today, I found a solution for my problem, and it works great. I found this little utility called SkypeSpeedDial which lets you to reveal the hidden speed dial feature in skype 4. You can use it to set speed dial numbers for contacts. To remind yourself the number, I use the rename function to add the speed dial numbers next to the contact names, e.g. John Smith (01)