Chrome and Linux

I have tried a free browsers such as Firefox, Opera and now Chrome on my Linux laptop (old R40e P4 Celeron 2.0GHz, 1GB), and must say Chrome is the best browser for resources. I like my Firefox for its wealth of extensions, but it often grinds my little laptop to halt for pages littered with excessive Javascripts and Flash adverts. Flash can be dealt with Flash Blocker, but Javascript is a bit hard. With so call Web 2.0, most "modern" websites are using AJAX (J = Javascripts), and turning off Javascript means useless websites. Unfortunately, this is the landscape of current WWW if is not worsen.

I have not scientifically test Chrome against other browsers, but Chrome does handle these websites where others may fail a lot better. However, it isn't without any problems. Firstly, it seems ever stuck to its BETA label, and its updates are more often than the others. You may argue this is good as updates keeps it current, but it is a pain with slow or metered connections, e.g. mobile network. Secondly, Chrome is still relatively new, web programmers are still targeting their sites to IE and Firefox, Webkit based browsers such as Safari, Chrome and others still taking the second seat if not the third. Thirdly, Chrome's link with Google. I don't know if Chrome's search/title bar is still linking to its parent company. It is a bit annoying to know all things you typed are going to be collected and sent back to the bee hive. Last but not the least, Chrome's convenience features. History search may be a good thing for many, but not for myself. I don't like my descriptions of my previous browsed popped up automatically when I typed a new URL. This can be a disaster if you certain types of websites get displayed while you are doing a presentation in front of a large audience. This is also not so good if you are security cautiousness. Personally, I would like to see Chrome more forgetful like Firefox. For example, I would like it to have an option to forget things when it is closed (history, cookies and temp files)

Nevertheless, if you are running Linux on a slow machine and is looking for a full feature browsers, Chrome is a decent choice.

VirtualBox Life Saver

I recently had problem with my OS and had to reinstall the OS from scratch. This caused big problem with my VirtualBox setup as it had serious problem to attach my images as they all had snapshot attached to them. After searching Google, I found this nice little life saver called CloneVDI tool, which allows you to detach an image from its snapshot (at least this was what I did) Okay, I had lost something, but at least I don't need to rebuild everything from scratch. If you are in the similar situation as me, you may want to give this little tool a trial too!

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=22422

Chang IP setting using CLI on Windows

Today I came across a way to set IP details on a Windows machine using CLI, and I just want to share it. For example, you can change the IP of a machine to 10.1.1.2 with subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and gateway of 10.1.1.1 by:

netsh interface ip set address local static 10.1.1.2 255.255.255.0 10.1.1.1 1

The full usage can be found out by typing below in a command prompt:

netsh interface set interface

Catch the duplicates

One of the problem I have is to find the find and remove duplicate files in my hard drives. Yesterday, I accidentally come across this little utiity called CloneSpy, which allows you to find and remove duplicate files in a number of ways. If you are having the same problems as me, you may want to give CloneSpy a trial and it can be found at http://www.clonespy.com

Update: Easy Duplicate File Finder is another nice alternative (http://www.easyduplicatefinder.com/) too.

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