Teknovis

I have always wanted to invent (or at least be one of the first to use) a new technology related word! Well, now I think that I have a good one – installups.

Installups are routine installations and upgrades that your operating system does. They generally make little sense to non-technical users, and they frequently occur at unsuitable times.

In fairness, credit for this word goes to a female friend of mine who recently told me:

I had to wait for ages in work last night for my laptop to do its installups.

She was referring to her Windows 7 laptop :o

Remember – you first read about installups here ;)

Tags: Windows 7

As I previous wrote, I am using Windows 7 as my main Windows operating system on my laptop.

To date, I dislike it intensely! I have not found a single useful feature that would really cause me to upgrade a Windows XP computer.

So today I am going to compain about the Windows Explorer! The following issues really annoy me, and I have been unable to find any solutions or workarounds online:

• The Windows Ribbon drives me nuts! It occupies a lot of area, and it does not give me any useful options that are not already available in the toolbar! I want it to vanish!
• Unfortunately, the entire toolbar area at the top of each window has grown very big :( I loved the way that I used to be able to put the address bar on the toolbar.
• I find the favourites that insist on appearing at the top of the panel on the left hand side to be useless to me.
• Why is there no button to allow me to “Go up one level” in the directory hierarchy?
• The status bar no longer contains useful information, such as the total file size when more than one file is selected!

Great, now I feel better :)

Tags: Windows 7, Windows XP

I came across three interesting settings for my tabs in Firefox today:

• In previous versions new tabs were always added to the right hand side of the tab bar. I found this very useful, because if I read my tabs from left to right it was a sort of First-In, First-Out queue. However, I could not understand why the new tab location seemed to be a bit random in the latest version :| After some searching I found Why to embrace Firefox 3.6’s new-tab ethos, which explains the logic bethind the new tab location :o After reading this I decided to try it for a while longer, and at least I now know how to change this behaviour if I change my mind!
• You can enable a very nice graphical tab switcher as described in Enable Visual Tab Switcher in Firefox 3.6.
• You can enable thumbnail previews of tabs in Windows 7 as described in Unlock thumbnail previews for Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7.

Enjoy!

Tags: Firefox, Windows 7

Last week I finally got my new laptop! I did get a Dell, but I did not get the Studio that I was considering in Virtualising my Laptop. The laptop came with Windows 7, and for the moment I have decided to leave that as my host operating system. However, I am already hating it, but I will leave that for another blog post…

After reading the articles described in VMware Workstation Versus VirtualBox I decided to try using VirtualBox, and I installed version 3.2.4. It installed perfectly.

I then tried to create my first virtual machine. This is where I had a few problems, that I will describe here:

• I was unable to assign more than 1500MB of Memory to my virtual machine :( After some research online I discovered this is a limitation of using a 32bit host operating system :o
• I assigned my virtual machine 2 processors since my laptop is dual core. However, when I tried to start the virtual machine I got an error code (VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED). It turns out that this means that the required hardware support for virtualisation is disabled in the BIOS. It was a bit tricky, because after changing this BIOS setting a hard reboot is required for it to become active – the normal soft reboot is not sufficient.
• I needed to install the Guest Additions in order to get the guest operating system to correctly identify and use my monitor resolution.

Since then everything has been working perfectly, and so far I have been very impressed!

Tags: Dell, Microsoft, VirtualBox, Windows 7