The Tech Nut

I’ve been quite busy for the past few weeks. As I said before disappearing off the blog, my exams were looming on the horizon. Now they’re in the rear-view mirror. I had 5 of them - Social Studies, English, Maths, Science and French, in the same order. Well, it would be useless to go into a full-out explanation for each one of them, because frankly, who cares? I’m done with them, and you don’t care either. But since I mentioned them, I’ll write one line about each one of them.

Social Studies involved a decent amount of rote learning, and I had a bit of trouble piecing together the answers when I was giving the exam. Geography might will be troublesome. English was a piece of cake. Studying for it involves going through the literature lessons and the writing skill formats. Maths was pretty smooth as well. Might have messed up one small question, can’t be too sure. In science, biology was smooth, and maybe a hiccup or two in physics and chemistry. French is an untold disaster. I’ll take the liberty of saying that I’m not alone in my class in saying this.

So much for the exams. The results are yet to come out, so, there’s a lull before the storm. Let me shift the attention to JSTS or the Junior Science Talent Search. I’m not sure if I mentioned it earlier, but I had given the JSTSE (E stands for Examination), and I cleared the first round. The second round involved an interview, which was today, on Wednesday. Didn’t go to school, the interview was at 2 PM.

Fastforward to the interview. First - Biology. The interviewer was a nice person, and we got along OK. He asked me about my strengths, then about where I was from, then about the Code Warriors. Then he got more into Bio. I messed up quite a few of them. Didn’t know about the Blue Revolution, which phylum mushroom belonged to and about some medicinal plants. In fact it was so bad, that in the end, he asked me how much I expected out of 10. I said I expected 3-4, because, truth be told, it was bad. He told me look at how much he had given me.

It was a 7. I was a bit dazed.

Then was physics. He was interested in how much I liked my school, because the guy before me, Shikhar had been asked a question like that. I said I did. Then he asked me how much I paid. Then he asked me how satisfied(?) I was with paying that much for the school. I said that the returns would be monumental compared with the initial investment. Cheesy, yet true… He then asked me some SI units - length, mass, time, luminosity, current. No probs. Then he asked me to provide the volume of a 1 cm side cube in m³. Easy. Then the difference between velocity and speed.

Chemistry, the interviewer was an slightly aged man. Very slowly closed the file after reading my name, and  very slowly took off his glasses and placed them on the folder. Hehe. He asked 3 simple questions. One about why there were so many carbon compounds. Another about fullerenes. And the last about the difference between isotopes and allotropes. The most simple one so far.

On a whole, I see no reason why I shouldn’t get through. Just the Bio might hold me back.

I’ve got exam blues. Mid-term exams are starting on the 30th of June. Going on till around … dunno when … Posts are on hold till then. I’m sorry, but I’ve also run out of scheduled posts.

BEEP

Well, this is concerning the new copy of Windows I installed on my PC.

I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP Pro. It had Service Pack 2 pre-installed. Naturally, I wanted SP3 as well, regardless of the fact that that dreaded piece of code is what brought my PC to its knees weeks ago. So, I went to the Microsoft Update site. I never ever use Automatic Updates. I just don’t like unknown pieces of software worming its way into my machine.

Well, first of all, I had to install WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage, if you forgot that after reading my last post, go boil your head). That, and one security update later, I was all set for SP3. 66MB of cumulative updates.

This time, the installation was glitch-free. No problemo.

Well, after that, I wanted to install a few more updates. I found I could install Silverlight, .NET frameworks and Windows Media Player 11. WU or Windows Update proceeded to download my updates, but it couldn’t install them.

I had no idea what went wrong. No error message, no nothing.

So, since I had become realy pally with Microsoft Customer Care these days, I decided to call them up. I had almost memorised the menu options, and did not wait for the cheerful recorded menu to finish. Well, I almost expected the people at the call centre to say, ‘Oh! It’s you again…’. Nothing of the sort happened.

I explained the problem, and then he took my product key, name and some other stuff to verify my copy of Windows and also to create a case (Woo…sounds big!). Then he was transferring me to a Service Engineer, when I cut the line.

I haven’t lost my marbles, but I was just trying to save some battery on the cordless. But I accidentally, cut the cordless, before switching on speaker phone, which effectively meant slamming the phone down on the holder. So I called them again, and this time, while I was explaining my problem, another call came. I put the first one on hold, to talk to the other person and found that MS had called back to see if I was really interested in Customer Care. Well, I then put the second call on hold, and tried to tell the first guy that I was already back on line with the original guy, but all I managed to do was cut both calls. I then decided to wait for one or two calls from MS. Yeesh…

Finally, the Service Engineer did call up, and we got cracking. Here’s what you should do, in case you’re having a problem, similar to mine:

1. First, we need to stop the services related to Windows Update. So, go to Start Menu -> Run, and type in cmd to open the Command Prompt.
2. Here, type in net stop wuaUserv to stop the Automatic Update service.
3. Then type net stop BITS to stop the Background Intelligent Transfer Service.
4. Then type net stop cryptSvc to stop the Cryptographic Service. Now, don’t close the Command Prompt.
5. Then, go to C:\Windows and rename the folder SoftwareDistribution as OldSoftwareDistribution. Basically, this folder might have got corrupted, and we need to get it out of the way for fresh files.
6. Do the same for C:\Windows\System32\CatRoot2. Rename it as OldCatRoot2.
7. Then, we need to register some DLLs with the System Registry. Open up the Command Prompt again, and type in, each of these, followed by Enter:

• regsvr32 wuapi.dll
• regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
• regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
• regsvr32 wucltui.dll
• regsvr32 wups.dll
• regsvr32 wups2.dll
• regsvr32 wuweb.dll
• regsvr32 winhttp.dll
• regsvr32 jscript.dll
• regsvr32 urlmon.dll

Now, restart your PC, and try Automatic Updates. It should work.

Then, the Customer Care guy asked me about the service. I told him that the Customer Service was pretty good. And I’m not joking. It wasn’t cold and impersonal, and my problem did get solved. Which is good. But then I said, that a good product doesn’t need customer care. A good product would be easy to use and wouldn’t have problems like that. Then I went on and on about how Microsoft could learn a lot from Ubuntu. Like overwriting MBRs. Simple installations. Better interoperability and stability in general.

He then offered to send me a survey to fill up and return. Obviusly, he couldn’t keep up with my barrage of complaints.

Today, I was installing Google Gears. I’ll write more about the software itself, later, but more importantly, I had to highlight something from the Terms and Conditions Agreement. Due to some whim of mine, I was perusing that useless bit of literature, and came across this clause.

2.3 You may not use Gears and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google, or (b) you are a person barred from receiving the Services under the laws of the United States or other countries including the country in which you are resident or from which you use the Services. (emphasis mine)

Now, past (a) of the clause, simply put, means that anyone who’s not an adult can’t use that. Somehow, I don’t think that’s a great move. Who knows, maybe stuff that everyone uses, like Google Talk might be having such hidden clauses?

Anyway, this is the first license agreement which refers directly to the age of the user.

Life would be difficult without shortcuts. OK, don’t look shocked at the immorality of the Nut. I refer to nought save desktop shortcuts. Y’know…those nice little icons that magically appear when you install software.

Well…this post is about creating a three-tier system for shortcuts:

1. The most important ones, two or three of them, should go to Quick Launch.
2. The next most frequently used ones should go to a folder on the Desktop.
3. The lease used ones should go in a sub-folder to the folder created in the above step.

By default a couple of shortcuts should already exist on quick launch. It’s those little nameless icons next to the Start menu. Before you delete all of the icons, add the ones you’ll need, because adding icons to a Quick Launch bar with no icons is difficult. You should add your web browser, media player, messaging applications, and so on. To add your icons, drag them to the bar, between two existing icons, till a vertical black bar appears. Then drop it there. Once you’re done, delete the unnecessary icons.

Then, you should organise desktop icons. As I mentioned in an earlier post, create a folder called Shortcuts on your desktop. Now, put all your desktop shortcuts in here. In case there are some extra shortcuts to applications that didn’t already exist on the desktop, that you want to add, find the application on your hard disk, right-click and Send to -> Desktop (Create shortcut). You might want to rename the shortcut to remove the Shortcut to … . Then add this shortcut to the Shortcuts folder.

You might also considering creating a Current Folder, for temporary storage of stuff, and all those downloaded files that inadvertently end up on your desktop. Remember to clear out that folder from time to time.

Inside the Shortcuts folder, create another folder and name it anything, or as in my case Cold Storage. Select all the shortcuts, except the most frequently used ones, and put them in this folder. Simple?

You can, if you want create a toolbar for your Shortcuts folder. Right-click an empty area on the taskbar (where minimised windows hang out), and go to Toolbars -> New Toolbar… . Now locate the Shortcuts folder on the dekstop. The toolbar by default will be made on the taskbar itself. To move or resize it, first select an empty area of the taksbar, and uncheck Lock the Taskbar. Now you can resize and move stuff. Now, there are two things you can do…

1. Reduce the size of the Shortcuts toolbar, till all you can see is the double arrow for expanding it. This way you can save some taskbar real estate. The bar can be either moved right next to the time and system notification area, or right next to the Start menu. Your choice… You can drag the bar, by dragging those couple of dots next to the bar.
2. You can drag the bar to the Desktop and creating a floating toolbar. Resize it according to your needs. You can also dock it to the top of your screen, or to the left or right. Once done, you can right click on the left edge of the toolbar for some options like:

• Uncheck Show Title - You already know it’s the shortcut toolbar.
• Uncheck Show Text - If you only have a few icons, and don’t need the accompanying text to identify the application, you can uncheck this. Beware, you might get confused, unless you’re very sure about this.
• Go to View -> Small/Large Icons - This is upto you. If you don’t have text for the icons, you can make them big. It looks better.
• Check or uncheck Autohide and Always on top -> Self-explanaratory. By default if you have applicatios running, the toolbar is not default, with Autohide enabled, you just need to move the mouse to the appropriate edge of the screen to access your shortcuts. With Always on Top, well…the toolbar’s always ton top!

Next, you can create shortcut keys for your favourite applications. Go to the Shortcuts folder, and select right-click, say Mozilla Firefox and click on Properties. Under the Shortcut tab, select the Shortcut Key field. There are two kinds of shortcut combinations you can have, as far as I know and have tried, and have needed. Firstly, you can assign a funtion key (F2, F3 etc.) don’t use F1, because that is generally used for help in most applications. Otherwise, you can use a Ctrl + Alt combo, like Ctrl + Alt + Del, for the Task Manager. I use Ctrl + Alt + M for Firefox. Similarly, you can set shortcuts for your most used apps as well.

I think that pretty much rounds up how to:

• Organise your desktop
• Make your applications more accessible.

P.S. With this post, you won’t even need to use the Start menu.