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• Where's the Swap File/Partition?

  - by chrisbunney

  I'm investigating the virtual memory configuration of a Debian based Amazon EC2 instance, and as my background isn't in system admin, I'm slightly confused by what I'm seeing. We're using MongoDB, and the monitoring server we have indicates that the Mongo process is using about 20GB of swap space, however I can't figure out where this is located on the server. As far as I can tell from using the various suggested methods from Google, there is either a much smaller amount, or none at all. top indicates that there is 1.8GB of swap memory: top - 15:35:21 up 6 days, 3:23, 1 user, load average: 1.60, 1.43, 1.37 Tasks: 47 total, 2 running, 45 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 1.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 14.7%id, 83.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.1%st Mem: 3928924k total, 2855572k used, 1073352k free, 640564k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 1887788k cached swapon -s doesn't seem to think there's any swap space: Filename Type Size Used Priority free -m doesn't think there's any swap either: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3836 3663 172 0 626 2701 -/+ buffers/cache: 336 3500 Swap: 0 0 0 And neither does vmstat: procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 0 3 0 66224 641372 2874744 0 0 21 5012 21 33 2 2 76 19 But cat /etc/fstab thinks there is a swap partition: /dev/xvda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/xvda2 /mnt ext3 defaults 0 0 /dev/xvda3 swap swap defaults 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 However df -k gives no indication of the xvda3 partition: Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 16513960 15675324 0 100% / tmpfs 1964460 8 1964452 1% /lib/init/rw udev 1914148 28 1914120 1% /dev tmpfs 1964460 4 1964456 1% /dev/shm So I really don't know what to make of this, because I appear to have a process using about 10 times more virtual memory than what might be available, and I have no idea where this virtual memory is on the system. I'm probably misinterpreting the output of the tools, so I'd be grateful if someone would be able to set me straight: What have I got wrong, what's the right interpretation, and how do you reach that interpretation? EDIT0: We use 10gen's MMS for monitoring the database, the relevant section for memory from the last data point is: "mem": { "virtual": 20749, "bits": 64, "supported": true, "mappedWithJournal": 20376, "mapped": 10188, "resident": 1219 }, This JSON is specific to the database process (I believe) rather than the system as a whole. fdisk -l /dev/xvda outputs... nothing? I tried each of the 3 xvda entries in /etc/fstab as well: root@ip:~# fdisk -l /dev/xvda1 Disk /dev/xvda1: 34.4 GB, 34359738368 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4177 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/xvda1 doesn't contain a valid partition table root@ip:~# fdisk -l /dev/xvda2 root@ip:~# fdisk -l /dev/xvda3 root@ip:~# Edit1: Output of cat /proc/meminfo for the sake of completeness: MemTotal: 3928924 kB MemFree: 726600 kB Buffers: 648368 kB Cached: 2216556 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 1945100 kB Inactive: 994016 kB Active(anon): 60476 kB Inactive(anon): 12952 kB Active(file): 1884624 kB Inactive(file): 981064 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree: 0 kB Dirty: 387180 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 73380 kB Mapped: 1188260 kB Shmem: 48 kB Slab: 149768 kB SReclaimable: 146076 kB SUnreclaim: 3692 kB KernelStack: 1104 kB PageTables: 16096 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 1964460 kB Committed_AS: 305572 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 16760 kB VmallocChunk: 34359721448 kB HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB DirectMap4k: 3932160 kB DirectMap2M: 0 kB

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• Unmountable boot volume blue screen, what should I do?

  - by Josh

  I was trying to install an update from NVIDIA for my GTX 560, but while it was installing, my computer shut off. After a few minutes, I turned it back on. It got to the Windows boot screen and then had a blue screen error and if left on it would just keep doing that. A few details about my PC: I haven't added any new hardware or software, I'm running Windows XP Professional 32 bit and Windows XP Professional 64 bit on the same hard drive for about 2 years now. I have 2 other hard drives also, but I don't have one large enough to hold everything from my main hard drive, so formatting isn't an option. Now, as for what I've done so far: I've scanned the RAM with "memtest - 86 v3.4" and it said that it was good. I scanned the hard drive in question with chkdsk /r and it gets to 50% and tells me something along the lines of "the drive has one or more unrepairable problems". I also tried to use chkdsk on the drive I installed the new copy of Windows XP on and it got to 75% then jumped back down to 50% and stayed there (I had to reboot the pc). So, after that, I turned off auto reboot and got to read the blue screen error code and I looked it up only to find that nobody seems to have this problem, just problems close to it. The error code is 0x000000ed and I've seen a lot of these online but none that matched the detailed part of the code UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME 0x000000ed (0xfffffadf513c19a0, 0xffffffffc0000006, 0, 0) So, I have installed another copy of Windows XP Professional 32 bit on one of my other hard drives in hopes of accessing the data on the drive in question and when it booted it asked if I wanted chkdsk to scan the drive in question and this is what it found: file record segments 12740, 12741, 12742 and 12743 were reported unreadable. Then it says "recovering lost files" but it sits there for a few seconds and then just boots to Windows. I can't access the drive in question from Windows as far as I can tell, it just says "drive not accessible" and when I go to properties it says that the drive has 100% free space. So, after that failed I didn't give up, I looked for another way to access the drive in question. I used a Ubuntu bootable disk and was able to access the drive in question without any problems. However, I can't access the registry editor because it's a .exe file and that won't load from Ubuntu. I made a copy of the "Windows" folder and put it on one of my other drives and that's where I'm stuck at now. I'm sure my drive works fine, I know chkdsk can't fix the problem with it and I know what caused the problem in the first place for the most part, but I don't know what to do about it. I have a laptop that I can use to download and burn disks if needed and I also have the other copy of Windows XP Professional 32 bit that I can use that's installed on the computer in question (so I know it's not a hardware issue). I'm pretty sure it's a driver issue or the update was editing the registry when it shut off and left me when a broken registry. I've tried accessing C:\Windows\System32\CONFIG only to find that the Windows XP disk repair option can't even access the files on the drive in question. It seems I'll need to be able to do everything from Ubuntu unless there is something I haven't tried with the Windows XP disk. I didn't install the update on Windows XP 64 bit but yet it also has the same blue screen error (that's where the error code above came from but I haven't checked to see if they are the same). They both stopped working at the same time, so I assume it's one problem causing both to not work.

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• Understanding NFS4 (Linux server)

  - by drumfire

  I've been a bit bothered by NFS4 on Linux. Some information 'out there' seems to conflict with other information, and other information appears hard to find. So here are a couple of things that caught my attention, hopefully someone out there can shed some light on this. This question focuses exclusively on NFS4 without Kerberos etc. 1. Exports There is ambiguous information in the exports manpage on the structure of /etc/exports. To quote from exports(5): Also, each line may have one or more specifications for default options after the path name, in the form of a dash ("-") followed by an option list. The option list is used for all subsequent exports on that line only. What does "subsequent exports on that line only" mean? 1.2 fsid=0 not required anymore? I was searching for fsid when I found a comment on the linux-nfs list stating fsid=0 is not required anymore. Now I'm just confused, do I need it with nfs4 or not?! 2. Non-exported directory still mountable Say I have the following tree: /exp /exp/users /exp/distr /exp/distr/archlinux /exp/distr/debian And I have the following entries in this fstab entry: /dev/disk/by-label/users /mnt/users ext4 defaults 0 0 /dev/disk/by-label/distr /mnt/distr ext4 defaults 0 0 /mnt/users /exp/users none bind 0 0 /mnt/distr /exp/distr none bind 0 0 And my exports is exactly this: /exp 192.168.1.0/24(fsid=0,rw,async,no_subtree_check,no_root_squash) /exp/distr 192.168.1.0/24(rw,async,no_subtree_check,no_root_squash) And exportfs -arv shows: exporting 192.168.1.0/24:/exp/distr exporting 192.168.1.0/24:/exp Then why am I able to do this and get no error on a client: mount -t nfs4 server:/exp/users /tmp/test Even though /exp/users is not exported? I didn't export this directory, and while I don't see the contents of /dev/disk/by-label/users unless I specify crossmnt, I am still able to write to the directory. Everything I write to there goes to the underlying directory of /exp/users which can be seen when I umount /exp/users; ls /exp/users.. 3. The odd case of showmount -d server As stated by rpc.mountd(8), this command should display directories that are either currently mounted by clients, or stale entries in /var/lib/nfs/rmtab, as can be read: The rpc.mountd daemon registers every successful MNT request by adding an entry to the /var/lib/nfs/rmtab file. When receivng a UMNT request from an NFS client, rpc.mountd simply removes the matching entry from /var/lib/nfs/rmtab, as long as the access control list for that export allows that sender to access the export. (...) Note, however, that there is little to guarantee that the contents of /var/lib/nfs/rmtab are accurate. A client may continue accessing an export even after invoking UMNT. If the client reboots without sending a UMNT request, stale entries remain for that client in /var/lib/nfs/rmtab. After reading this I surely wonder: Isn't it terribly insecure to just expose this type of client information; Aren't unaware server admins bound to have an rmtab with a lot of stale clients; Is this the reason that clients that mount nfs4 directories with mount -v get to see output like "nothing was mounted" even though something was mounted? I have a lot of other questions regarding nfs4, but I'll keep it at this for the moment.. :)

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• Thoughts on home NAS server

  - by user826955

  I currently have a NAS with a 2x2TB HDD 1x16GB SSD layout on a mini-itx atom board. The NAS is in a Lian Li PC-Q07 case. On this system I was running freebsd 8 with a gmirror raid 1 setup, which was enough for my needs. So far I was using the NAS for: Fileserver with AFP protocol (only mac clients used) SVN server hosting all my source trees of my projects JIRA (performance was okay-ish) Timemachine backup for the macs The power consumption was about 38W, although I did not put HDDs asleep when unused (I think this is not possible in a raid setup). I liked the NAS because: the performance was good through gigabit LAN (enough for my needs) power consumption was good its a pretty small case and fits in one of my cupboards I disliked the NAS a bit because: it was a bit noisy, the Q07 case vibrated a good amount because of the HDDs. I switched the NAS off every evening I do not have a real backup of the data on the NAS, only the internal raid 1 as safety. I really dont want to loose my source trees under no circumstances, so I would really be sleeping better if I knew I had regular backups somewhere. Recently, the board seemed to have died, I can't boot anymore. Thus, I was thinking about a redesign of my NAS (I still have to find out what parts are broken, I probably need to replace the mainboard and SSD. HDDs seem to be okay). First of all, I was wondering what other users have as backup for their NAS? Are you actually using a second NAS, and regularly copying over the data to have it safe? Or is there any better solution to this? I was thinking about getting a cheap NAS like the synology DS112j with only one disk, and use rsync or something similar to regularly copy data over to the second NAS (wake the second NAS upon start, shut it down after copy). Although this approach seems somewhat weird, It would have the benefit (?) that I could use a single disk instead of raid in the main NAS, and put the disk asleep when idle, and have the NAS running 24/7 with low energy consumption (I found no way to do this with a gmirror setup). Is there any recommended backup solution for a small NAS? Then I was thinking about a different raid setup. Since I have to buy a new mainboard as well as SSD, I might as well switch over to a i3 board with more ram, and also switch to ZFS. I am not familar with ZFS, I've never used it, but I read and hear much about it. Would it be viable to set up a ZFS storage with only 2 disks? Can I easily extend this storage with more disks, once I choose to add some? I could maybe get a new case like the Fractal Design Array R2 which has more 3,5" slots. I could as well get another 2 disks, but I would prefer sticking with the existing 2 for enegery/heat/noise reasons. Should I go for a ZFS storage or stick to my gmirror setup? I would also like to keep freebsd as operating system, and also I dont need any web gui or something (that is, I dont need/want to use FreeNAS or Openfiler etc). Does anyone maybe have a sample setup in use so I can compare energy consumption/noise/software setup? Any guidance towards the NAS of my dreams (silent, low energy, safe w/ backups) much appreciated.

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• Causes of sudden massive filesystem damage? ("root inode is not a directory")

  - by poolie

  I have a laptop running Maverick (very happily until yesterday), with a Patriot Torx SSD; LUKS encryption of the whole partition; one lvm physical volume on top of that; then home and root in ext4 logical volumes on top of that. When I tried to boot it yesterday, it complained that it couldn't mount the root filesystem. Running fsck, basically every inode seems to be wrong. Both home and root filesystems show similar problems. Checking a backup superblock doesn't help. e2fsck 1.41.12 (17-May-2010) lithe_root was not cleanly unmounted, check forced. Resize inode not valid. Recreate? no Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Root inode is not a directory. Clear? no Root inode has dtime set (probably due to old mke2fs). Fix? no Inode 2 is in use, but has dtime set. Fix? no Inode 2 has a extra size (4730) which is invalid Fix? no Inode 2 has compression flag set on filesystem without compression support. Clear? no Inode 2 has INDEX_FL flag set but is not a directory. Clear HTree index? no HTREE directory inode 2 has an invalid root node. Clear HTree index? no Inode 2, i_size is 9581392125871137995, should be 0. Fix? no Inode 2, i_blocks is 40456527802719, should be 0. Fix? no Reserved inode 3 (<The ACL index inode>) has invalid mode. Clear? no Inode 3 has compression flag set on filesystem without compression support. Clear? no Inode 3 has INDEX_FL flag set but is not a directory. Clear HTree index? no .... Running strings across the filesystems, I can see there are what look like filenames and user data there. I do have sufficiently good backups (touch wood) that it's not worth grovelling around to pull back individual files, though I might save an image of the unencrypted disk before I rebuild, just in case. smartctl doesn't show any errors, neither does the kernel log. Running a write-mode badblocks across the swap lv doesn't find problems either. So the disk may be failing, but not in an obvious way. At this point I'm basically, as they say, fscked? Back to reinstalling, perhaps running badblocks over the disk, then restoring from backup? There doesn't even seem to be enough data to file a meaningful bug... I don't recall that this machine crashed last time I used it. At this point I suspect a bug or memory corruption caused it to write garbage across the disks when it was last running, or some kind of subtle failure mode for the SSD. What do you think would have caused this? Is there anything else you'd try?

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• Why is writing to my external hard drive slow, while benchmarks show fast writing?

  - by matix2267

  I have an iOmega eGo 320GB portable drive connected through USB2.0 to my laptop running Windows Vista. It's been working fine for quite some time until recently it became very slow when writing e.g. when copying ~300MB movie over to the drive at first it is extremely fast but it actually doesn't write it only puts in cache and then hangs on last 10-20MBs for about a minute. When copying larger files it's the same story: starts fast but then slows down to ~5MB/s (sometimes even slower down to 2MB/s). Strange thing is that I have always had caching disabled for this drive (it was disabled by default and I never bothered changing it). At first I thought that the disk is dying so I checked S.M.A.R.T. values and everything is fine there. I also run chkdsk and it seemed to fix the problem - it worked fast for a few minutes but then it slowed down again. I also tried plugging it into another USB port - no difference. Additionally I noticed that reading under certain circumstances is sometimes slower e.g. loading times for some games are ~10 times longer, whereas simple copying files from this drive to my internal HDD is fast. I ran a speed benchmark using CrystalDiskMark with a 5x100MB run and strangely got these results: read write (MB/s) Seq 33.05 28.25 512k 17.30 15.27 4k 0.267 0.372 4kQD32 0.510 0.260 This is different from what most other people have (I've found many threads about slow disk write while googling but all of them were slow on benchmarks too) which is why I decided to post this problem here. BTW most of the time when writing (or sometimes reading) the activity led is mostly idle (blinks a while and then stops for longer, sometimes has slower blinks ~1 sek, sometimes goes off for a few seconds - extremely long blink :) ) but when benchmarking, defragmenting or just reading (copying from this drive, installing apps from installers there, watching HD videos) it is blinking really fast (like it should) and there are no slowdowns. It shouldn't be driver issue unless stock Windows drivers have some issues I'm not aware of.

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• What is the proper way of debugging a slow Windows installation?

  - by Niklas

  You know the drill - you've been asked to check why you cousin's computer is running slow. I was there yesterday. Being a Mac user since 2007 I haven't really dug deep in Windows internals in the past five years. Googling for answers reveals many, many different answers: broken registry, spyware, antivirus program, fragmented disk, turning of visual effects etc. In this particular case I was asked to look at a two year old HP laptop with Vista. Windows was running incredibly slow and even opening up a new explorer window took almost a minute. I ended up doing everything of the above: running cc cleaner, defragmenting the disk, turning off visual effects, turning off norton and a bunch of other things people believe have an impact on Windows performance. Now I'd like to understand this in depth. Is there a proper, "scientific" if you so will, way of debugging and understanding where the problem with a slow running Windows installation lies? (In my particular case this concerned Windows Vista but let's try to create general guide for XP and Windows 7 too). To me, it seems wrong to just run a bunch of different tools without understanding the underlying cause of the error.

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• How to free up space on RHEL6 /boot safely?

  - by ams

  I am trying to do yum update on RHEL 6 box and I am getting this error message Transaction Check Error: installing package kernel-2.6.32-279.9.1.el6.x86_64 needs 10MB on the /boot filesystem installing package grub-1:0.97-77.el6.x86_64 needs 10MB on the /boot filesystem Error Summary ------------- Disk Requirements: At least 10MB more space needed on the /boot filesystem. My /boot has the following # ls -lah /boot total 74M dr-xr-xr-x. 5 root root 2.0K Jun 10 08:05 . drwxr-xr-x. 23 root root 4.0K Aug 27 03:08 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 99K Apr 26 12:53 config-2.6.32-220.17.1.el6.x86_64 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 99K Feb 10 2012 config-2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.x86_64 -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 99K Nov 9 2011 config-2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64 drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 1.0K Mar 29 2012 efi drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 1.0K Jun 10 07:53 grub -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15M Jun 10 07:53 initramfs-2.6.32-220.17.1.el6.x86_64.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15M Mar 29 2012 initramfs-2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.x86_64.img -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 15M Mar 29 2012 initramfs-2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64.img -rw------- 1 root root 3.4M Jun 10 08:06 initrd-2.6.32-220.17.1.el6.x86_64kdump.img -rw------- 1 root root 3.5M Jun 10 07:53 initrd-2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.x86_64kdump.img -rw------- 1 root root 3.4M Mar 29 2012 initrd-2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64kdump.img drwx------. 2 root root 12K Mar 29 2012 lost+found -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 168K Apr 26 12:55 symvers-2.6.32-220.17.1.el6.x86_64.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 168K Feb 10 2012 symvers-2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.x86_64.gz -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 168K Nov 9 2011 symvers-2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.3M Apr 26 12:53 System.map-2.6.32-220.17.1.el6.x86_64 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.3M Feb 10 2012 System.map-2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.x86_64 -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 2.3M Nov 9 2011 System.map-2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.8M Apr 26 12:53 vmlinuz-2.6.32-220.17.1.el6.x86_64 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 171 Apr 26 12:53 .vmlinuz-2.6.32-220.17.1.el6.x86_64.hmac -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.8M Feb 10 2012 vmlinuz-2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.x86_64 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 170 Feb 10 2012 .vmlinuz-2.6.32-220.7.1.el6.x86_64.hmac -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 3.8M Nov 9 2011 vmlinuz-2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64 -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 166 Nov 9 2011 .vmlinuz-2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64.hmac here is the disk usage on boot # du -h 13K ./lost+found 282K ./grub 247K ./efi/EFI/redhat 249K ./efi/EFI 251K ./efi 75M . Problem is that when I got this severer at my ISP I used their default image for RHEL 6 which only allocates 100MB for /boot clearly this is not enough. How can I get around this problem, is it safe to delete any of the above files some of them seem to be on the disk more than once? Is there some way of expand /boot without re-imaging the machine?

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• Installing XP through USB-flash disc

  - by Crazy Buddy

  I don't know whether this could be asked here... So, Pardon me for this. Probably, this is based on My laptop and a contradiction to this question asked already here... I tried to format my "government-provided" laptop (No CD-drive). I thought those IT guys are proving that they're too smart..! I have the Windows XP CD right now. I didn't like to stick with some home-made OS from our Government. So, I used another laptop to format the govt. thing and tried to install XP (As I didn't have enough bills to invest on Windows 7 or 8). Case 1: First, I allowed WinSetupFromUSB 1.0 beta 8 to deal with the flash disk. I wondered for the first time that XP text-screen appeared. Using the first part, I formatted my laptop. It started to copy files, entered into the next part, and completed the installation. I started my PC for the first time. XP splash screen appeared. Suddenly, a blue screen flashed and disappeared (I can't even read what it says). Rebooted and arrived at the screen, "Start Windows Normally". It happens and happens still - like an infinite loop :-) Case 2: Next, I used Rufus 1.2.0 to transfer files to my Flash and it screwed everything out. Even if I used Flash to boot, it arrives to the same screen "Start Windows normally". It doesn't show any response of Flash being inserted. Then I recognized that, It's simply copies everything to the flash disk. Case 3: Then, I started with Novicorp WinToFlash (giving utmost priority to this site). I booted with the disk. I entered into the first part - "Text mode". Some lines started running like that "Press F6 if you..." like that. The last thing I saw was, "Setup is starting Windows..." Suddenly a blue screen appeared like this captured one. I've a suspicion that the same screen appears again & again in first case. Man, I'm dead. Case 4: For the sake of my last hope, I used WinSetupFromUSB 0.1.1. I was shocked on arriving at a screen which says something "GRUB4DOS" like that and some commands like {command line, reboot, halt, \find menu.lst} and when I go inside those "find" options, I see "Error:15 - File not found". Googling provided some commands to mount SETUPLDR.BIN file in the "grub" thing which also proved unsuccessful... Some sites say that Factory reset uses only some function keys. A guy said that it's F11 for lenovo. Screw him. It's all a waste-of-time. But, I think SE would help me out. Is our government IT guys doin' this to me? Are they Soooo smart to spark some blue screen in front of me to freak me out? Any suggestions or new (useful) USB transferring things would be appreciated. It's very urgent. So, It'd be better if you guys pay some attention in debugging and help me out..? Thanks for your time guys :-)

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• Best SSD tweaks for Windows 7

  - by Nick Berardi

  I have seen many articles about tweaking an SSD, but many of them seem outdated, or too broad (read all Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 general tweaks). And I know that Windows 7 has been specifically tweaked for SSD by the Windows team, so I don't want to do something that was written for Windows XP in mind and end up circumventing something the Windows team has specifically designed in to Windows 7. So my question is what are the best SSD tweaks for Windows 7 that you have found to get the performance out of your drive? I hope to make a comprehensive list in the answers below so there won't be so much disinformation in the forums about what to do and what not to do. Here are a few that I see posted up on the forums alot, and some questions to get the discussion started: Disabling Superfetch. Yes or No Disabling Page File or limiting it to a really small size such as 500 MB. Disabling Indexing. Yes or No Disabling Defragmenting. Yes or No What are your thoughts do you have any that have worked for you? When providing an answer please do your best to back it up with a reason and possibly some documentation from MSDN, TechNet, or another credible source.

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• Computer freezes after watching Youtube videos

  - by Roberts

  I had Windows 7 installed all september. But I installed Windows XP Professional back because my computer couldn't handle the new OS. After first boot I tried to install newest flash player (from Adobe website), but it failed. I had my old setup on USB drive and it worked. I don't know is it important or not. I am watching Youtube videos in my free time (almost every hour). After few days the computer started to freeze when I open a page with the video or close the page with video, not while I watch a video. No BSODs. Nothing in Event viewer. I use Firefox only. When computer freezes the sound wont. If iTunes is playing a radio station or is it another video playing in background, the sound wont freeze. Last few days the mouse wont freeze. Its a strange symptom. If I click few times then the cursor will actually freeze. I just want to know where does this problem come from (hardware - graphics card, old motherboard or it's just some glitch in setups). If it's not graphics card then I will be happy. The graphics card is ATI Radeon HD 4650 - brand new. Catalyst 11.8 installed. Things I have tried: Installed newest flash player after a week (the setup didn't fail this time) Installed latest video drivers Deleting cookies Defragmenting hard drive Using TuneUp utilities for computer cleenup Installed latest Mozilla Firefox Cleaned the PC Changed CPU Fan speed almost to max (just to be sure) Things I haven't tried yet: Didn't try playing videos on other browsers What can I do now?

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• Best SSD tweak for Windows 7

  - by Nick Berardi

  I have seen many articles about tweaking an SSD, but many of them seem outdated, or too broad (read all Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 general tweaks). And I know that Windows 7 has been specifically tweaked for SSD by the Windows team, so I don't want to do something that was written for Windows XP in mind and end up circumventing something the Windows team has specifically designed in to Windows 7. So my question is what are the best SSD tweaks for Windows 7 that you have found to get the performance out of your drive? I hope to make a comprehensive list in the answers below so there won't be so much disinformation in the forums about what to do and what not to do. Here are a few that I see posted up on the forums alot: Disabling Superfetch. Yes or No Disabling Page File or limiting it to a really small size such as 500 MB. Disabling Indexing. Yes or No Disabling Defragmenting. Yes or No What are your thoughts do you have any that have worked for you? When providing an answer please do your best to back it up with a reason and possibly some documentation from MSDN, TechNet, or another credible source.

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• Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

  - by mbcrump

  Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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• Add keyboard languages to XP, Vista, and Windows 7

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you regularly need to type in multiple languages in Windows?  Here we’ll show you the easy way to add and change input languages to your keyboard in XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Windows Vista and 7 come preinstalled with support for viewing a wide variety of languages, so adding an input language is fairly simply.  Adding an input language is slightly more difficult in XP, and requires installing additional files if you need an Asian or Complex script language.  First we show how to add an input language in Windows Vista and 7; it’s basically the same in both versions.  Then, we show how to add a language to XP, and also how to add Complex Script support.  Please note that this is only for adding an input language, which will allow you to type in the language you select.  This does not change your user interface language. Change keyboard language in Windows 7 and Vista It is fairly simple to add or change a keyboard language in Windows 7 or Vista.  In Windows 7, enter “keyboard language” in the Start menu search box, and select “Change keyboards or other input methods”. In Windows Vista, open Control Panel and enter “input language” in the search box and select “Change keyboards or other input methods”.  This also works in Windows 7. Now, click Change Keyboards to add another keyboard language or change your default one. Our default input language is US English, and our default keyboard is the US keyboard layout.  Click Add to insert another input language while still leaving your default input language installed. Here we selected the standard Thai keyboard language (Thai Kedmanee), but you can select any language you want.  Windows offers almost any language you can imagine, so just look for the language you want, select it, and click Ok. Alternately, if you want, you can click Preview to see your layout choice before accepting it.  This is only the default characters, not ones that will be activated with Shift or other keys (many Asian languages use many more characters than English, and require the use of Shift and other keys to access them all).  Once your finished previewing, click close and then press Ok on the previous dialog. Now you will see both of your keyboard languages in the Installed services box.  You can click Add to go back and get more, or move your selected language up or down (to change its priority), or simply click Apply to add the new language. Also, you can now change the default input language from the top menu.  This is the language that your keyboard will start with when you boot your computer.  So, if you mainly use English but also use another language, usually it is best to leave English as your default input language. Once you’ve pressed Apply or Ok, you will see a new icon beside your system tray with the initials of your default input language. If you click it, you can switch between input languages.  Alternately you can switch input languages by pressing Alt+Shift on your keyboard. Some complex languages, such as Chinese, may have extra buttons to change input modes to accommodate their large alphabet. If you would like to change the keyboard shortcut for changing languages, go back to the Input Languages dialog, and select the “Advanced Key Settings” tab.  Here you can change settings for Caps Lock and change or add key sequences to change between languages. Also, the On-Screen keyboard will display the correct keyboard language (here the keyboard is displaying Thai), which can be a helpful reference if your physical keyboard doesn’t have your preferred input language printed on it.  To open this, simply enter “On-Screen keyboard” in the start menu search, or click All Programs>Accessories>On-Screen keyboard. Change keyboard language in Windows XP The process for changing the keyboard language in Windows XP is slightly different.  Open Control Panel, and select “Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options”.   Select “Add other languages”. Now, click Details to add another language.  XP does not include support for Asian and complex languages by default, so if you need to add one of those languages we have details for that below. Click Add to add an input language. Select your desired language from the list, and choose your desired keyboard layout if your language offers multiple layouts.  Here we selected Canadian French with the default layout. Now you will see both of your keyboard languages in the Installed services box.  You can click Add to go back and add more, or move your selected language up or down (to change its priority), or simply click Apply to add the new language. Once you’ve pressed Apply or Ok, you will see a new icon beside your system tray with the initials of your default input language. If you click it, you can switch between input languages.  Alternately you can switch input languages by pressing Alt+Shift on your keyboard. If you would like to change the keyboard shortcut for changing languages, go back to the Input Languages dialog, and click the “Key Settings” button on the bottom of the dialog.  Here you can change settings for Caps Lock and change or add key sequences to change between languages. Add support to XP for Asian and Complex script languages Windows XP does not include support for Asian and Complex script languages by default, but you can easily add them to your computer.  This is useful if you wish to type in one of these languages, or simply want to read text written in these languages, since XP will not display these languages correctly if they are not installed.  If you wish to install Chinese, Japanese, and/or Korean, check the “Install files for East Asian languages” box.  Or, if you need to install a complex script language (including Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, the Indic languages, Thai, and Vietnamese), check the “Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages” box.   Choosing either of these options will open a prompt reminding you that this option will take up more disk space.  Support for complex languages will require around 10Mb of hard drive space, but East Asian language support may require 230 Mb or more free disk space.  Click Ok, and click apply to install your language files. You may have to insert your XP CD into your CD drive to install these files.  Insert the disk, and then click Ok. Windows will automatically copy the files, including fonts for these languages… …and then will ask you to reboot your computer to finalize the settings.  Click Yes, and then reopen the “Add other languages” dialog when your computer is rebooted, and add a language as before.     Now you can add Complex and/or Asian languages to XP, just as above.  Here is the XP taskbar language selector with Thai installed. Conclusion Unfortunately we haven’t found a way to add Asian and complex languages in XP without having an XP disc. If you know of a way, let us know in the comments. (No downloading the XP disc from torrent site answers please) Adding an input language is very important for bilingual individuals, and can also be useful if you simply need to occasionally view Asian or Complex languages in XP.  And by following the correct instructions for your version of Windows, it should be very easy to add, change, and remove input languages. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Show Keyboard Shortcut Access Keys in Windows VistaKeyboard Ninja: 21 Keyboard Shortcut ArticlesAnother Desktop Cube for Windows XP/VistaThe "Up" Keyboard Shortcut for Windows 7 or Vista ExplorerWhat is ctfmon.exe And Why Is It Running? TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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• West Wind WebSurge - an easy way to Load Test Web Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few months ago on a project the subject of load testing came up. We were having some serious issues with a Web application that would start spewing SQL lock errors under somewhat heavy load. These sort of errors can be tough to catch, precisely because they only occur under load and not during typical development testing. To replicate this error more reliably we needed to put a load on the application and run it for a while before these SQL errors would flare up. It’s been a while since I’d looked at load testing tools, so I spent a bit of time looking at different tools and frankly didn’t really find anything that was a good fit. A lot of tools were either a pain to use, didn’t have the basic features I needed, or are extravagantly expensive. In  the end I got frustrated enough to build an initially small custom load test solution that then morphed into a more generic library, then gained a console front end and eventually turned into a full blown Web load testing tool that is now called West Wind WebSurge. I got seriously frustrated looking for tools every time I needed some quick and dirty load testing for an application. If my aim is to just put an application under heavy enough load to find a scalability problem in code, or to simply try and push an application to its limits on the hardware it’s running I shouldn’t have to have to struggle to set up tests. It should be easy enough to get going in a few minutes, so that the testing can be set up quickly so that it can be done on a regular basis without a lot of hassle. And that was the goal when I started to build out my initial custom load tester into a more widely usable tool. If you’re in a hurry and you want to check it out, you can find more information and download links here: West Wind WebSurge Product Page Walk through Video Download link (zip) Install from Chocolatey Source on GitHub For a more detailed discussion of the why’s and how’s and some background continue reading. How did I get here? When I started out on this path, I wasn’t planning on building a tool like this myself – but I got frustrated enough looking at what’s out there to think that I can do better than what’s available for the most common simple load testing scenarios. When we ran into the SQL lock problems I mentioned, I started looking around what’s available for Web load testing solutions that would work for our whole team which consisted of a few developers and a couple of IT guys both of which needed to be able to run the tests. It had been a while since I looked at tools and I figured that by now there should be some good solutions out there, but as it turns out I didn’t really find anything that fit our relatively simple needs without costing an arm and a leg… I spent the better part of a day installing and trying various load testing tools and to be frank most of them were either terrible at what they do, incredibly unfriendly to use, used some terminology I couldn’t even parse, or were extremely expensive (and I mean in the ‘sell your liver’ range of expensive). Pick your poison. There are also a number of online solutions for load testing and they actually looked more promising, but those wouldn’t work well for our scenario as the application is running inside of a private VPN with no outside access into the VPN. Most of those online solutions also ended up being very pricey as well – presumably because of the bandwidth required to test over the open Web can be enormous. When I asked around on Twitter what people were using– I got mostly… crickets. Several people mentioned Visual Studio Load Test, and most other suggestions pointed to online solutions. I did get a bunch of responses though with people asking to let them know what I found – apparently I’m not alone when it comes to finding load testing tools that are effective and easy to use. As to Visual Studio, the higher end skus of Visual Studio and the test edition include a Web load testing tool, which is quite powerful, but there are a number of issues with that: First it’s tied to Visual Studio so it’s not very portable – you need a VS install. I also find the test setup and terminology used by the VS test runner extremely confusing. Heck, it’s complicated enough that there’s even a Pluralsight course on using the Visual Studio Web test from Steve Smith. And of course you need to have one of the high end Visual Studio Skus, and those are mucho Dinero ($$$) – just for the load testing that’s rarely an option. Some of the tools are ultra extensive and let you run analysis tools on the target serves which is useful, but in most cases – just plain overkill and only distracts from what I tend to be ultimately interested in: Reproducing problems that occur at high load, and finding the upper limits and ‘what if’ scenarios as load is ramped up increasingly against a site. Yes it’s useful to have Web app instrumentation, but often that’s not what you’re interested in. I still fondly remember early days of Web testing when Microsoft had the WAST (Web Application Stress Tool) tool, which was rather simple – and also somewhat limited – but easily allowed you to create stress tests very quickly. It had some serious limitations (mainly that it didn’t work with SSL),  but the idea behind it was excellent: Create tests quickly and easily and provide a decent engine to run it locally with minimal setup. You could get set up and run tests within a few minutes. Unfortunately, that tool died a quiet death as so many of Microsoft’s tools that probably were built by an intern and then abandoned, even though there was a lot of potential and it was actually fairly widely used. Eventually the tools was no longer downloadable and now it simply doesn’t work anymore on higher end hardware. West Wind Web Surge – Making Load Testing Quick and Easy So I ended up creating West Wind WebSurge out of rebellious frustration… The goal of WebSurge is to make it drop dead simple to create load tests. It’s super easy to capture sessions either using the built in capture tool (big props to Eric Lawrence, Telerik and FiddlerCore which made that piece a snap), using the full version of Fiddler and exporting sessions, or by manually or programmatically creating text files based on plain HTTP headers to create requests. I’ve been using this tool for 4 months now on a regular basis on various projects as a reality check for performance and scalability and it’s worked extremely well for finding small performance issues. I also use it regularly as a simple URL tester, as it allows me to quickly enter a URL plus headers and content and test that URL and its results along with the ability to easily save one or more of those URLs. A few weeks back I made a walk through video that goes over most of the features of WebSurge in some detail: Note that the UI has slightly changed since then, so there are some UI improvements. Most notably the test results screen has been updated recently to a different layout and to provide more information about each URL in a session at a glance. The video and the main WebSurge site has a lot of info of basic operations. For the rest of this post I’ll talk about a few deeper aspects that may be of interest while also giving a glance at how WebSurge works. Session Capturing As you would expect, WebSurge works with Sessions of Urls that are played back under load. Here’s what the main Session View looks like: You can create session entries manually by individually adding URLs to test (on the Request tab on the right) and saving them, or you can capture output from Web Browsers, Windows Desktop applications that call services, your own applications using the built in Capture tool. With this tool you can capture anything HTTP -SSL requests and content from Web pages, AJAX calls, SOAP or REST services – again anything that uses Windows or .NET HTTP APIs. Behind the scenes the capture tool uses FiddlerCore so basically anything you can capture with Fiddler you can also capture with Web Surge Session capture tool. Alternately you can actually use Fiddler as well, and then export the captured Fiddler trace to a file, which can then be imported into WebSurge. This is a nice way to let somebody capture session without having to actually install WebSurge or for your customers to provide an exact playback scenario for a given set of URLs that cause a problem perhaps. Note that not all applications work with Fiddler’s proxy unless you configure a proxy. For example, .NET Web applications that make HTTP calls usually don’t show up in Fiddler by default. For those .NET applications you can explicitly override proxy settings to capture those requests to service calls. The capture tool also has handy optional filters that allow you to filter by domain, to help block out noise that you typically don’t want to include in your requests. For example, if your pages include links to CDNs, or Google Analytics or social links you typically don’t want to include those in your load test, so by capturing just from a specific domain you are guaranteed content from only that one domain. Additionally you can provide url filters in the configuration file – filters allow to provide filter strings that if contained in a url will cause requests to be ignored. Again this is useful if you don’t filter by domain but you want to filter out things like static image, css and script files etc. Often you’re not interested in the load characteristics of these static and usually cached resources as they just add noise to tests and often skew the overall url performance results. In my testing I tend to care only about my dynamic requests. SSL Captures require Fiddler Note, that in order to capture SSL requests you’ll have to install the Fiddler’s SSL certificate. The easiest way to do this is to install Fiddler and use its SSL configuration options to get the certificate into the local certificate store. There’s a document on the Telerik site that provides the exact steps to get SSL captures to work with Fiddler and therefore with WebSurge. Session Storage A group of URLs entered or captured make up a Session. Sessions can be saved and restored easily as they use a very simple text format that simply stored on disk. The format is slightly customized HTTP header traces separated by a separator line. The headers are standard HTTP headers except that the full URL instead of just the domain relative path is stored as part of the 1st HTTP header line for easier parsing. Because it’s just text and uses the same format that Fiddler uses for exports, it’s super easy to create Sessions by hand manually or under program control writing out to a simple text file. You can see what this format looks like in the Capture window figure above – the raw captured format is also what’s stored to disk and what WebSurge parses from. The only ‘custom’ part of these headers is that 1st line contains the full URL instead of the domain relative path and Host: header. The rest of each header are just plain standard HTTP headers with each individual URL isolated by a separator line. The format used here also uses what Fiddler produces for exports, so it’s easy to exchange or view data either in Fiddler or WebSurge. Urls can also be edited interactively so you can modify the headers easily as well: Again – it’s just plain HTTP headers so anything you can do with HTTP can be added here. Use it for single URL Testing Incidentally I’ve also found this form as an excellent way to test and replay individual URLs for simple non-load testing purposes. Because you can capture a single or many URLs and store them on disk, this also provides a nice HTTP playground where you can record URLs with their headers, and fire them one at a time or as a session and see results immediately. It’s actually an easy way for REST presentations and I find the simple UI flow actually easier than using Fiddler natively. Finally you can save one or more URLs as a session for later retrieval. I’m using this more and more for simple URL checks. Overriding Cookies and Domains Speaking of HTTP headers – you can also overwrite cookies used as part of the options. One thing that happens with modern Web applications is that you have session cookies in use for authorization. These cookies tend to expire at some point which would invalidate a test. Using the Options dialog you can actually override the cookie: which replaces the cookie for all requests with the cookie value specified here. You can capture a valid cookie from a manual HTTP request in your browser and then paste into the cookie field, to replace the existing Cookie with the new one that is now valid. Likewise you can easily replace the domain so if you captured urls on west-wind.com and now you want to test on localhost you can do that easily easily as well. You could even do something like capture on store.west-wind.com and then test on localhost/store which would also work. Running Load Tests Once you’ve created a Session you can specify the length of the test in seconds, and specify the number of simultaneous threads to run each session on. Sessions run through each of the URLs in the session sequentially by default. One option in the options list above is that you can also randomize the URLs so each thread runs requests in a different order. This avoids bunching up URLs initially when tests start as all threads run the same requests simultaneously which can sometimes skew the results of the first few minutes of a test. While sessions run some progress information is displayed: By default there’s a live view of requests displayed in a Console-like window. On the bottom of the window there’s a running total summary that displays where you’re at in the test, how many requests have been processed and what the requests per second count is currently for all requests. Note that for tests that run over a thousand requests a second it’s a good idea to turn off the console display. While the console display is nice to see that something is happening and also gives you slight idea what’s happening with actual requests, once a lot of requests are processed, this UI updating actually adds a lot of CPU overhead to the application which may cause the actual load generated to be reduced. If you are running a 1000 requests a second there’s not much to see anyway as requests roll by way too fast to see individual lines anyway. If you look on the options panel, there is a NoProgressEvents option that disables the console display. Note that the summary display is still updated approximately once a second so you can always tell that the test is still running. Test Results When the test is done you get a simple Results display: On the right you get an overall summary as well as breakdown by each URL in the session. Both success and failures are highlighted so it’s easy to see what’s breaking in your load test. The report can be printed or you can also open the HTML document in your default Web Browser for printing to PDF or saving the HTML document to disk. The list on the right shows you a partial list of the URLs that were fired so you can look in detail at the request and response data. The list can be filtered by success and failure requests. Each list is partial only (at the moment) and limited to a max of 1000 items in order to render reasonably quickly. Each item in the list can be clicked to see the full request and response data: This particularly useful for errors so you can quickly see and copy what request data was used and in the case of a GET request you can also just click the link to quickly jump to the page. For non-GET requests you can find the URL in the Session list, and use the context menu to Test the URL as configured including any HTTP content data to send. You get to see the full HTTP request and response as well as a link in the Request header to go visit the actual page. Not so useful for a POST as above, but definitely useful for GET requests. Finally you can also get a few charts. The most useful one is probably the Request per Second chart which can be accessed from the Charts menu or shortcut. Here’s what it looks like:   Results can also be exported to JSON, XML and HTML. Keep in mind that these files can get very large rather quickly though, so exports can end up taking a while to complete. Command Line Interface WebSurge runs with a small core load engine and this engine is plugged into the front end application I’ve shown so far. There’s also a command line interface available to run WebSurge from the Windows command prompt. Using the command line you can run tests for either an individual URL (similar to AB.exe for example) or a full Session file. By default when it runs WebSurgeCli shows progress every second showing total request count, failures and the requests per second for the entire test. A silent option can turn off this progress display and display only the results. The command line interface can be useful for build integration which allows checking for failures perhaps or hitting a specific requests per second count etc. It’s also nice to use this as quick and dirty URL test facility similar to the way you’d use Apache Bench (ab.exe). Unlike ab.exe though, WebSurgeCli supports SSL and makes it much easier to create multi-URL tests using either manual editing or the WebSurge UI. Current Status Currently West Wind WebSurge is still in Beta status. I’m still adding small new features and tweaking the UI in an attempt to make it as easy and self-explanatory as possible to run. Documentation for the UI and specialty features is also still a work in progress. I plan on open-sourcing this product, but it won’t be free. There’s a free version available that provides a limited number of threads and request URLs to run. A relatively low cost license  removes the thread and request limitations. Pricing info can be found on the Web site – there’s an introductory price which is $99 at the moment which I think is reasonable compared to most other for pay solutions out there that are exorbitant by comparison… The reason code is not available yet is – well, the UI portion of the app is a bit embarrassing in its current monolithic state. The UI started as a very simple interface originally that later got a lot more complex – yeah, that never happens, right? Unless there’s a lot of interest I don’t foresee re-writing the UI entirely (which would be ideal), but in the meantime at least some cleanup is required before I dare to publish it :-). The code will likely be released with version 1.0. I’m very interested in feedback. Do you think this could be useful to you and provide value over other tools you may or may not have used before? I hope so – it already has provided a ton of value for me and the work I do that made the development worthwhile at this point. You can leave a comment below, or for more extensive discussions you can post a message on the West Wind Message Board in the WebSurge section Microsoft MVPs and Insiders get a free License If you’re a Microsoft MVP or a Microsoft Insider you can get a full license for free. Send me a link to your current, official Microsoft profile and I’ll send you a not-for resale license. Send any messages to [email protected]. Resources For more info on WebSurge and to download it to try it out, use the following links. West Wind WebSurge Home Download West Wind WebSurge Getting Started with West Wind WebSurge Video© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Week in Geek: FBI Back Door in OpenBSD Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to migrate bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo, fix annoying arrows, play old-school DOS games, schedule smart computer shutdowns, use breaks in Microsoft Word to better format documents, check the condition of hard-disks using Linux disk utilities, & what the Linux fstab is and how it works. Photo by Jameson42. Random Geek Links Another week with extra news link goodness to help keep you up to date. Photo by justmakeit. Report of FBI back door roils OpenBSD community Allegations that the FBI surreptitiously placed a back door into the OpenBSD operating system have alarmed the computer security community, prompting calls for an audit of the source code and claims that the charges must be a hoax. Fortinet: Job outlook improving for cybercrooks In an ironic twist in the job market, more positions will open up for developers who can write customized malware packers, people who can break CAPTCHA codes, and distributors who can spread malicious code, according to Fortinet. Enisa: Malware for smartphones is a ’serious risk’ Businesses and consumers are at risk of data breaches through smartphone use, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency. The trick with the f: Google and Microsoft web sites distribute malware Last week, Google’s DoubleClick advertising platform and Microsoft’s rad.msn.com online ad network briefly distributed malware to other web sites in the form of advertising banners. New scam tactic: Fake disk defraggers It would appear that scammers are trying out new programs to see which might best confuse potential victims and evade detection by legitimate antivirus software. Microsoft closes IE and Stuxnet holes As previously announced, Microsoft has released 17 security updates to close 40 security holes. All four Windows holes so far disclosed in connection with Stuxnet have now been closed. Microsoft Offers H.264 Support to Firefox on Windows via Add-On The new HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in add-on from Microsoft offers users that are running Firefox on Windows 7 H.264 support for HTML5 video playback. Google proclaims Chrome business-ready Google has announced that Chrome is ready for corporate use. Microsoft Tells Exchange Customers to Think Twice Before Opting for Google Message Continuity This week, Microsoft is telling companies still running Exchange 2010’s precursors that they should carefully consider the implications of embracing Google Message Continuity. Who Google has in mind for its Chrome OS users Steven Vaughan-Nichols explains why he feels that Chrome OS will be ideal for either office-workers or people who need a computer, but do not know the first thing about how to use one safely. Oracle takes office suite to the cloud Oracle has introduced Cloud Office 1.0, a cloud-based version of its office suite, which is aimed at web and mobile users. Mozilla pays premiums for reports of vulnerabilities The Mozilla Foundation has followed Google’s example by expanding its rewards program for reports of vulnerabilities in its Web applications. Who bought those 882 Novell patents? Not just Microsoft The mysterious CPTN Holdings — the organization that bought the 882 Novell patents as part of the terms of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell – has been unmasked (Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle). Appeals court: Feds need warrants for e-mail Police must obtain search warrants before perusing Internet users’ e-mail records, a federal appeals court ruled today in a landmark decision that struck down part of a 1986 law allowing warrantless access. Geek Video of the Week What happens when someone plays a wicked prank by shoveling crazy snow paths that lead to dead ends or turn back on themselves? Watch to find out! Photo by CollegeHumor. Janitor Snow Shoveling Prank Random TinyHacker Links The Oatmeal on Cat vs Internet What lengths will our poor neglected kitty hero have to go to in order to get some attention? Guide On Using JoliCloud With Windows JoliCloud is a nifty operating system that’s made for people who need a light-weight OS that’s mostly cloud based. Check this guide on using it with Windows. Use Cameyo to Easily Create Portable Programs Here’s a nifty tool to make portable apps out of programs in Windows. Check out the guide to do it. Better Family Tech Support A nice new site by Google to help members of family understand how computers work. Track Your Stolen Mobile Phone With F-Secure A useful anti-theft tool for your mobile phone. Super User Questions Another week with great answers to popular questions from Super User. What Chrome password manager fits my requirements? What’s the best way to be able to reimage windows computers? Could you suggest feature-rich disk-based personal backup program for linux (and I’ve seen a few)? What is IPv6 and why should I care? Is there any way to find out what programs are trying to connect to Internet on windows? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Here are our hottest articles full of geeky goodness from this past week at HTG. 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Kills Viruses Dead. Download It Now. Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? Ask the Readers: Would You Be Willing to Give Windows Up and Use a Different O.S.? The Twelve Days of Geekmas One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy reading through our latest batch of retro-geek goodness from one year ago. Macrium Reflect is a Free and Easy To Use Backup Utility How To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd How To Restore Windows 7 from a System Image How To Manage Hard Drive Space Used by Windows 7 Backup and Restore How To Manage Hibernate Mode in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week, so see you back here again after the holidays! Got a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by mitjamavsar. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Deathwing the Destroyer – WoW Cataclysm Dragon Wallpaper Drag2Up Lets You Drag and Drop Files to the Web With Ease The Spam Police Parts 1 and 2 – Goodbye Spammers [Videos] Snow Angels Theme for Windows 7 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser

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• How to See Which Metro Apps You’ve Installed on Each Windows 8 PC

  - by Taylor Gibb

  The Store in Windows 8 is awesome, but when you have so many apps at your disposal it becomes hard to keep track of what’s installed where, here’s how you can see the apps installed on any of your devices running Windows 8. Hack Your Kindle for Easy Font Customization HTG Explains: What Is RSS and How Can I Benefit From Using It? HTG Explains: Why You Only Have to Wipe a Disk Once to Erase It

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• Using Microsoft's Chart Controls In An ASP.NET Application: Serializing Chart Data

  This article, by Scott Mitchell, shows how to store (and load) the data generated by the Microsoft Chart Controls to disk or some other store.

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• Using Microsoft's Chart Controls In An ASP.NET Application: Serializing Chart Data

  This article, by Scott Mitchell, shows how to store (and load) the data generated by the Microsoft Chart Controls to disk or some other store.

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• Using Microsoft's Chart Controls In An ASP.NET Application: Serializing Chart Data

  This article, by Scott Mitchell, shows how to store (and load) the data generated by the Microsoft Chart Controls to disk or some other store.

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• E: mkinitramfs failure cpio 141 gzip 1

  - by Nagaraj Shindagi

  I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with Dell power-edge R720 server, facing the problem when I apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Setting up linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae (3.2.0-37.58) ... Running depmod. update-initramfs: deferring update (hook will be called later) The link /initrd.img is a dangling linkto /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-37-generic-pae Examining /etc/kernel/postinst.d. run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools 3.2.0-37-generic-pae /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-37-generic-pae update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-37-generic-pae gzip: stdout: No space left on device E: mkinitramfs failure cpio 141 gzip 1 update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-37-generic-pae with 1. run-parts: /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools exited with return code 1 Failed to process /etc/kernel/postinst.d at /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-3.2.0 -37-generic-pae.postinst line 1010. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-generic-pae: linux-image-generic-pae depends on linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae; however: Package linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-image-generic-pae (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup erro r from a previous failure. Errors were encountered while processing: linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae linux-image-generic-pae E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) ------------ even i tried with apt-get clean apt-get remove apt-get autoremove apt-get purge there is no difference it will show the same error message as above, even i checked the disk space ----------- Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 24030076 612456 22196964 3% / udev 16536644 4 16536640 1% /dev tmpfs 6618884 1164 6617720 1% /run none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock none 16547208 72 16547136 1% /run/shm cgroup 16547208 0 16547208 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sda1 93207 75034 13361 85% /boot /dev/sda10 9611492 1096076 8027176 13% /tmp /dev/sda12 9611492 226340 8896912 3% /opt /dev/sda13 9611492 152516 8970736 2% /srv /dev/sda7 9611492 592208 8531044 7% /home /dev/sda8 9611492 2656736 6466516 30% /usr /dev/sda9 9611492 696468 8426784 8% /var /dev/sda14 961237336 134563516 777845764 15% /usr/data /dev/sda15 618991384 84498388 503050052 15% /usr/data1 /dev/sda11 9611492 152616 8970636 2% /usr/local --------------- is there any problem on allotting the space to the partiations please let me know the solution its on urgent please help me on this issue regards

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• Create PDF document using iTextSharp in ASP.Net 4.0 and MemoryMappedFile

  - by sreejukg

  In this article I am going to demonstrate how ASP.Net developers can programmatically create PDF documents using iTextSharp. iTextSharp is a software component, that allows developers to programmatically create or manipulate PDF documents. Also this article discusses the process of creating in-memory file, read/write data from/to the in-memory file utilizing the new feature MemoryMappedFile. I have a database of users, where I need to send a notice to all my users as a PDF document. The sending mail part of it is not covered in this article. The PDF document will contain the company letter head, to make it more official. I have a list of users stored in a database table named “tblusers”. For each user I need to send customized message addressed to them personally. The database structure for the users is give below. id Title Full Name 1 Mr. Sreeju Nair K. G. 2 Dr. Alberto Mathews 3 Prof. Venketachalam Now I am going to generate the pdf document that contains some message to the user, in the following format. Dear <Title> <FullName>, The message for the user. Regards, Administrator Also I have an image, bg.jpg that contains the background for the document generated. I have created .Net 4.0 empty web application project named “iTextSharpSample”. First thing I need to do is to download the iTextSharp dll from the source forge. You can find the url for the download here. http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/files/ I have extracted the Zip file and added the itextsharp.dll as a reference to my project. Also I have added a web form named default.aspx to my project. After doing all this, the solution explorer have the following view. In the default.aspx page, I inserted one grid view and associated it with a SQL Data source control that bind data from tblusers. I have added a button column in the grid view with text “generate pdf”. The output of the page in the browser is as follows. Now I am going to create a pdf document when the user clicking on the Generate PDF button. As I mentioned before, I am going to work with the file in memory, I am not going to create a file in the disk. I added an event handler for button by specifying onrowcommand event handler. My gridview source looks like <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" Width="481px" CellPadding="4" ForeColor="#333333" GridLines="None" onrowcommand="Generate_PDF" > ………………………………………………………………………….. ………………………………………………………………………….. </asp:GridView> In the code behind, I wrote the corresponding event handler. protected void Generate_PDF(object sender, GridViewCommandEventArgs e) { // The button click event handler code. // I am going to explain the code for this section in the remaining part of the article } The Generate_PDF method is straight forward, It get the title, fullname and message to some variables, then create the pdf using these variables. The code for getting data from the grid view is as follows // get the row index stored in the CommandArgument property int index = Convert.ToInt32(e.CommandArgument); // get the GridViewRow where the command is raised GridViewRow selectedRow = ((GridView)e.CommandSource).Rows[index]; string title = selectedRow.Cells[1].Text; string fullname = selectedRow.Cells[2].Text; string msg = @"There are some changes in the company policy, due to this matter you need to submit your latest address to us. Please update your contact details / personnal details by visiting the member area of the website. ................................... "; since I don’t want to save the file in the disk, I am going the new feature introduced in .Net framework 4, called Memory-Mapped Files. Using Memory-Mapped mapped file, you can created non-persisted memory mapped files, that are not associated with a file in a disk. So I am going to create a temporary file in memory, add the pdf content to it, then write it to the output stream. To read more about MemoryMappedFile, read this msdn article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997372.aspx The below portion of the code using MemoryMappedFile object to create a test pdf document in memory and perform read/write operation on file. The CreateViewStream() object will give you a stream that can be used to read or write data to/from file. The code is very straight forward and I included comment so that you can understand the code. using (MemoryMappedFile mmf = MemoryMappedFile.CreateNew("test1.pdf", 1000000)) { // Create a new pdf document object using the constructor. The parameters passed are document size, left margin, right margin, top margin and bottom margin. iTextSharp.text.Document d = new iTextSharp.text.Document(PageSize.A4, 72,72,172,72); //get an instance of the memory mapped file to stream object so that user can write to this using (MemoryMappedViewStream stream = mmf.CreateViewStream()) { // associate the document to the stream. PdfWriter.GetInstance(d, stream); /* add an image as bg*/ iTextSharp.text.Image jpg = iTextSharp.text.Image.GetInstance(Server.MapPath("Image/bg.png")); jpg.Alignment = iTextSharp.text.Image.UNDERLYING; jpg.SetAbsolutePosition(0, 0); //this is the size of my background letter head image. the size is in points. this will fit to A4 size document. jpg.ScaleToFit(595, 842); d.Open(); d.Add(jpg); d.Add(new Paragraph(String.Format("Dear {0} {1},", title, fullname))); d.Add(new Paragraph("\n")); d.Add(new Paragraph(msg)); d.Add(new Paragraph("\n")); d.Add(new Paragraph(String.Format("Administrator"))); d.Close(); } //read the file data byte[] b; using (MemoryMappedViewStream stream = mmf.CreateViewStream()) { BinaryReader rdr = new BinaryReader(stream); b = new byte[mmf.CreateViewStream().Length]; rdr.Read(b, 0, (int)mmf.CreateViewStream().Length); } Response.Clear(); Response.ContentType = "Application/pdf"; Response.BinaryWrite(b); Response.End(); } Press ctrl + f5 to run the application. First I got the user list. Click on the generate pdf icon. The created looks as follows. Summary: Creating pdf document using iTextSharp is easy. You will get lot of information while surfing the www. Some useful resources and references are mentioned below http://itextsharp.com/ http://www.mikesdotnetting.com/Article/82/iTextSharp-Adding-Text-with-Chunks-Phrases-and-Paragraphs http://somewebguy.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/itextsharp-simplify-your-html-to-pdf-creation/ Hope you enjoyed the article.

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• Internet Explorer 9 Commercial (The Honest Version) [Parody Video]

  - by Asian Angel

  Internet Explorer 9 does well as a browser, but what if things did not run as smoothly as one liked? That is where this humorous parody video of the official Internet Explorer 9 commercial steps in… Internet Explorer 9 Commercial (The Honest Version) [via Softpedia] How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems 7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows

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• Watch Favorite Classic Movies in 16-Bit Animation Glory at PixelMash Theater

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you ready for a quick bit of retro fun? Then sit back and enjoy movie favorites like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, and more in these condensed version 16-bit animated GIFs. Note: You can select your favorite movies from the list on the left side of the homepage. PixelMash Theater Homepage [via Neatorama] 7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows HTG Explains: How System Restore Works in Windows HTG Explains: How Antivirus Software Works

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• Backup Meta-Data

  - by BuckWoody

  I'm working on a PowerShell script to show me the trending durations of my backup activities. The first thing I need is the data, so I looked at the Standard Reports in SQL Server Management Studio, and found a report that suited my needs, so I pulled out the script that it runs and modified it to this T-SQL Script. A few words here - you need to be in the MSDB database for this to run, and you can add a WHERE clause to limit to a database, timeframe, type of backup, whatever. For that matter, I won't use all of the data in this query in my PowerShell script, but it gives me lots of avenues to graph: SELECT distinct t1.name AS 'DatabaseName' ,(datediff( ss,  t3.backup_start_date, t3.backup_finish_date)) AS 'DurationInSeconds' ,t3.user_name AS 'UserResponsible' ,t3.name AS backup_name ,t3.description ,t3.backup_start_date ,t3.backup_finish_date ,CASE WHEN t3.type = 'D' THEN 'Database' WHEN t3.type = 'L' THEN 'Log' WHEN t3.type = 'F' THEN 'FileOrFilegroup' WHEN t3.type = 'G' THEN 'DifferentialFile' WHEN t3.type = 'P' THEN 'Partial' WHEN t3.type = 'Q' THEN 'DifferentialPartial' END AS 'BackupType' ,t3.backup_size AS 'BackupSizeKB' ,t6.physical_device_name ,CASE WHEN t6.device_type = 2 THEN 'Disk' WHEN t6.device_type = 102 THEN 'Disk' WHEN t6.device_type = 5 THEN 'Tape' WHEN t6.device_type = 105 THEN 'Tape' END AS 'DeviceType' ,t3.recovery_model  FROM sys.databases t1 INNER JOIN backupset t3 ON (t3.database_name = t1.name )  LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediaset t5 ON ( t3.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id ) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediafamily t6 ON ( t6.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id ) ORDER BY backup_start_date DESC I'll munge this into my Excel PowerShell chart script tomorrow. Script Disclaimer, for people who need to be told this sort of thing: Never trust any script, including those that you find here, until you understand exactly what it does and how it will act on your systems. Always check the script on a test system or Virtual Machine, not a production system. Yes, there are always multiple ways to do things, and this script may not work in every situation, for everything. It’s just a script, people. All scripts on this site are performed by a professional stunt driver on a closed course. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Offer good for a limited time only. Keep out of reach of small children. Do not operate heavy machinery while using this script. If you experience blurry vision, indigestion or diarrhea during the operation of this script, see a physician immediately. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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