Category: Software
Microsoft SyncToy 2.0 Beta
Posted by Wanderlust in Software Friday, 30 May 2008 02:26 No Comments
Microsoft has, what appears to be, a very nice and quick tool to sync data from one PC to another. This is handy for me to sync my web work, imaging, data docs, game screenshots, etc. from my main PC to my server and then to sync back to my laptop. I just started playing with the tool but if you’re interested in something that syncs up your PCs with little work (unlike Symantec’s backup tool that encrypts files and requires 360 installed on all systems…YUCK), this is the tool for you without the overhead of something like TortoiseSVN (which is a great tool) and a bit easier to use.
Check it out at Microsoft.
A screenshot of it in action (a bit cut up but click for a full image):
Norton 360 v2 and Yearly Subscription Scams
Posted by Wanderlust in Software Wednesday, 16 April 2008 23:59 No Comments
Norton 360 v2 … same as the old …
I received an e-mail that Norton 360 v2 was available since I had bought the first one last year and long ago stopped using it. So many had taunted how it uses less memory, etc. etc. etc. but I found it wasn’t the case (they just distributed across more process from what I could tell) and they removed any kind of usefulness that SystemWorks had in the past. I posted this sometime last year but a quick overview… They made defrag a click and run program with no customization for files, the backup tool requires you to have 360 installed to restore it, meaning if you want to use it to sync multiple PC files, you need to make sure that 360 is installed and they took away countless other customizable features.
So we come up to 2008 and there’s a new version. I figured it wouldn’t be much better but gave it a shot on a fresh system. I added a few essential apps to get back up and running and then installed 360 v2. This install lasted 2 weeks. The first issue I started seeing is a ccvhost.exe (recalling from memory) crash on almost every shutdown which was associated to 360. Not soon after this I started seeing applications not exit memory. I started to notice the system would start to slow way down after being up and running, slow start-ups and shutdowns (with the above error). I found that if I ran something like Word, exited normally it would stay in memory and using a nice size footprint depending on what I was doing. Same thing with Excel, Nero, PS, Flash and other higher memory demanding apps. Small apps like ccleaner exited fine. After seeing this and associating it to the shutdown error, I un-installed and re-installed 360 with their cleaning utility. I didn’t initially see any issues but low and behold it started again. I did find some information while looking for a Symantec cleaner that this apparently happened on the previous version as well and re-installing fixed it, which is the only reason it got a second chance. So I’m officially done with this product and probably any other home based Symantec apps. They made no improvements to allow customization and apparently have some major bugs.
Alternatives:
AVG works fine and I really don’t think the corporate edition of SAV is that bad even though it takes up a bit more memory and if your company can provide it to you. One of the things that somewhat tied me to it before was also having the Anti-Spam as a free add-on which I think is still a decent product (not sure if they updated it for the 2008 version since I didn’t install the add-on pack) but I found SpamFighter as a free replacement. I haven’t had a need for the whitelist/blacklist feature so I’m not that interested in buying it. I probably will at some point as support for the product but it works great without purchasing it. So if you’re looking for a good Anti-Spam and not interested in a $50/year (unneeded) Internet Suite, check out SpamFighter!
The Yearly Subscription Fee Scams:
I want to get a page up of free software soon that covers how you can save cash by using some basic tools that do a good job without dropping yearly subscriptions. I have no issues with buying software but this “yearly full priced subscription” scam these companies are running is worthless. Looking around, I could hardly find anything that was really a spam tool on it’s own. All of them are “Internet Suites” and charge a premium YEARLY for these additional unneeded apps to eat memory. My Windows firewall and a decent router covers me on about everything but AV and Spam. Hell, I’d have no problem with some of these products if I paid $50 for the package and chose to keep that version and paid $10/year for the definition updates. If it works, I could care less about a new version every year. All they’re really doing is repackaging essentially the same product with fixes, changes to the interface and shovel it out the door to consumers as a new version and charge a full price. Some of them aren’t even new versions, just a way to charge a premium yearly. I only hope that these free utilities can get enough steam to start making companies like Symantec rethink their strategy.
GSC Anyone?
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters, PC Gaming, Software Sunday, 2 December 2007 09:53 No Comments
Wondering if anyone has tried out GSC which is tagged as the “Total Gaming Client” at http://www.getgsc.com/. Just curious what it does that xFire doesn’t or more than likely what it doesn’t do that xFire does.
Comments, feedback would be nice. I’ll give it a try this week, not sure how popular it is but I’ve been seeing it on GameTracker, who provides the stats for the UT3 server.
Hasta La Vista
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters, PC Gaming, Software, Troubleshooting, Windows Wednesday, 28 November 2007 02:36 No Comments
Nothing fits better than that phrase. After using Vista for several months I’ve reverted back to XP and quite happy with the decision. Vista is everything I like visually and even a lot of the functionality but beyond that it’s flaming pile of dung. I could have waited for SP1 or tried the release candidate but I’ll save that for my laptop.
The first thing I did while installing was remove UAC and the system ran very well. I noticed it wasn’t quite as fast as XP but I traded it for the visually appealing look and how it functioned. The honeymoon was shorter than Britney Spears first, then again maybe a little bit longer than that. The slowdown continued to get worse, the application timeouts were numerous and WTH was Microsoft thinking with the search function?
The search is one of the worst concocted items with the new OS. I’d do a search, it’d indicate that it could search faster if indexed (with my understanding of XP, I thought, sure!). Eventually I started noticing my search process taking up HUGE chunks of memory. I found where it stored the “indexing” and killed them and it restored some speed. What’s odd is that the search function seems to have been built for a monkey. It’s not that the XP built in feature is great (it doesn’t find a lot of items inside of a file) but it’s at least easy to click something like *.bmp, *.gif, *.jpg, etc. and return all the extensions I want. I’m sure there is some other way to do it in Vista but why remove the simplicity that was in XP? It was also a lot worse than XP when attempting to search within files (which is hard to do). Regardless they need to overhaul the search.
The timeout on applications and even explorer are ridiculous. I’m using an application such as Word 2003 and out of nowhere (and while typing with no apparent issues), it stops responding losing whatever I had done since the last save. Worst is in graphic programs where you don’t save every minute and lose a crap load of work. I’ve had issues where I’m browsing a network drive and suddenly Explorer just crashes with no signs of an issue.
Games kicked off slower and frame rates were significantly lower than on XP. Anyone who says they’re running Vista and getting 100+ frames on an 8800GTS (as I have) running at high resolutions (which they rarely include their resolution) with high effects on games like UT3 are full of it. It’s simply not happening or they’re leaving out that it’s at 800×600 or with dual cards (which I still suspect is not the case in terms of FPS).
Again, as opposed to a lot of others, I like what the OS is about but they did a piss poor job of implementation and optimization. We’ll see how the release candidate of SP1 does on my laptop but unlike previous versions of Microsoft OSes, I have a feeling that I’ll not jump until potentially SP2 is released or I see some substantial increases on my laptop.
Windows Vista, Days 1 and 2
Posted by Wanderlust in First Person Shooters, PC Gaming, Software, Windows, XBox 360 Sunday, 30 September 2007 09:26 No Comments
Well I upgraded. Micro Center has a deal for Vista Home Premium OEM at $79 so I picked it up last week. Got it installed Friday night and so far I’m happy with it. I picked it up mostly for gaming and prep for Crysis. I did pick up Halo 2 but not really played it much but it looks great as well. I also want to pick up Shadowrun since it’s the first full cross platform game out there (Xbox 360 vs. PC gamers) but haven’t as of yet but it’s fairly cheap.
I wanted to try out my tried and true games first to really get a feel for how it would perform on the gaming platform. Honestly I’ve not seen any issues with BF2142 (other than the “this game has only been tested on Windows XP” message on install) and the typical issues I had on XP with PunkBuster. BF2 also has the same message.
The only issue I’ve had so far is hibernate or sleep. I found the system locked up (or at least non-responsive by the monitor) the first time I attempted to “revive” it in this state.
I’ve also played around with the built in games on Premium and they’re not bad. I even tried out Purble Place and found it friendly to kids and adults with the levels. I’m a gamer, have to try every game I find! hehe
As far as interface I haven’t been too upset but I do miss the up arrow but found that “alt-up arrow” does the same thing so being a keyboard person that’s not been a hard adaption. I was able to set most of the rest of the system to how I liked it in XP (no frills settings that I’ve liked since 95 but with the Aero design and settings that I find appealing as I did with XP from 98/2000 and using the XP “themes”).
The installation was a breeze, no issues with dropping the DVD in and installation, even to my Intel RAID. I believe it took about 20 minutes total (on an Intel 6600 core 2 duo). I also found that my 26GB system drive wasn’t enough after installation of the OS and my standard tools as well as Adobe CS3 but no fear, I was able to drop my gaming drive from 125GB to 113GB and increase my system drive to 38GB with no issues in the drive management piece. I have typically ran with a 15-20GB system drive on XP so it was a bit amazing that my 26GB partition wasn’t enough and I was down to like 2GB. I did turn off system restore afterwards and moved my temp file to another, larger, drive. The problem I did find is that it didn’t allow me to delete the pagesys file after redirection of the file but I’ve moved on from that for now.
So that’s it for my Vista experience… So far, so good. Other than figuring out a new OS and changing what I can back to how I like them (from previous OSes) I’m good to go. 