Friday, February 27, 2015

What I Installed (and uninstalled) On My New PC

Installed:

Adobe Flash Player (alas)
Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 (from Costco)
Adobe Reader
Chess Hero
Eudora 6.2 (old mail program for my top 70 list)
EXIF file date changer
Firefox web browser
Houdini chess program
HP all-in-one software
iTunes
Java
MS HealthVault
MS Office Pro 2013
MS Visual Studio 2012
MUP music authoring program
NVIDIA graphics drivers
WD SmartWare backup
WinSCP FTP program

Uninstalled:

Bing Bar
Cyberlink
Norton

Friday, February 13, 2015

Paint Desktop Version

I got a new HP computer.  It's nice and fast.  I'm doing my usual customizing.

Starting with PaintDesktopVersion.  This shows the Windows version and build number that you're running in text in the lower right of the desktop background.

To activate (so I will remember in future): Windows key + R and run regedit.  Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.  Find the DWORD value PaintDesktopVersion (or create it if necessary) and set the value to 1.  Reboot.

Windows 8.1 very slow after update

Windows insisted on updating my Windows 8.1 installation.  It said save your stuff, we're rebooting in 14 minutes!  Now that's annoying, but even worse, after the reboot, it ran slow as molasses in winter.

I finally figured out what was wrong.  I ran Task Manager and clicked on the Performance tab.  Down at the bottom is a button/link for the Resource Manager.  I clicked that and it showed my C: disk, not full, but being used 100% of the time.  Sure enough, the disk light was on almost continuously.  Something funky with the C: disk!

After googling about this, I ran (in an admin level command line) chkdsk /r/f c: and then had to reboot for it to take effect.  This command checks and repairs the hard disk.  They tend to fail after about 5 years.  Anyway, this ran for HOURS stuck at 12% but finally completed and the problem was fixed!

So yay for chkdsk.