Web review

Let’s speak about EASEUS Partition Manager, a new product for Windows. The first element I noticed is… the price: the home edition is free for personal use, this is a good beginning Anyway the version I tested is the Server edition, that supports also Windows Server family operating sytems; in addiction of this, it is able to operate also on 64-bit editions and it offers the possibility to create bootable  CDs/DVDs to boot and operate on dead systems (these last two functions are included also in the Professional edition, as stated in this comparison table). leggi tutto »

Today I fixed a new problem with my test installation of Windows 7 (first public beta): Avast! Free – my “default” antivirus, was causing random system crashes. After some tries, I understood that blue screen of death was occurring during internal network activity. To be more precise, the problem is located in the use of shared folders (aka “samba shares”, for Linux users) and it involves the tdx.sys file, that seems to be often a protagonist of BSODs. leggi tutto »

I’m currently testing the first public beta of Windows 7 on a desktop and a notebook, so I installed Live Messenger through the official Live installer provided from Microsoft as optional pack of the operating system. While there wasn’t problems on the notebook (connected to the LAN via Wi-fi), the desktop gived me 81000306 error trying to connect to Messenger service. After a lot of tests, including activation of uPNP on the router and forwarding the typical Messenger ports to the desktop’s IP, I finally discovered that the problem was in a feature of Windows 7 (also included in Windows Vista), the auto tuning of TCP stack. To disable this feature (that seems to be also the cause of network slowness on some LAN), you’ve to execute a simple command as Administrator:

• click on the Windows logo in the bottom-left corner of the screen (the old “start” menu);
• type CMD.EXE and wait a second: the cmd.exe program will appair in a list;
• right-click it and choose “Run as Administrator”, then confirm the action in the request that will appair;
• you’ll see a black window; type the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
• now just close the window and try to connect with Windows Live Messenger (it shouldn’t be necessary to restart the computer).

Note 1: I suspect that this problem is linked to my hardware (a Netgear DG834G router and a Atheros PCIE Gigabit LAN, on a ASUS M2A-MX motherboard).

Note 2: If you want to restore the auto tuning feature, you’ve to repeat the above process with the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

WARNING: After some tests, it seems that Windows Live Messenger contact list have problems after change of email login. So do this at your risk.
This problem always plagued Windows Live (aka MSN) users: you signed up for a Microsoft Passport account since 2002  with a custom e-mail as login, then you changed the e-mail address but you can’t change your Live Messenger login (this was my case).

About a year ago I tried to directly ask Microsoft, but they answered me that this wasn’t possible; they suggested me to sign up for a new Live account.

Now I discovered that it’s possible to do it easily. leggi tutto »

Vista’s “3D Flip” effect is really nice. Honestly, the entire new graphic of Windows Vista is beautiful… even if the rest of the operating system is disappointing

Anyway, if you want to add this feature to your Windows XP… someone has done it: WinFlip is a little and free addon that is capable to re-create the same effect. Just download it and try!

http://winflip.stylekings.de/

Since I definitely chose Firefox (aka “goodbye IE”), I tried a lot of extension, but only a little part of them is still installed on my browser. Here’s my personal list: I’d like to know your comments and suggestions
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Fliqlo is a simple but really beautyful free screensaver: it simply shows the current time, in a “flip clock” style (do you remember those old office clocks?).
Nothing special, but very nice and somehow useful.

It can be downloaded for free; the same site offers other nice screensavers for Windows.

http://www.9031.com/downloads/screensavers.html

Mozilla has just released a new security fix for Firefox Browser.
Here’s the changelog:

I want to suggest a very good work from TredoSoft: Multiple IE Installer (aka MultipleIEs) is a free tool that installs all the previous versions of Internet Explorer (from 3.0 to 6.0) on a Windows PC, allowing Internet Explorer 7 users to use older versions of IE on the same computer.

It was very useful for me, because I have to test my sites on Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 but IE 6 is still popular, so I must test everything (at least) on these 3 browsers.

As a web developer I work everyday with FTP to transfer and update files on several web servers. The process is simple but boring: I’ve to download a page on my hard drive, edit it and then upload it back on the remote machine to test my modifications. These activities must be done with an FTP client like FileZilla, SmartFTP, WS_FTP…

Microsoft Windows can’t mount FTP servers on the local filesystem as network folders (you can do it only with computers that are connected in your local network), so it’s impossible to work with a local application (PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, Notepad++…) loading and saving documents directly on the remote server.

There is some software that is able to add this functionality to Microsoft Operating System, like the old Novell NetDrive, that is not freeware but is considered as abandonware by the same software house. Now Novell suggests to use a newer product like WebDrive, but it’s unfortunately a commercial software.

I Googled for a while and finally I found a solution.

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