hendrikch.com – Hendrik Christian Blog on Daily Life

Last night, I went to Microsoft for a seminar on the upcoming Windows Longhorn. We were shown the pre-beta build 5054 of Longhorn in soon-to-be-released IBM Thinkpad T43. There are few features that were shown last night, from the latest Longhorn Display Manager, which can zoom and shrink windows into any size in your screen, to the new index-based search and filtering.
You can have a notepad or calculator so small that you can put it on the corner of your screen, or so big that it fills your entire screen. For the search capability, it is nothing new, as I am using Copernic Desktop Search to fulfill the same purpose in Windows XP. But having this capability built directly into the operating system means we will get better performance, accuracy and result. What the speaker showed us last night was that Longhorn can search your document faster than you can blink. It is that fast.  It is certainly a much welcome addition if you compare with the search built into Windows XP now that may take minutes to return search result.
For the eye candy, there was semi-transparent, glassy title bar, dropshadow all around, and few more things that will justify your purchase of high-end video card next year.
A word from me, if you can wait a year, do wait until next year to upgrade your current PC. It’ll be rather sad if you decided to upgrade now, and realized that the hardware you bought is not optimized for Longhorn experience. For Longhorn, there are a lot in the pipeline waiting which I believe will get everyone excited when it is released mid-2006.
Lastly, as much as I wanted to, I can’t post any screenshot, sorry about that.

Today, 7th of April, Microsoft has released the final version of their latest MSN Messenger 7, build number 7.0.0777, with download size at 7 MB, about 7 months after it entered its beta testing stage since September 2004. Now what’s up with 7′s ???

Download MSN Messenger 7 now from MSN Messenger or Microsoft Downloads
View Microsoft Press Release

Continuing yesterday’s installing spree, here are few more software I installed last night.
WinRAR – Open .RAR files
TweakXP Pro – tweak many settings in Windows to my heart’s content.
FlashGet – so many downloads, so little time, this download manager can split your download up to 10 parts and download them simultaneously.
Logitech MouseWare – utility for my Logitech mouse.
Nero 6 Reloaded – CD/DVD burning utility. Been using Nero for couple of years now.
In addition, I also disabled unnecessary system services in order to make my system run faster. Taking a cue from BlackViper’s Windows XP Service Pack 2 Service Configuration page, I disabled quite a number of services, and save close to 100 MB of memory during Windows load. Worth your 15 minutes, but please be aware of the risk. Do not disable services which you don’t understand.

As I am installing new software to my PC, I will post here and let you know, just in case you find something interesting. Without further ado, here they are:
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2005 – Antivirus, which according to CNET, is better than Norton and McAfee
ZoneAlarm 5.5 – the best firewall software out there. You need it to protect your machine from intruders.
Opera 8.0 – my favorite browser above all, though Firefox is also a good contender.
Copernic Desktop Search 1.2 – The Search Engine for your PC. How about being able to search any file on your machine faster than you can blink?
Microsoft Money 2005 – finance management software.
MSN Messenger 7.0 Beta – needless to say, complete with Messenger Plus! 3.5
ACDSee 7.0 – fast photo viewer and manager. Some may consider Picasa or Adobe Photoshop Elements.
Acronis TrueImage 8 – disk imaging software. backup my system, just in case.
Adobe Reader 7.0 – everyone need this.
Microsoft Office 2003 – everyone should need this as well. I installed Word, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote.
Winzip 9.0 – de facto compression software. Some may consider WinRAR or some other software, doesn’t really matter, it’s just that I have been using Winzip for ages.
pdfFactoryPro – print any document to PDF format. No need for full-fledged Adobe Acrobat.
PowerToys for Windows XP – I installed TweakUI and PowerToy Calculator.
Microsoft ActiveSync – to connect my Pocket PC to my desktop.
Daemon Tools and arniWORX extension – mount an ISO image as a virtual CD drive.
UltraEdit – call it advanced Notepad
That’s all for now. I think I’m going to install few more apps on my PC tonight, will let you posted when I do so.

Question: how harmful can reinstalling Windows Media Player 10 be?
Answer: Irrecoverable system
Sunday morning, I plugged in my CF card using a card reader, intending to copy new songs from Media Player to it, so I could listen to songs on my way to church yesterday. But, when I selected my CF card in “Sync” section of WMP10, it said: “A null reference was passed from the stub“. What???!!! Okay, try again, same error message, plugged out card reader, plugged back in, nothing changed. I quickly browsed through Media Player newsgroup at Microsoft, to find that there are few people who encounter this problem, with no apparent solution, except reinstalling WMP10. Okay, sounds good I think, since a lot of software problems can be solved simply by reinstalling it. So, I went to Microsoft website, downloaded a new copy of WMP10, and let the installation ran in the background, while I was chatting to a friend. Seconds later, my screen blanked, three LED indicators on my keyboard blinked, and I heard a beep from casing’s speaker, indicating that the system has just rebooted itself. Totally clueless on what’s going on, I simply waited for my Windows to load back. To my horror, it refused to. It only went as far as the logon screen, and rebooted after that. Confused, I tried few more times. Same thing, Windows rebooted before I could logon to Windows.

Troubleshooting time. I rebooted my Windows, hit F8 when it loaded to get Advanced Options Menu, selected “Load last known good configuration”. This should save me I think, wrong. It didn’t help. Last known good configuration hit the same problem. Next, I tried “Disabled automatic restart” in order to see the blue screen which I hoped to give me more clues on what happened. It gave me STOP 0x8E. That’s all. Not helping at all. Next, I tried “Safe mode with Networking”. This usually works. It didn’t. Oh no, what has WMP10 done to my system? Started to panic a bit, I tried “Safe mode”. Nope, not even a glimpse of anything than black background with white text so far on my screen. This started to look ugly; I put in Windows XP with SP2 CD, loaded it, set up Windows XP, agree to its license, and hit “R” to repair existing Windows installation. Waited 15 mins, it rebooted to load Windows. To my surprise, it hit the same concrete block, refused to load my Windows beyond its boot up screen. Furious, I thought I would just roll back my machine to WinXP SP1 era by restoring my image created using Acronis True Image. I took out my DVD wallet, nooooo… the backup DVD was not there? DVD backups for all other machines I have was there, but not for that desktop’s backup image. Okay, don’t panic, I think it should be in my portable hard drive. I connected it to my friend’s PC, and to my amazement, “Backup Images” in my portable hard drive was empty. Things are getting from bad to worse.

Well, with half an hour left before I must leave for church, I didn’t have much choice. So, I deleted my Windows, yes deleted, and install a clean Windows. Can’t believe my luck, especially after knew it was caused “simply” by installing Windows Media Player 10. To be fair, I don’t think it’s WMP10′s fault, but it so happened that other problems decided to gather to cripple my Windows at the time when I reinstalled WMP10.

Now, since I have a clean Windows, it’s time to install sooooooo many things (again). I think I will post on what software I will install on my machine, what customization, and what tweaks to get my machine faster and better. Hope this experience will serve as a lesson to me, to store my backup properly. The lesson for me here is not to do backup, coz I do backup my machine, it’s just that it so happened I didn’t keep the backup for this machine properly that I couldn’t get back online in 15 mins time. Will post over the next few days what I am doing to my system to suit myself.

Yeah, just one of those days when some applications decided to hung my notebook by hogging 2 GB of memory usage. No option but to turn it off the “hard” way. Now who said, 1 GB RAM was enough? hehe…