windows

I want to get something out in the open.  It’s not illegal to hack your software. This is probably contrary to what you might assume when you hear the words “hack” and “software” used in the same sentence, but there is an important distinction to make: hacked software is not the same thing as pirated […]

Mark started his history of music production yesterday, and I thought I would follow suit.  I’ve never documented the process.  As I warned on his blog, my history is messy and doesn’t involve fancy equipment.  In fact, to a large extent, it mostly involves the cheapest equipment available.  But I’ll get to that. It all […]

I’ve flipped back to iTunes as my default audio player.  I was avoiding it for a long, long time for a lot of reasons but when WinAmp randomly stopped playing OGG files (which I have a lot of), and I couldn’t fix it, I installed the Xiph QuickTime Components plugin and downloaded the latest version of iTunes.  And I […]

a few months ago, i posted a link to a hack that revealed how to do an in-place “upgrade” (although it’s really a downgrade) from Windows 7 RC-1 to a lesser version of Windows 7.  as the nag alerts saying i need to backup my stuff and reinstall have started cropping up, i decided to […]

stumbled across this “duh” of a hack to allow up/downgrading (depending on your perspective) of a more premium version of windows 7 to a less premium version.  why would you do this? if you were running a beta or rc version of windows 7 you can “upgrade” to a retail edition without wiping the system. […]

it won’t surprise anyone who visits this blog or knows anything about me that i’m a bit of a geek.  i mean that in the broadest sense of the term.  geek as in music geek — not only am i a music snob, but i was also a band geek, and, yes, i listen to bands […]

okay, so i’m on windows 7. i’m transferring files (about 300mb of them) from my linux server to my local hard drive. there’s some lag on the network due to the server running a backup to a NAS backup server while i’m doing this. eventually, some file transfer times out and i’m given a dialog […]

windows 7 ships on october 26.  when that day comes, you’ll start to see (if you haven’t already) a lot of reviews.  i’m guessing most of them will be very positive. here’s the thing: windows 7 is a very good operating system.  it’s generations better than previous versions of windows and will definitely give OSX a run for […]

the other day i tweeted about a recent acquisition.  i found a computer lying in the street in the universal, “take this, it’s free” position.  i had little doubt that was actually the intent because the moisture underneath the pc case told me it had probably been out overnight.  i took it home figuring it looked […]

i’ve been a longtime fan and occasional user of linux.  i had it running for about a  year as my primary operating system under ubuntu.  microsoft announced the release of their windows 7 RC-1 the other day, and as part of the announcement stated that all of their beta testers, whether you’re using win 7 beta […]

so the other day, i got a notification in my systray that msdt.exe was corrupt, and possibly i should do a chkdsk to repair the problem. after seeing this crop up several times, i decided to take the message’s advice.  i stopped paying attention at some point, when i realized the chkdsk was gonna take […]

so, i’ve been running win 7 beta on my main machine for a little while now and thought i should share my thoughts, since, you know, that’s kind of the whole point of this beta thing… boot time bootup time is significantly faster than vista and xp.  i’m actually pretty surprised at how quickly it’s […]