TeraCopy – the solution to slow multiple copies
If you face situations, such as, very very slow copy files when you drag a file at a time to another drive or NAS, you might want to try this tool out. It does integrate to your regular work flow without an interrupt since you can just basically do the same—drag & drop again and again. Teracopy will catch that and put in the queue automatically.
I dragged and dropped files twice, an above figure was what I got. TeraCopy put the second batch on queue waiting for the first batch to finish first. This way is the most efficient way to do so and I constantly got around 40MB/s over gigabit LAN while I practically couldn’t achieve this if using only Windows Explorer. As you might already notice, Explorer will share throughput for each, but, in practice, Windows couldn’t share that efficiently. The speed will decrease dramatically over the time.
Enough said, Teracopy is such a nice alternative to stock Windows Explorer copy handler. As of yet, I have no disadvantage of having Teracopy. It is that cool. oh better yet, free version is more than enough!
Note: There are quite a number of similar applications like this, such as, SuperCopier, FastCopy, etc. If I have a chance to try them and they are better, I’ll surely update. Also, if you have experienced them, I would love to hear too.
SuperCopier2.2: People claimed that it gives better performance than Teracopy, but for me, it lacks of a queue feature. Therefore, it doesn’t qualify for me. As shown below, overall transfer speed over gigabit LAN is <10MB/s which is what we normally get with stock copy handler.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Windows or Mac or any OS – they all are the same
Regardless of OS we choose, it’s always giving us problems and also pleasures. No more arguing since you probably have seen tons of BSOD or error dialog from Windows; Mac OS is the same story. They all are ‘”garbage in, garbage out.” Nothing is perfect in the world. Just choose what you like and get the best out of it.
Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!
Popularity: unranked [?]
Must have – Flash w/ video hardware acceleration
Flash, these days, is just an evitable plug-in to the world of the Internet; no one can avoid using that although some, like me, don’t prefer to use this resource hog app that much.While Flash never had any hardware acceleration involved, all HD content pushed Flash into limit. Even some Intel Core 2 Duo might not get smooth Youtube or Hulu HD videos or even flash games.
Now Adobe decided to help us a little bit by putting effort on video hardware acceleration too. Yeah, it’s been a while people asking for this, ARM and x64 support are another highly requested. Although this release is a beta one, as for myself, I have tried and it works way better than Flash 10. I don’t get any few seconds pause in any HD video anymore. Also, games like Farmville, Fishville, that sort of stuffs, won’t make a problem like they did before. I bet Netbook would get the real benefit of this release for sure. Try for self; you will like Flash content better.
Grab it @Adobe labs. Plus, if you use Adobe AIR too, there is AIR 2.0 coming out. Check it out!
note: I still hope that Silverlight would be more widespread use than this. We need competition to get moving forward faster.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Change Login Screen background in Windows 7
If you are sick of vanilla login screen background, there is a way to change =) You have to tweak in registry a bit though, Microsoft just made it easy for OEM partner only
First of all, you have to prepare your new background. Crop your image to 1:1 to your screen resolution. The catch is you should save your image not to be larger than 256kB. You might think it turns to crap one, but believe me that’s good enough =)
After getting an image you want, rename it to “backgroundDefault.jpg”. Then copy to the folder
%windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds
in case it doesn’t exist, create your own.
Secondly, enable the background in Registry, by getting into “regedit”
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background
Create new key DWORD 32-bit, value 1 (1 as enable, 0 as disable) Also, if any of these doesn’t exist, create your own =)
That is it!, you may lock the computer and appreciate your personal login screen. Make your PC personal again!! lol
Popularity: unranked [?]
I’m not a big fan of customized desktop since I regularly clean up my OS every now and then. This is much easier way to spice up the feeling a bit =) Yeah, it’s free.
Also, it has a lot of interesting wallpapers which, of course, are nice. It’s like looking through Flickr with rotating desktop wallpaper, a feature which Microsoft eventually get after Apple has for many years
Check it out @ Personalized Gallery
Popularity: unranked [?]
Where is Google Apps free edition?
The thing is I want to move all e-mails from one of my domains to Google Apps. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t offer free edition (or standard edition), which is allowing up to 50 users only, anymore. After finding for the link for Google Apps standard edition for a while, I just found out that Google started moving Apps, GMail, docs, etc. to be paid service only.
Not like Google at all huh? I started wonder whether Google will force everyone paying for used-to-be-free service or not although Google said that it was free before.
However, in this transient state, you still are able to signup for Google Apps: standard edition by this link. It works now. I don’t know how long this link is going to last though and more importantly, how long this free Google Apps lasts. If you are using it, just backing up all your mail data more often. That should do it! =) I just hope that Google would honor free edition as they claimed when we signed up. No new features? that’s not a problem. For me, GMail engine solely is the factor here. I bet most users are the same.
Popularity: 1% [?]
TVSU revival by request!
I don’t know if you guys know about this or not, but what I first thought is ThinkVantage System Update was temporarily dropped service due to update or whatever. It’ was turned out to be Lenovo decided to cut TVSU out of ThinkVantage Suite due to the maintenance cost.
However, System Update made its way back by tons of requests. I’m really happy to see it back and it works just fine with Win7 (which I don’t have complete set of ThinkVantage software such as Fingerprint and Active Protection System) but CSS still doesn’t get along with clean install Win7. Oddly upgrading Win7 from Vista, CSS works flawlessly!
This can be either the way to waste Lenovo’s bandwidth or it’s the way to keep the crowd with Thinkpad. But the bottom line is happy customers. You are on the right track, Lenovo!
Popularity: 2% [?]
Bing – re-badge Live Search
This is definitely not the breaking news. Microsoft just decided to change the word, Live, to “Bing” I don’t know if Bing is so much better word or anything. Will Live suite which is great change its name to Bing suite as well? They claimed that Bing uses new algorithm or whatever to achieve better performance; we probably don’t care either. What we care is whether “our keyword” can generate the result we want or not.
After trying for a while, I don’t see anything much interesting or persuasive enough to convince me that it’s much more than a re-brand & putting useless features like category, search history. I honestly don’t know if you feel the same way, to me, search is built to destroy any classified, categorized data since if you do arrange stuffs neatly, you don’t need search, but if you do need “search, “ then you have no need of organizing them [that includes others’ stuffs which is categorized in the different ways of your brain]
In short, if Bing couldn’t change attitude about putting more and more bots for much larger coverage, like Google, and try to get most out of those huge database, they are not going to be even close to the first choice. Don’t think Google is the only competitor here. Yahoo, which gives the results much different than Google, might be much better alternative to Google rather than old archive search like Bing.
ps. I really feel sorry for Microsoft that they have soo much potential in every ways, but they couldn’t come up with the ace solution to the market. They might need to re-organize or something to aim their goals much more efficient. For instance, if they happen to amalgamate all E-mail clients’ teams such as Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Outlook 2007, into only 1 e-mail client—might be 2 sub-divisions: web-based & desktop-based. I believe they can have GMail-equivalent easily. But, they are dividing into small groups to achieve in everything as far as the products go. Consequently they just divide themselves… and think of it as a good plan. Hurr what a waste..
Popularity: 2% [?]
ThinkVantage System Update – big UPDATE coming??
Although all ThinkVantage softwares are likely to be just redundancy from Windows stock, System Update is one of the best ThinkVantage software provided for Thinkpad. It basically automatically finds all necessary drivers and apps (of course within ThinkVantage suite) that need to be updated or installed and set all we want up by single-click. It works on and off sometimes but, 70%-80% chance, this helps save quite a lot of time spending on IBM support site. I don’t blame their unorganized site by any mean since there are tons of update every week. It’s just hard to be that organize and up-to-date at the same time.
By the way, I COULD NOT UPDATE ANYTHING with System UPDATE recently. What they tell us is only this pop-up?!? Well, May is coming—tomorrow!!. I hope it would turn out to be something very good for us, Lenovo!!! Don’t just refresh new UI like all new ThinkVantage but only a few improvement then. I don’t care if that looks cool; I want it to work well.
I’m PC Ad: I’m not cool enough to be Mac. That’s why I’m using Thinkpad, perhaps LOL
Popularity: 4% [?]
Adblock plus like on IE8 with InPrivate Filtering
Although I don’t use IE8 that much, it’s good to see how to implement adblock in IE. You will see it work like a charm as you experienced with Adblock plus on Firefox. It’s actually a feature in InPrivate mode (aka. porn mode) called Private Filtering. You may add rule yourself, but anony101 from dslreports.com did the list for you to import easily.
How to:-
1. Enter InPrivate mode in IE8 (Ctrl + Shift + P)
2. Menu: Safety | InPrivate Filtering Settings
3. Get into Advanced Settings
4. Then import this file "rules.xml"
You are now good to go! You will find that ad is gone in InPrivate mode. However, how about normal mode? All ads still there. If you like to enable this feature, you gotta get yourself into Registry Editor.
1. Start | Run "regedit”
2. Add “DWORD 32-bit” entry named StartMode with value 1 as shown below.
Start your IE again, you will see InPrivate Filtering Feature is on and available in normal mode too. You can always disable and enable at all time or by shortcut Ctrl + Shift + F
Well, it works =) Happy surfing without any extra stuff.
Popularity: 3% [?]
