I want a MacPC :)

A few weeks ago I bought myself a new PC after finally admitting that my old Athlon 3800+ was obsolete.

I can’t believe that I didn’t blog that already but here’s a quick run down of the specs:

Asus P5K-c
Intel CoreQuad Q6600
4GB Geil budget crap DDR2 RAM
Nvidia 8800GTX
Universal CPU Waterblock

Anyway.. After speaking to a lecturer today at college and toying with the idea of which OS to run, I’ve decided that I’m going to install Mac OS with [url=http://iatkos.wikidot.com/]iATKOS[/url] on this box alongside Windows XP and possibly [url=http://ubuntustudio.org/]Ubuntu Studio[/url].

I’m not sure which OS I will be using most frequently but after using Ubuntu for a week or two when my Athlon gave up the ghost, I realised that you can do pretty much anything in linux that you can in windows with the exception of games.

I’ll post progress later tonight or possibly tomorrow after I’ve had a play in OSx to tell you guys how it went.

Stephen

Stop Windows Update from restarting your PC automatically

This morning I woke up to find my PC turned on. Not unusual you might think, but when you consider that I had been encoding a DVD with the program set to "Shut down when complete", it was.

What had happened (and seems to happen more and more often) was that windows had automatically updated it’sself and then restarted my PC. Not a big deal you might think, but it starts to be a big deal when you often go to sleep while your pc downloads and seeds torrents, or encodes avi files to DVD, it can quickly become very annoying and so I went in search of a way to disable it.

[b]Disable Automatic Restart[/b]

After a few minutes of rephrasing my problem in google a [url=http://www.aeonity.com/frost/remove-automatic-restart-after-windows-updates]solution was found[/url].

1: Click Start > Run.
2: Type "gpedit.msc" and press enter.
3: Navigate to "Local Computer Policy" > "Computer Configuration" > "Administrative Templates" > "Windows Components" > "Windows Update"
4: Double click the entry "No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations"
5: Select "Enabled" from the three options and press OK.
6: Close all open windows and restart your computer. Automatic updates should now run without automatically restarting your PC and giving control back to you.

I hope this helped someone because it was invaluable to me
Stephen

Order start menu alphabetically

After years, probably, of having 3 or 4 columns of start menu programs all of which are installeds in no-particular order, I have finally gotten sick of struggling to find the program I want to launch. Again, I set about [url=http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=order+start+menu+alphabetically&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a]googling[/url] for a solution and found one on [url=http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com]www.softwaretipsandtricks.com[/url]. Here it is:

When you move programs around in your WindowsXP start menu, the OS will stop arranging it when you add new software. This happens when you move items from your user start menu to the all users start menu. Here is the fix:

1. Open regedit (Start -> Run. Type regedit)
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Explorer\MenuOrder\Start Menu\Menu OR HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Explorer\MenuOrder\Start Menu2\Menu
3. Remove the order key by right clicking and going to delete.
4. Log out then back in.

Reply above quoted text in Thunderbird

Recently, I have gotten back into using my own pop3 email accounts instead of web services such as [url=http://www.hotmail.com]hotmail[/url] and [url=http://www.gmail.com]gmail[/url].

The software I use for this purpose is Mozilla’s brilliant [url=http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/thunderbird/]Thunderbird[/url]. One thing I didn’t like about Thunderbird was it’s method of replying to emails. It’s default format was something like this:[code]xxx@zzz.com wrote:
| This is the first email
| From the person
| who you want to
| reply to

And this is your reply
[Signature][/code]

I wasn’t happy with this and trawled through the options for an alternative style. I found nothing so had a quick [url=http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=Trs&q=thunderbird+configuration+editor&btnG=Search&meta=]google[/url] and found the Config Editor ([b]Tools>Options>Advanced>General>Config Editor[/b]). In here are many configuration options similar to that what you get by typing [b]about:config[/b] into your navigation bar on firefox.

The key we are looking for is [i]mail.identity.default.reply_on_top[/i]. By default this is set to [b]0[/b] but if we change it to [b]1[/b] then our new reply is on top. You can also set this preference on a per-identity basis using the keys [i]mail.identity.id1.reply_on_top[/i] by replacing [b]id1[/b] with the id you want to change.

This is what our format looks like now:[code]Our reply is up here now

xxx@zzz.com wrote:
| This is the first email
| From the person
| who you want to
| reply to

[Signature][/code]

As you can see though, our signature is still located at the bottom of the email and could easily be lost after more than 1 or two emails have been sent back and forward. To change this, fire up the configuration editor once more and locate the following key:
[i]mail.identity.default.sig_bottom[/i]

Change this key to [b]false[/b]to complete our changes and have our emails read properly. Once again, this can be set on a per-identity basis using the keys starting from [i]mail.identity.id1.sig_bottom[/i]

And here is our final result:[code]Our reply is up here now

[Signature]

xxx@zzz.com wrote:
| This is the first email
| From the person
| who you want to
| reply to
[/code]

I hope you find this useful as it is knowledge that was hard to find but I feel that I will be using alot in the future!

Thanks
Stephen