The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

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Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

I used to like TreePie to occasionally check my drive, especially with a SSD and the current age of apps that seem to have no problem making GBS threads away gigabytes of disk space. (Looking at you, Chrome. *chrome stares back and poops 2 more gigs into local cache*)

anyways treepie doesn't work in Win10. What's a good utility for doing the same thing, that's compatible with 8/10, and isn't WinDirStat? That UI of infinite nested rectangles is awful.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2016 19:40

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 06:29

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Re: treepie replacement - found HDGraph which is free and does the easily readable treepie-like solar graph, though not quite as nice looking and the scan is kinda slow. But it works better, it isn't confused by junctions or symlinks. Treepie would double count the space used by WinSxS and such. Recommended.

Arsten posted:

An (also sometimes shady) alternative is to ~~buy a discount key~~ wander around an office, college campus, best buy, or e-waste dump with a cellphone camera taking pictures of key stickers. This is how many ebayers are selling for as little as $25 for a pro key.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2016 22:45

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Internaut! posted:

I'm using Windows 10 for work and have a bunch of applications with audio that I monitor, currently I use Windows' sound mixer to mute the sound from individual apps when I need to focus on one, but it would be *way* more convenient if I could use keyboard shortcuts to mute/unmute particular apps. Does anyone know an app that lets you create global keybinds to mute individual Windows applications?

For what it's worth I tried Voicemeeter but it's not really meant to handle more than 2 app audio streams (I have up to 8 sometimes) although it works really well for mixing mic/music into a Skype output for example: http://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/Voicemeeter/

The insanely useful multi-tool NirCmd can do this. All it needs is application PID or exe filename (latter is gonna be easiest unless it's a UWP app), or it can select the active app.

It would not be difficult to use autohotkey for the global keybinds into nircmd. They work together flawlessly -- I use 'nircmd setdefaultsounddevice' with my general-purpose ahk script to switch sound output between headphones and my monitor's built-in speakers, and also 'monoff' to blank my monitor with win+pause.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2016 02:28

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Internaut! posted:

That sounds perfect, what do you use to execute the "monoff" command with Win+Pause? Is there a recommended keymapper for Windows 10? Ideally something that works in fullscreen apps etc.

Edit: I tried making a Windows shortcut including the keyboard shortcut option, but for some reason it takes 4-5 seconds to invoke. Regardless the solution is perfect; I can create a little batch file to mute/unmute a bunch of named applications at once which is exactly what I need, thanks much.

Get Autohotkey, don't bother with batch files or the windows built in shortcut keys.

If you take a little bit of time to learn how to use autohotkey I can promise you won't regret it. And if you already know the basics of programming, you can pick up the simple scripting language it uses easily. It's seriously the best macro and automation tool for windows.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2016 17:57

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

neogeo0823 posted:

I notice Windows now has this Fast Start thing. I'm totally fine with the speed that my computer takes to start up as it is. I'm not really interested in having it go in 4 seconds or whatever instead of 8 seconds. Is there any reason I should have it enabled?

On a desktop machine, zero. Your PC boots up 4 seconds faster, but now you can't boot from USB or access the bios without going through extra rigamarole. I cannot think of any reason not to just use S3 sleep. It's even faster to resume than fast boot, and it uses a completely trivial amount of power while sleeping.

For a laptop fast boot is better, since you want full power off and booting is a more frequent activity.

EoRaptor posted:

All it does is load required device drivers into memory as a single block, instead of individually picking them up from disc as the HAL requests them.

it's actually a hibernate that's had everything but the kernel & drivers unloaded first, and uefi helps pull it all back into memory directly.

which is another reason to skip fast boot: you have to keep hibernate enabled to use it. if you have a small-ish SSD that you want to get the most useful space from, that means losing 75% of your ram size to hiberfil.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2016 15:07

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Vulture Culture posted:

I know it's beside the point, but for anyone who's not actively tracking prices, you can get a 480 GB SSD for under $100 nowadays.

true but
a) if you already have an ssd that works, getting something new just to have it is $100 you don't need to spend.
b) the rock-bottom price TLC drives kinda suck performance-wise. I'd rather spend my hundred bucks on a better 250gb 850evo (or whatever) and continue to move games around / disable hibernate / ruthlessly stomp on dumb programs that squander space.

but even if I had a 480gb ssd or a 2TB one, I'd continue to turn off hibernate because S3 sleep is already the perfect method for desktops

# ¿ Jul 26, 2016 17:22

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Shumagorath posted:

My new build is going to happen just after the free upgrade ends. If I upgraded a machine from 8.1 to 10 is there any way to transfer my 10 license?

Possibly MS will start allowing people to take a free upgrade license across a hardware upgrade if you tie it to a MS account (and activate with the MS account on the new hardware).

But it's unconfirmed stuff that we won't totally know how it works until after the anniversary update comes out. Which is Aug 2.

quote:

Also did anyone ever bother with Storage Spaces or am I better off doing RAID1 via my motherboard?

Why not simple volume mirroring in software, via disk management? I've been using that for years now to mirror my files partition, it works fine. (Started using it because I had unequal size drives, which software handles easily.) And the speed difference between windows mirroring and mobo RAID is pretty negligible, especially for writes.

Storage spaces just seems way too complicated for a relatively simple operation like mirroring. It's also slow, and I'd worry about data recovery if something bad happened. Like if the OS was totally hosed and I wanted to boot a linux USB stick to do an immediate safety backup. Linux can't read from storage spaces, you'd have to yank a drive and put it in another windows 8/10 PC.

Windows software mirrors require dynamic disks, which are a pain if you want to dual-boot linux, but at least linux can read them.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2016 23:56

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Red_Fred posted:

Thanks. So basically use sleep for short breaks and then otherwise just shutdown fully?

for a laptop yeah. though also note that it has the ability to be in sleep then automatically hibernate itself after a period of time. the standard power plans of "balanced" and "power saver" will do this for you.

for desktops sleep is fine even for long breaks / overnight because sleep really doesn't use much more power than the so-called "off" does. (most plug-in electronics use a few watts even when they're off. a desktop pc power supply keeps one small part active at all times and generally uses 5-8 watts when off. sleep might use 2-4 extra watts.)

# ¿ Aug 10, 2016 05:15

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

jesus christ guys the #1 hit on google is a free program to do the job exactly. and it doesn't even need to be installed, no crapware or anything.

all 3 of y'all are failures but special marks to arsten for suggesting a method with re-compressing jpgs

VVVV edit: there's nothing wrong with ifranview, but if you're gonna recommend it you should at least take a moment to look up the proper way to do what you're recommending it for. again, a 10 second google for ifranview remove exif lossless would do the trick. bad advice is worse than no advice.

Klyith fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Aug 16, 2016

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 19:13

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Massasoit posted:

My friend will be taking a Windows 10 laptop to remote Africa for peace corps and likely won't have much access to Internet. How can we force w10 to not update on the rare occasion he is on a network?

Will the metered connection setting help here?

You could just disable the windows update service altogether, that should prevent it from downloading updates. Worked in previous win versions anyways, unless they've split off the downloading and updating parts.

I'm sure windows will bug him a bunch about it, but that seems like the easiest and most effective solution.

Heran Bago posted:

There is a "defer upgrades" option that only works on 10 Pro, and even then it doesn't work as it's supposed to for everyone.

defer upgrades only works for the big ones like the Anniversary update that are pretty much full OS changes, not just little patches or security updates.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2016 21:20

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

obviously we should just put all our porn into PDF files since we've already proven that it has compression that can't be improved by zip, 7zip, or rar.

SEKCobra posted:

Can't I just add it to my %PATH%?

only if it's a hard link.
:rimshot:

# ¿ Aug 29, 2016 15:51

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Happiness Commando posted:

Anyone know of a way to swap the mappings for 2 keys?

As much as i love autohotkey, that's a case where you can go down to a more basic level for better results. You can remap keyboard scancodes in windows, which then doesn't need a running program and works during login etc. Two ways to do this:

1. (easier, do this) Get sharpkeys, use it to remap keys. Very simple program, and it just uses a special registry key that swaps keyboard scancodes. For a win-alt swap this is probably the way to do it (I've remapped my capslock button with this). Downside, it's limited to simple swaps.

2. (way more work) Get the MS custom keyboard layout program and make a new keyboard layout. Advantage is that you can easily swap layouts back and forth. If you were using a laptop and plugging in the fullsize mac keyboard at your desk but then needed the normal layout with the laptop keyboard, this is how you'd do it. Also you can do waaaay more than plain swapping keys, like all the international layouts that have e-E-� and such. But that stuff is difficult to set up unless you know how it works.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2016 02:58

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Sir Unimaginative posted:

^{^{Before you reply, consider: even if I WAS a professional coder I'd have trouble justifying 70 bucks for Sublime Text, and it's not because of money. I have already deliberated on this and 'I'm helping!'-posting, uh, won't.}}

I had trouble with $70 for sublime text because my cards kept rejecting their payment processors

Sir Unimaginative posted:

I am suddenly very interested in this Atom thing.

Atom is worth checking out. I didn't end up liking it myself, and I'd really question Thermopyle's assertion over how many people are switching from Sublime to Atom (at least of the people who have a real Sublime license), but it does have advantages. Here's what I *didn't* like:

Open source + active development is a double edged sword. There are packages in atom's repository that don't work because they got deprecated by updates. Making extensions incompatible is annoying, not removing them is really really annoying.

It's a heavy app running on chromium & interpreted js. It's a bit slow to load, and opening / switching files just isn't as snappy as sublime (or n++ or any other text editor that's a normal program). It's not awful, but it's not instantaneous and I'm used to instant with a text editor.

For whatever reason, I guess the chromium display engine, the font rendering was not great. It's a bit soft, like too much antialiasting or extra cleartype or something. Same font (PragmataPro) & size as I use in Sublime, worse result, a tiny difference that added up to eyestrain after enough hours.

But you should try it for yourself! Coming from notepad++ I think I would be very happy with atom.

^{^{Take this as the opinions of a complete dilettante who does not code for a job, but still ends up hacking on scripts, lua, and xml for entertainment quite a bit.}}

# ¿ Sep 12, 2016 23:54

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Ynglaur posted:

Is there a good comparison of LastPass and 1Passwird anywhere?

The good comparison for LastPass is a piece of paper with your passwords written on it.

LastPass is not a company you want in charge of your security because they're poo poo at it. Not only have they had some really bad flaws in their program that could be exploited to steal passwords, they have a history of reacting stupidly to the security researchers that found them.

Pay for 1password if you don't want to manage keepass.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2018 03:22

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Ynglaur posted:

Why do so few apps have a version in the Windows Store at this point? 7-Zip, WinSCP, Notepad++, Audacity, Pidgin, etc. I would assume at least some of them would have a version in the Store, but I am probably ignorant of some obvious shortcoming.

UWP *is* the obvious shortcoming. lemme tell you about how all my UWP apps stopped working for months due to insane lovecraftian DCOM permissions errors.

but for real, what advantage is it for any of those things you listed, which are all free open source apps, to be on the Win Store?

# ¿ Jul 14, 2018 20:03

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

dont be mean to me posted:

As in, most other platforms.

free open-source applications get added to platforms based on someone who can do the work wanting them there. 7-Zip, WinSCP, Notepad++, Audacity, Pidgin, etc already exist on the windows platform. they don't need to be on the windows store, you go to their website and hit download.

dont be mean to me posted:

You don't concern-troll like this over repositories on any other platform.

lol I sure would, but this happens to be the microsoft thread talking about the windows store. other repositories have their own drama which can be intensely stupid -- but at least it resembles normal humans yelling at each other over a disagreement. microsoft otoh is like interacting with an Elder God.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2018 13:47

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Goodpancakes posted:

I got a new SSD that seems to not be great. Intermittent non system disk errors, difficulty coming out of hibernation. I've tested a lot of other harddware and I think its the HD. SO I want to clone its contents onto a new drive so I don't have to reinstall every thing. Windows 10 install. What are my software options to get this done? Clonezilla?

Macrium Reflect is good and the free version does disk cloning with good support for both the special windows boot partition and resizing.

However, if your SSD is having errors there are two things I'd check first:
1. get CrystalDiskInfo and see how it reports drive health -- if it's good and you're not having reallocated sectors or internal errors, it may not be the drive itself.
2. check your SATA cable. reseat it both ends, make sure it's not kinked or doing 90 degree turns.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2018 00:16

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

nwin posted:

So my stepdad died and all of his poo poo was on his computer, which is password protected.

We knew the password about a year ago but he�s changed it since then.

It�s windows 7 professional-is there any way to get into his computer now?

assuming that it's just the login screen that you're stuck at, a bootable linux CD (or USB stick) will let you see everything on it. alternately, remove the hard drive and plug it into another computer.

if it's password protected and he was using windows bitlocker, you have a much harder task.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 14:53

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

lol I was thinking "there's a thing right on the account screen to disconnect the account from MS, I've done that" and it turns out they removed it, just :hmbol:

you can logout any time you like, but you can never leave

khy posted:

Microsoft has been real poo poo ever since Windows 8. Windows 10 feels like it was several steps back, even if it was also a couple steps forward.

I ain't exactly complaining when I got it for free, but when a giant megacorp gives you stuff for free of course it's a trojan horse. Regard everything with suspicion appropriate for that.

Anyways if you got tired of having the MS account lockdown for reasons other than the password, it's really not hard to make a second account and copy settings over. Pretty much all modern 3rd party programs keep their settings in AppData, and are generally tolerant to moving between user profiles.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2018 17:38

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

InfiniteZero posted:

Is there a decent option out there to add a bit of reverb to all of my PC audio output?

I want Spotify/Soundcloud (etc.) and pretty much any other sound to have some reverb on top of it. I like the sound of music in a huge room and find it less distracting while I work if it sounds that way.

Is DFX the only option? I don't want my audio "enhanced" or "super mega bass boosted" or whatever. Just a touch of reverb.

There's no option for this on my Realtek tab.

Please help all my music sound like a soundcheck.

Virtual Audio Cable + software that can host real-time VST plugins + find good VST reverb that you like

but the stomp box idea is a lot easier and probably way more fun to play around with, if you don't care about tossing down a fair chunk of cash

# ¿ Jul 25, 2018 20:56

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

khy posted:

It's fine and dandy, no problems, but I need to tie it to a Microsoft account to ensure the license activates properly. But doing so will require that Microsoft account password to log in, right? And while I can replace that password with a PIN, I can't just remove the necessity of putting in a password to log in entirely can I?

1. Create a new local administrator account, using MMC
--- a. win+r run -> "lusrmgr.msc"
--- b. open the Users folder, then use menu Actions -> New User...
--- c. type name, password, uncheck must change password at next login and check password never expires, create
--- d. now from the list of list of users, right click the new one and select Properties
--- e. select Members Of tab
--- f. Add, type "Administrators", click Check Names and it will change to (PCName)\Administrators, click OK
--- g. OK

2. restart PC and log into that new account. tie it to a Microsoft account. do your SSD upgrade.

3. Disable the new account so your grandpa won't be confused
--- a. open user manager again
--- b. open Users, right click the dummy account, Properties
--- c. check Account is disabled

# ¿ Jul 25, 2018 21:58

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Double Punctuation posted:

Why are they not using Opus now? Do they not have access to the raw files to re-encode to a format that doesn�t suck rear end?

If you are putting music in a mobile device like Ape Agitator Opus has a big drawback: the decode performance chews a lot more CPU in comparison to other formats. Enough to have noticeable battery impact if you listen to music for a couple hours. I wouldn't pick that for mobile encoding unless the use case was to have a big library but not actually play music all the time.

For mobile devices I'd stick with MP3, AAC, or if you're ok going off into crazy codec land Musepack (which has the fastest decode performance of any high quality codec).

# ¿ Jul 28, 2018 16:34

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Double Punctuation posted:

Okay, that makes sense. I assumed a codec designed with VoIP in mind would be better optimized for power consumption. Is it something that could be improved with better decoders or ASICs?

I'm not super-knowledgeable about Opus, as I personally stopped paying attention to codec development 5 years ago because it seemed like a solved problem as far as I was concerned. So other than the general story that a codec designed for very-low-bandwidth voice encoding turned out to be transparent for music at 96kbps (which is wack), I don't know what it needs for better decode performance.

But the general trend is more efficient codecs are more demanding on processor time, and VoIP is not an application that cares about CPU consumption as much as it cares about bandwidth. I do know that Opus does algorithmic high frequency reconstruction, which could be something that adds a bunch of extra overhead.

Modern ARM ships don't bother with an ASIC for media, they have a general purpose co-processor (Neon) that does SIMD instructions. So it's not something that is likely to be vastly improved in a future smartphone, other than the general march-of-progress fashion.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2018 21:26

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

baka kaba posted:

It has evolved, mp3s used to sound like rear end below like 160kbps. Encoders just got a lot smarter about how they compress the data without ending up with swishy garbage

to expand on this: the most frequently used (freeware or distributed with other software) encoders from the early days had really lovely or completely non-existant psychoacoustic models. To encode a good mp3 you had to :filez:

a copy of the real-deal fraunhoffer codec.

a whole lot of the cleverness in lossy compressed audio is the psychoacoustic model -- the algorithms that determine how to throw away large quantities of the original sound data, because you can't hear it. The early work on open-source psychoacoustics from lame, vorbis, and musepack is a big part of why they improved so much over early mp3s, and why a new codec like Opus can come along years later and do CD quality at 1/2 the bitrate of mp3.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2018 05:26

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Black Griffon posted:

One thing that has bothered me for a while now is that I feel like I've got so little control over my PC audio. Mix, levels and everything. Not only is this annoying because I do a bunch of radio where I have total control over every aspect of my sound, and coming home to a worse setup sucks, but it truly does gently caress with my self confidence that I haven't figured out a solution for this by myself yet.

I'm using my HyperX cloud II for pretty much everything nowadays, connected via USB, my problems are most prominent on that set, but pretty ubiquitous. I have two main problems:
1. As seen in this image, a comfortable volume level occupies something like a tenth of the volume bar, meaning I have really poor precision and control over my volume.

2. In addition to and combined with this, trying to set up different volumes for when I'm playing MP games, watching films and alt-tabbing between the two is clunky, annoying and bad. I generally keep my games at a way higher volume than youtube and whatnot.

So what I hope you guys can help me with is some way to adjust all this on the fly with more intuition and precision. Good third party software, a setting I've somehow missed, whatever. I'd love to be able to use the whole volume slider, or adjust Codblops without loving with VLC.

Voicemeeter can do what you want. It's a virtual mixer that people use for streaming and stuff, but for you the important bit is that it has a virtual sound card that does volume control.

The basic setup is to set "voicemeeter input" as your default sound device in the window audio panel, then in the mixer app set your usb headphones as the hardware out. Then you can use the fader bars on the mixer to cut the volume down. Master volume stays at 100% in the windows panel, and per-app volume in the windows mixer has the full range.

Downside: since this is doing all the audio mixing in software, there's CPU headroom taken up. Not a major problem if you have a CPU with 4 or 8 cores. And you lose all the fancy 5.1 or 7.1 surround stuff the headphones do -- the virtual sound device is plain 2 channels. (IMO this isn't a big loss because that stuff is a gimmick... but I don't play codblops or other games where over-expanded surround is an advantage.)

edit: now that I think about it, it may be possible to have 7.1 for codblops by setting the game to use the headphone USB device as output, while feeding everything else through voicemeeter. I haven't used it enough myself, but if you're ok with a lot fiddling you can probably have the best of both worlds.

Klyith fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Oct 24, 2018

# ¿ Oct 23, 2018 23:47

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

s.i.r.e. posted:

I keep getting this stupid notifications about the "Xbox Rewards App is Now Available" and it doesn't show up in the Notification area. It happens once every couple days and is really drat annoying since I don't even own an Xbox. I also have notifications off and have no clue what would even be sending this. Any ideas?

Do you sign in to windows with a microsoft account? Seems like it might be being pushed from that.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4027592/microsoft-account-how-to-opt-out-of-microsoft-rewards

Otherwise, have you disabled all the advertisement stuff in windows 10?

# ¿ Feb 9, 2019 06:45

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Statutory Ape posted:

I've googled (many times) and checked the OP here to no avail.

Any suggestions for why my start menu on my xps 13 A) lags when i open it a bit and B) under no circumstances lets me use the search functionality?

ie, when i hit windows key on every other computer and start typing "Calc" it'll bring up calculator ,etc. there is no text input happening at all

this is on a reasonably fresh windows install too which is funnky

check event viewer, see if you've got a bunch of stuff like Activation of app Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cx571q69xxyzy!CortanaUI failed with error: some bullshit excuse

# ¿ Mar 22, 2019 02:42

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Statutory Ape posted:

i took your advice and i do see this

Yup, I had the same problem. (You haven't disabled the firewall service by any chance have you?)

Possible solution 1: open a PowerShell window as administrator, run
sfc /scannow
followed by
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

Solution 2: wait for 1903 to come out, the appx bitrot resolves itself during major updates because those are basically a reinstall for that poo poo.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2019 02:11

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

HenryEx posted:

So do i need to somehow convert the MBR to a GPT on my boot partition first before it can handle the full 4TB on the Red? How the heck do i do that?

There is a possible problem with that: you can't boot from a GPT drive unless your mobo supports UEFI boot. Confirm that you can set your mobo to UEFI first.

If it does: Convert your existing Win10 install drive to GPT+UEFI by following the these instructions. (Especially follow the part about backing up your stuff first.)

If it does not, you're stuck with MBR only which means you can only use the first 2TB of your new HD. Say no to whatever prompt asked to convert to GPT (or maybe use a more user-friendly cloning tool).

# ¿ Apr 20, 2019 20:17

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Alpha Mayo posted:

What's a better alternative to Notepad++ these days? It has been choking on larger XML files (50MB+) that I work with.

Looking for something FAST with big files, syntax highlighting and other basic coding-like features.

SciTE is ugly but one of the fastest at loading big files.

The need to hand-edit 50mb XML is the major failure in your process though.

# ¿ May 8, 2019 00:57

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Dirt Road Junglist posted:

My co-workers like SublimeText, but I never found it to be that much better than NP++. That said, I never had anything that large to work with, so I'm just throwing out a random suggestion and not something I've tested.

I also use and really like SublimeText, but it wouldn't be my choice for the job in question.
#1 it's maybe faster at huge files than NP++ but not massively so

#2 more importantly, it actually kinda sucks at dealing with huge garbage-piles that have stuff like giant chunks of text with no newlines. I ran into this recently on a json output that was like 800kb and 8 line feeds, it did weird things to sublime's scroll movement. It's a very good editor of human-readable code, which I'm just guessing this isn't.
(Anything that requires a 50mb XML file to be hand-edited, is probably an unreadable garbage-pile.)

# ¿ May 8, 2019 09:58

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

win10 virtual desktops are extremely good

cool feature: right click on something in the win-tab spread, "show windows from this app on all desktops": this is fully persistent for that program. I use that on foobar2000 so I always have music visible.

hambeet posted:

i have no idea why they wouldn't use the same functionality as alt+tab, that'd be more user friendly

here's a snip of autohotkey that makes a single keypress into a toggle for switching desktops:

code:

^#\::
  SendMessage, 0x08 , 0, 0, , WinTitle, A, , , 200  ;0x08 WM_KILLFOCUS = tell active window to release key focus
                                                    ; prevents flashing taskbar (mostly)
  if (vdeskflip)
  {
    send ^#{Left}
    vdeskflip := false
  }
  else
  {
    send ^#{Right}
    vdeskflip := true
  }
Return

I bind ctrl+win+\ to an extra button on my mouse, and this makes it into a one-button desktop flipper.
#` instead of ^#\ on the first line would make win+tilde be the hotkey, which would be a good combo for keyboard.

# ¿ May 15, 2019 07:36

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Fleedar posted:

Is there a way to permanently apply folder view options to every folder in Windows 10? There is never a moment that I don't want to see a folder in Details view with Name, Type, Size, and Date Modified columns. I know you can apply the current view settings to all folders "of this type", but it never wants to stick forever, and it seems I'm always stumbling across folders Windows thinks are a new "type" with different default view options that I don't want.

There are few things in technology that I feel like a luddite about, but if I could use the Windows 95/98 version of Windows Explorer unchanged in Windows 10, I totally would.

Here's what I would do:

1. close all explorer windows, delete these two keys in regedit
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\BagMRU HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ShellNoRoam\Bags
(this is where explorer stores all saved folder view settings)

2. logout/ login, open explorer, navigate to a folder, set the view details as you like.

3. change the folder to a different type in options and apply its view to all of this type. repeat for every available type. it should stick going forward because there are no old views saved to confuse things.

# ¿ May 16, 2019 02:48

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

doctorfrog posted:

Yeah, I'm sure it's more than 64 characters in the path, since I have files with pathnames over 100 characters that play, and some that don't show on the head unit. But sometimes you have to be specific to get specific help, even if you're not sure what the limit is.

The head unit is dumb, and I'm dumb too for working this hard to load a bunch of music on a stock Honda player:

Foobar2k has a very good function-based formatting script that is usable in the move/rename feature. The real problem you have though is that fitting genre\artist - album\01 - title into 64 characters is pretty difficult. You gotta be pretty ruthless about cutting down characters so that it fits without everything just being cut from the end. (Like, if you have any album by Godspeed You Black Emperor that's all your characters gone just on the directory name.)

In your green day example you're duplicating the artist at the end, is that because you can't see the artist otherwise? I think this would do what you want:

$cut($trim($cut(%genre%,12))\$cut($trim($cut(%artist%,16))-$trim($cut(%album%,16)),24)\$trim($cut(%tracknumber% - %title% - %artist%,32)),61)

Possibly also wrap the whole thing in a $ansi(X) or $ascii(X) if the dumb head unit can't deal with unusual characters.

But it's kinda unsatisfying when I look at a bunch of music I have through that filter. Lot of super-truncated results. Honestly, with only 700 tracks I don't know if I'd bother organizing by genre.

# ¿ May 18, 2019 15:46

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Factor Mystic posted:

Bookmarks really do not cut it for reasons that are hard to articulate. Firefox once had a more clearly defined "tab groups" feature but I can't find it any more.

I use SessionBuddy in chrome/edge to manage old windows, because its easy to generate a snapshot and then selectively restore in the future, but mainly I just use that to avoid catastrophic browser crashes rather than for workspace management. But it's nice to go pull an old tab from 6 months ago.

Firefox tab groups still exist in the engine, but the user-facing feature got killed off from the browser. There are a bunch of different extensions that bring groups back -- this is the one I like. Tab groups were always a bit finicky, but that extension has an auto-backup feature (plus a manual backup so you could also do the saved session thing).

# ¿ Jun 20, 2019 19:57

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Tapedump posted:

Is that so? When's the last time you tried?

# ¿ Jul 5, 2019 23:00

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Tapedump posted:

Both with recently made 1809 build media and 1903, too.

"Made" like, a custom built installer different from the standard MCT USB stick? Because I could totally see the ever-changing target of each tweak making the offline account harder to reach loving up with that.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2019 23:48

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

Dirt Road Junglist posted:

Does Exact Audio Copy still work? Pretty sure it's got FreeDB or Gracenote integration, too.

Exact Audio Copy still works. The special modes it tells you to use for perfect rips don't work anymore (at least not for me), but that's ok because they have an online database that compares a checksum hash for what you just ripped against everyone else's results.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2019 01:50

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

The Lord Bude posted:

Get rid of CDs and move over to your choice of music streaming service like everyone else?

All that music you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a decade ago? Throw that poo poo away, and pay $10 a month for the rest of your life to listen to it!

Or if you're particular about which pieces of music you want, pay $10 a month to like three different services.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2019 07:15

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 06:29

Klyith: Aug 3, 2007; GBS Pledge Week

codo27 posted:

You've learned your lesson. Fresh. Every. Time.

One guy with a mystery problem isn't a lesson. Finding out why the mystery problem happened is a lesson. Never learning means everything will always be a mystery and you go around saying things like "install fresh every time".

(For future reference ProjektorBoy, you probably either had a problem with MBR-vs-GPT partitioning or weren't copying the boot partition. Or something much weirder which would be hard to tell without seeing the laptop's disk management from before.)

# ¿ Jul 24, 2019 15:04

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

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