Posts tagged Windows

Closing Windows

Today I finally made the decision to close down my Windows 7 machine and remove it from my primary computing location. It was February when I last used it and since then it has only been used for the occasional game or to run a PCB design tool.

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Windows 7 + CUPS - Problem Solved

I have been trying to get my Windows 7 (Pro) machine to connect to the CUPS printer on my Linux server. Whilst it used to work with Windows XP (Home) via IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) I was having no luck with Windows 7. One reason for the problem is my network security and firewalls. I lock down everything unless it is actually needed. This means that all the auto discovery services on the network can’t talk to each other. Still knowing the IP address and ports of the relevant machine/service to connect to is normally enough to get things working. Not in this case however. For some reason either at the Windows or CUPS end the IP address was causing a problem. The problem being that the it wasn’t being resolved to a machine name when trying to setup the IPP connection.

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Experiences With Windows 7 & SSD

This week I took delivery of a 40GB Solid State Drive (SSD) an a copy of Windows 7 Professional to give a boost to my quad core box. Windows XP has had a good run and it is getting to the point where an OS upgrade is needed to get the best out of the underlying hardware. The system has 8GB RAM but the 32bit nature of XP meant that only 4GB of memory could be addressed. In addition Windows 7 supports newer versions of DirectX. There are games on the horizon which I plan on getting which will require a newer graphics card which will use the newer DirectX. So that is the reason for the upgrade, now onto the installation itself.

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Portable Apps & Portable Python

So I wanted to do some programming in python whilst at work I could have used my netbook but its size can make it difficult to work on for serious code generation. So my decision was to use Portable Apps from a USB memory stick, Portable Apps does not include Python in its package listing. A quick scout about with a popular search engine showed Portable Python as a solution a current Python version bundled with some handy modules.

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Windows Vista - Still Crap

In the past few weeks I purchased some new Anti-virus and Firewall software from ESET to replace my expiring & bloated AVG install. The first machine to get the upgrade was my XP desktop machine; everything went well. I was impressed with the lighter feel to the software and the added fact that it didn’t seem to be hogging the system resources quite as much. A weeks trial later I decided it was stable and usable enough to be used on my laptop; running Windows Vista. The install was painless and the software scanned my system and there were no obvious issues.

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Another One Bites The Dust

It’s that time again when another peice of my IT equipment has died. When I say died it’s more akin to requiring the replacement of several major organs at the same time. Thurday night I was going about my usual activities of checking email and surfing the web with my windows desktop and 24/7 linux server.

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I Hate Windows XP Home

Over the easter weekend I have decided once again to setup my network just the way I like it. Up to this point everything is going well, the Samba shares on the linux machines are at last accessible through the firewall and the Linux machines can access the Windows shares. Now the problems start.

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