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Foxit reader all the way….dump Adobe post-haste. If you ever have the need to highlight sections or otherwise annotate PDFs before forwarding them on you will find Foxit to be amazingly useful.

I’m on a Lenovo G780…after the upgrade I kept getting error messages about the Dolby Sound Manager….eventually fixed with a de-installation/reinstallation of drivers….now left with a flakier IE11 the randomly “encounters an unknown error” and shuts a tab down… so I now also have Chrome and Firefox installed. Expecting a ‘patch Tuesday” update to settle IE11 down at some point.

Otherwise I seem to have got of fairly lightly!

Sorry to interrupt your nostalgia trip folks (you’ll be waxing lyrical over vi next!) but just to let anyone know that might be interested, release 2.5 of Textreme is now available for download.

Regards,

Jim

Okay folks, some replies:

BATcher – you don’t need quotes (in fact if you DO use them it will treat them as part of the search string!) and the only ‘special characters’ you need to worry about are the square brackets because these are used by the statement parser to detect the parameters. If you need to use square brackets in your parameters then there is a line in the ini file that will temporarily switch them with the characters of your choice (set to the curly brackets by default) so that the parser will not get confused. On the subject of the help file, I seem to recall having to install something from the M$ support area in order for Win7 to be able to read .chm (compiled html) helpfiles (or you might want to try some of the things mentioned here first: http://www.techulator.com/resources/4302-How-open-chm-file-Windows.aspx )

SF99 – the best example I can offer is from The Register’s Verity Stob where she wanted an editor (Textreme isn’t one, BTW) that could do what she referred to as “munging”. The example she gave was to turn this:

0001, 3000, Adam, London
0002, 1000, Bonnie, Manchester
0003, 2000, Catherine, Edinburgh
0004, 3000, David, New York
continues like this for 20 more lines)

into this:

db.add(“0001”, “Adam”, “London”, 3000);
db.add(“0002”, “Bonnie”, “Manchester”, 1000);
db.add(“0003”, “Catherine”, “Edinburgh”, 2000);
db.add(“0004”, “David”, “New York”, 3000);

At the time Textreme could do it all except the shift of the second field to the end which was what prompted me to add the ‘Move’ command.

Here’s some screenshots of the function list that does it and the “First 25 Lines” window (not sure if I have uploaded/attached them correctly but we shall see!):

33601-Textreme33602-First25

Hope this helps, any more questions/problems, either post them here or click the “Send the Jollybean webmaster an email” button on the website.

Best regards,

Jim.

OK BATcher the ‘latest & greatest’ Textreme is now uploaded to http://www.jollybean.co.uk and ready to try. Make sure you keep the 3 files (exe, ini and chm) local to one another after extraction.

The pop-up screen shot shows v2.3 (grr, only just noticed that!) but v2.4 is in the zip file. Because of the website builder I have used (WebPlus X6) I have to recompile the whole page to fix that but I can upload the new zip file no problem. Please let me know how you get on with it!

Best regards,

Jim.

Another cause of wierd cursor movements and/or random characters is if you have accidentally switched on the ‘voice activated’ function without realising it

Hi there, I had a need to do this to extract Argos (an eVisions reporting tool) actual report runtime events from a system logfile with loads of other stuff in it ages ago, and consequently it occurred to me that if I made the thing more versatile, it would save me from trying to resurrect my oft-rusting Perl/RegExp skills when I needed to do this in future with other text files.

So, I wrote a small utility using AutoIT and dubbed it Textreme, and you can download it from my website to see if it might come some way towards meeting your needs.

It’s available at http://www.jollybean.co.uk under the Textreme menu item on the right.

If you DO give it a try I would be interested to know if it was of use to you!

Best regards,

Jim.

[Edit] I just tried it and it appears that the Include function does not ‘cascade’ properly so that you would have to make several passes — sorry about that but thanks for highlighting a ‘feature’ that I need to work on!

[Edit2] Okay, I think I have got both the Include and Exclude functions cascading correctly now. If you can wait until tomorrow, I should be able to upload the latest version to my site this evening (UK time). I had been meaning to do this anyway because I recently added another function (‘Move’) as a result of an article about editors written by Verity Stob on TheRegister website

OK this may sound a bit off-the-wall but I remember some years ago when I worked in support at my last-but one job, we got a laptop that was having erratic and random mouse and keyboard behaviour and it turned out that the voice recognition app had somehow got switched on, so that random ambient noise was moving the pointer and putting random characters on the screen. It took us quite a while to figure it out too!

I had a small 1Gb one that began to cause BSODs if the machine was booted with it plugged in which I binned.

I had a newer one which I used for my day-to-day “toolkit” (LiberKey apps, NirSoft Apps, my “essential” PC freeware library, eBook reference material etc) which suddenly decided to corrupt all the files in one of its folders. I reformatted it and now use it for occasional high volume transfers and bought a new 32Gb to use for my toolkit (which I had backed up on to a regular HD). Once something dodgy goes on I reckon it’s best to replace them even if you can get them working again, and just use the old one for some other less important role. These things get quite a bit of hammer in daily use and transportation not least of which is frequent trips through airport scanners so treat them as you would an old 3.5-inch floppy that suddenly started misbehaving, demote them to a less important role and get a new one for daily use.

Just my 2c-worth….

I have every sympathy with the OP — I have a similar problem with a rogue page that insists on opening even though it was not open when I last closed Chrome. Not only that, Chrome auto-starts on boot-up. There is something in the synchronisation with my gmail account that is causing this because if I reinstall without synching then all seems OK but I would have to reconstruct my toolbar and favourites and I can’t yet be bothered to do that (I suppose I could export them then reimport them rather than allowing google to synch, but I want to use synch because it is convenient off-site). I have tried all manner of scouring, cleaning and registry cleaning using CCleaner, Glary utilities, startup manager tools and god knows what else all to no avail. Very irritating. I have also scoured the web looking for what causes the auto-start but every thread seems to end in “reinstall” without addressing a proper solution.
Chrome is also installed in my wife’s account on the same PC and that is fine.
For now I am just putting up with it but I suspect if I could find a way of clearing out the cache of my settings that Google has stored ON THE WEB and then re-synch upwards from my PC with only my homepage tab open then this might solve it.

I just got a Samsung Galaxy S II with Android 2.3.4. It is one of the models that will receive the 4.0 upgrade. This will be my first Android upgrade so we’ll see how it goes. I suspect when I choose the upgrade will be pushed to my phone and everything will be fine.

note: I was able to fully root my Samsung Galaxy S II using this method.

Ted, I have a Samsung G2 and always assumed that any Android versions above 2.9.9.9..etc would be aimed at tablets and not reallt for smartphones. Do you have a link to whatever your info source was about being able to upgrade to 4.0 please?

BTW, for UK readers, I think that CNET’s info about rooting the G2 might be a bit more suitable (and there’s no messing about having to ‘register’). I haven’t tried it myself as I haven’t seen any apps that I want that require it but CNET is a very trustworthy source….the link is here:
http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobile-phones/how-to-root-your-samsung-galaxy-s2-50004972/

Regards,

Jim

Just as an aside to the main thread, could I implore everyone to shun entirely all those companies that say “join us on facebook and ‘like’ us to get a chance to win…blah blah…” as a way to insidiously worm their way into your friends list… you don’t ‘LIKE’ them at all, you are just trying to get an iPad for zilch and inflicting their pervasive influence upon your friends and family motivated by a lousy marketing ploy… DON’T DO IT and DON’T BUY FROM THEM. This is the only way to kill this annoying stealth advertising stone dead.

Not trying to muddy the waters or anything here, but does Easus allow you to mount the backup image as a virtual drive and access the files within it? I only ask as I am an Acronis (2010 – works fine for me!) user and my most recent requirement was to restore my Thunderbird prefs.js after it decided to self-destruct which saved me a LOT of grief having to reinstall and then re-link all my accounts.

I took the cautious route to decide whether or not to switch (dual boot XP & 7) but soon made the decision to go whole hog 7. I wish I had just gone for it in the first place though because undoing the dual boot without having to do a clean slate reinstall of 7 was such a pain in the butt (messing about with the MBR for example – thank you EasyBCD!) that I wish I had bitten the bullet at the time and just gone for it. Because of this my system drive is still F: rather than C: to this very day which can cause problems with some software that assumes everyone uses C:

I have to admit that I am somewhat bemused to see people making their choice base on the functionality of Windows Explorer — I haven’t touched that thing since they replaced the excellent dual-pane File Manager with it, it’s useless to me as a single pane and I don’t see why I should have to run two instances of what is a mediocre tool at best. FreeCommander has been my file manager of choice both in XP and now in 7 and until the demise of WE that’s how it will stay!

Regards,

Jim.

The interface is so labyrinthine that I’m sure I won’t learn all there is to know merely by fiddling on my own…

Thank you so much for starting this thread — I had begun to wonder whether I was “losing it” because I find the facebook interface appalling, disorganised and convoluted and far too volatile to ever get a fix on. My opinion FWIW is that it has been slung together rather quickly in the early days and since then has suffered from patchitis with one patch altering the previous one until it looks like a 30-year-old pair of work jeans. It’s time they threw them away and bought a brand new pair but they are afraid of alienating the now massive user-base who raise howls of protest at even the smallest change so a complete redesign would cause global apoplexy. This is why I only maintain a simple locked-down account to enable people to be able to contact me who prefer to use it to email.