Replies

Remember InCtrl? I think it was from PC Magazine. I used to use it religiously on every install.

Can’t wait to try WhatChanged Portable! Thanks!

I’ve been using Foxit PDF Reader for several years for the same reasons you mentioned in your article. I chose Foxit because they offered a ‘PDF Printer’ option back when Microsoft was only offering ‘Print to XPS’.

Thank you for OlderGeeks!

What does “Error: Are you sure you wanted to do that?” mean? Do what?

And where did the text of my reply go? Did “Submit” actually work? Or have I just wasted an hour of my time?

 

Lance, you are familiar with ALT+PrtScr (screen-shot of just the current app), aren’t you? I’m using Windows 10, but I assume this feature is still available in Windows 11. You can resize the window to frame just the content you want to capture. I use this very often.

(Oops! Didn’t see the previous replies before I hit ‘Submit’.)   🙁

If I don’t have any local accounts, and I lose Internet access, will I still be able to log in to Windows (either 10 or 11)? Will Windows still be fully functional? I seem to remember running into a ‘Catch 22’ with this in the past.

I’m not sure if I ever saw this on Windows 7 (or XP), but it happens several times every day on Windows 8.0/8.1. I’ve seen it on FF 28.0 to current, and maybe a couple of versions earlier than this. It doesn’t seem to be affected by whatever else is running at the time.

I totally agree….that defeats the purpose of the warning/notifier system it all together.

With RED indicating ‘all systems are “Go”‘, and
with RED indicating you haven’t downloaded virus signatures for a while, and
with RED indicating your machine is infected,

I don’t really see the value of this ‘warning/notifier system’.

I would guess that most of your apps would still run on Win7, but I haven’t tried these specific versions.

What you can do is ‘run your desktop inside your laptop’. Download a copy of VirtualBox (it’s free), and you can run Windows XP and even DOS on virtual machines (VMs) on your laptop. Depending on the particular version of XP you have, you may be able to transfer the license from your desktop to the XP machine running on your laptop. The operating system licenses might be a little tricky. (Microsoft seems to want you to pay more than once for your copy Windows.) Any required licenses for the applications are almost surely transferable from the old desktop to the new VM.

I am currently running Windows 7 VMs on my Win8 laptop, that contain everything I previously had on older Win7 desktop machines. They work perfectly!

I highly recommend you check into this if you want to ‘keep your old desktop, but get rid of the box.’ There are a number of VirtualBox alternatives, but I have never found one, not even the paid ones, that works as well as VirtualBox.

RS-232? I could wire up null-modem cables in my sleep. Then they came out with those tiny 9-pin connectors!

Clonezilla has saved my butt on several occasions! The UI is not for the faint-of-heart, but it gets the job done.

In the past, anything that required a ‘work-around’ was typically considered a bug!

… M$ will be forced to extend the deadline because of all of the businesses using 32 bit machines alone!

I doubt that M$ really cares about the users/businesses still running XP (except to the extent they will pay for upgrades). But if Microsoft really wanted to put the final nail in XP’s coffin, they could upgrade all XP users to Win7 at no cost. They could incorporate it into a Windows XP security update; add an item to the Start menu to ‘Download and Install Upgrade to Windows 7‘. This would ensure that the offer was made to all current XP users, and ONLY to current XP users. (At least to all who were keeping their XP systems up to date.)

From waaaaaaay out in left field …

If you are a ‘tinkerer’, here’s something else you might try. bbearren mentioned the possibility of a bad SATA-to-USB board. I understand that to mean there is a plain-vanilla SATA drive inside the external case. I’d take things apart and see what’s inside. If the drive has the right interface, try a separate SATA to USB adapter on the internal drive. They’re cheap. I used one to recover my data when my only SATA-compatable PC died, and all I had was IDE based machines. (Note: I am not recommending that you open the sealed, internal drive.)

If you do try this, let us know what you find.

How full is the disk? If you don’t have at least 10% free space, Nothing is going to run very well, if at all. You might want to disable ‘hibernate’, temporarily or permanently, to free up the space taken by the hibernate file in the root of C: drive. I would also defrag the drive. Then the other advice you have received will be more effective.

Here is a trick that I sometimes use. In Google’s search results, right under each link, (usually in green) is the URL you want. I just select and copy that, and paste it into the address bar in a new tab. This is especially useful for those times when Google gets stuck trying to load that intermediate address before redirecting you to your final destination.

I have also used DuckDuckGo and StartPage.com, and use the DoNotTrackMe plug-in. I have no complaints with any of them.