Let me guess…..you tried it and it failed. Well, there is a way (probably not sanctioned by MS) to get this done. I’ve installed it on two separate machines and verified that it works. First you need to download MSXML 6 from Microsofts website. Just go to microsoft.com and search for MSXML. There should be a link to MSXML6.0 download. Download the 64-bit version of the software and install it. Then force a windows update by choosing windows update from the start menu. You will notice a bunch of updates for MSXML. Let it update the files and reboot after that’s done.

Now you need to get the x86 version of office 2010 off the cd and copy it onto your computer somewhere (I just dragged the folder onto my desktop). We need to modify something and you can’t do that on the CD/DVD. Once the copy is done, find setup.exe right click on it and choose properties. Under the Compatibility tab choose “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and choose Windows XP from the pull down.

Click Apply/Okay and double click setup to run it. That’s it. It works…..Happy days are here again .

I’ve been posting mainly about OSX for the last little while, but no worries, I haven’t given up on Windows…yet . Someone today was asking about a good WebDAV client and after searching around for a bit, it seems like there is really only a couple out there. But really none of them can beat BitKinex client in terms of features and “price”. Here is a short list of features (oh…and the price thing….it’s free:-) ):

• Site Navigation Without Freezing Windows
  Unique technology of advanced directory caching and multi connection/threaded directory scanning makes the non-blocking browse windows possible.
• Robust User Request Handling
  Resume and control in detail not only file transfers but all user requests – including file removals, moves, directory creations, remote edits, prints, etc.
• Indirect Transfers
  Allows users to transfer files from one server to another regardless of which protocol they are running (FTP->SFTP, WebDAV->FTPS, HTTP->FTP, etc.)
• Smart Messenger-like User Interface
  Does not occupy much space on your desktop.
• Properties Inheritance
  For easy and flexible configuration.
• Large Number of Supported Protocols
  Including FTP, FXP, FTPS, SFTP, HTTP, HTPS and WebDAV

I don’t know how they do it, but I would just grab a copy, if I were you .

Todays must watch video comes to you curtesey of Leon Wang. I seriously think MS should hire this guy to do their ads. This is excellent stuff ….

Yep MS strikes again. This time though it’s funny as hell. Turns out a bug in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 causes a whopping 30 seconds delay to your login process if you have a solid colour background set as your desktop wallpaper. Why? Well it’s MS, what did you expect, a working OS….HAH??? My solution…..Format C:\…..If you prefer an MS solution, check the support page.

MMmmmmm…..Windows 7 Space Cake…….MMmmmmmm

There are a lot of fantastic free software packages out there for the PC if you’re running windows. VLC, Firefox come to mind. The problem is that it takes a long time to install all of them on your PC. You know the routine, click, wait for download, double click, next, next, next, etc……Well, why? Head over to Ninite’s website, choose the applications you want and let them create a custom “Meta Installer” for all the applications in one package. Run the installer and wham, you got all those free/opensource apps downloaded and installed on your machine in one shot, with minimal clickage . No sign-up required, Free for personal use, Just in time for Windows 7 Upgrade (or potentially downgrade). Now if only someone would make something like this on OSX, so I can install Final Cut Pro Studio without having grass grow under my seat, that would be nice .

Here is a video for all the people who attended — or god forbid hosted — a windows 7 launch party yesterday. This will give you a rough idea of what people will think of your party video in about 17 years……hehehehe

Holy crap…..MS has literally photocopied the Apple Store, replaced the Genius Bar with “Answer Bar” and the Genius’ with Guru’s……Does Microsoft ever come up with something original? Here comes “Attack of the Clones”…..hehehehe

….Atleast if you’re in Japan. Take a look at this monster…seven freaking patties stacked up in between two buns…..in time to celebrate Windows 7 launch. You’ll pay (roughly) $17.10 for the pleasure of clogging your arteries with this 5.1 inch tall monster. Once you’re done — if you’re still alive — you’ll finally understand how your computer feels after a windows installation .

Hehehe……Nicely done…..

Yep, as weird as that sounds, by cascading your startup items load time (ie: most of the stuff that gets loaded into your system tray) you can actually speed up windows boot times. When Windows loads it’s Startup file, it attempts to load every program in there at the same time. Therefore if you have quite a lot of programs starting when Windows starts, each program will try and grab CPU time so that it can load and that makes windows Craaawwwwllllll.

Startup Delayer allows you to setup how many seconds after Windows has started, to load each program. This little freebee — for example — allows you to load that really really important (yeahright) “iTunesHelper.exe” program later in the boot process. Let’s face it half the crap that gets loaded during windows boot process are not actually needed right when the user logs in. So delay that IMAP/POP Email checker, push itunes/quicktime/adobe air/adobe pdf and all the other junk to a later load time and watch windows rock!!! Finally.

I’ve always had problems with this and now really appreciate the value of DMS (DivXLand Media Subtitler). You see I own a small HD media player that’s connected to my TV. The trouble with this little gadget is that it does not support subtitle files. That’s not a problem anymore since DMS allows me to embed the subtitles into the Divx/Xvid file before I watch it.

DivXLand Media Subtitler key features:

* Create subtitle files from plain text files
* Preview subtitled video immediately without saving file
* Save partially edited files to resume subtitling process later
* Automatic caption timing features
* Multiple subtitling modes available
* Support for basic text formatting
* Support for at least 30 subtitle formats (open and save)
* Keyboard shortcuts available to control subtitle process
* Spell check using the Ms Word component
* Embed subtitles on AVI video
* Extract audio streams from AVI and MPG videos into MP2, MP3 and WAV formats
* Check for product updates directly from Help menu
* Quick Start Guide in several languages included as PDF and online
* Support for all East Asian and Right-to-Left languages; more info

Subtitle formats currently supported:

Adobe Encore ● Advanced SubStation Alpha ● CSV (Excel) ● DKS ● DVD Subtitle System ● DVD Subtitle ● FAB Subtitler ● JACOSub 2.7 ● Karaoke LRC ● MacSUB ● Mac DVD Studio Pro ● MicroDVD ● MPlayer ● OVR Script ● Pinnacle Impression ● PowerDivx ● PowerPixel ● QuickTime Text ● RealTime ● SAMI ● SonicDVD ● Sonic Scenarist ● Spruce DVD Maestro ● Spruce Subtitle ● SubRip ● SubStation Alpha ● SubViewer 1.0 ● SubViewer 2.0 ● Tabbed values (generic) ● TMPlayer ● TurboTitler ● Ulead DVD Workshop ● ViPlay ● ZeroG

Fantastic windows only application and free to download.

For those of you who’ve hated the opensource ffmpeg command line media conversion tool, here is Quick Media Converter. It’s a nice looking front-end for ffmpeg that hides the command line complexity of this swiss army like media converter. So What can you do with Quick Media Converter?

-Converting Video files from one format to another.
-Converting Audio files from one format to another.
-Extracting and converting Audio files from video or audio media.
-Extracting and converting Video without sound.
-Preview and/or listen to video and audio files with FFPLAY Multi format player (Fabrice Bellard).
- A myriad of formats is recognized by FFmpeg, those not recognized yet, are worked on by many people around the open source community and may most of the time, become available sooner or later.
-Many files to convert? No worry, batch files processing is also supported by QMC.
-You are lazy by nature and do not wish to start selecting files? That’s okay just drag and drop the files in the active worksheet.
-You have more specific needs and want to experiment with video and audio conversion, you can do so by using our Expert mode section.
-You want to capture a movie or picture directly from your webcam or DV Cam, just click on the webcam button and start capturing in raw flux or avi divx , after this is done the software will offer you to convert your file to other formats.
-You want to make a tutorial or capture your latest performance in your favorite video game? just click on Camstudio (open source) start recording and add comments on your avi divx movie output.

-Access our support forum directly from our application to get help, we usually respond to your questions within one day or two. We do not support expert mode in general as by essence if you use it you are considered an expert user.

It’s a Windows only utility and is free to download.

I came across EASEUS Disk Copy today and I have to admit it’s pretty cool. It’s not a live disk imager, but will image just about any disk (even damaged) or partition. It also has a neat feature of being able to image one large disk onto multiple smaller disks. It boots off CD and supports IDE, SATAI, SATAII, SCSI, Firewire(IEEE1394) and USB drives. The best part……It’s FREE.

If you’re like me, you don’t like to install Anti-Virus software or any of the malware removing utilities on your system. The machine is sitting behind a firewall and I know what is running on the machine (most of the time).

That said, I’ve always wanted to have the equivalent of trip-wire or rkhunter from Linux/Unix land. An application that would monitor the rest of windows and would alert me when vital files/registry entries get touched. Well, I think I’ve found such beastie and it’s free to boot. Grab Tiny Watcher and install it on your windows box and let it run once to create a profile. From then on TW will monitor your system and tell you when some application/installer changes something vital on your machine. You also get the option to heal/remove/delete the changes after the fact.

Tiny Watcher checks the following point:

Processes

Registry keys or entries

ini entries

File scan

Scheduled tasks

Have Fun, and remember to stay safe

Hmmmm……Ugggghhh…..Yet another MS research juicy fruit that no one outside of Redmond is gonna be able to play with. I guess this is a further development or an offshoot of PhotoSynth that MS presented at Siggraph in Boston. This one is much more polished and seems to actually have a purpose (see the end of the video). The days of QTVR are numbered if MS ever decides to make this project a reality.

Yep, Microsoft is at it again (actually MS research to be more precise). Show up at Siggraph, present a juicy paper, get everyone salivating and then, well…..not sure…..hide . I don’t get it, I’ll give you an example, couple of years ago a bunch of MS research guys showed up at Siggraph in Boston (I think) and showed this amazing application — PhotoSynth — that would stitch pictures taken by random tourists from different internet sources into a brilliant 3D model. It was fantastic, but other than a demo application, it’s no where to be found.

MS, are you listening…..You’re a Software company, stop producing software noone wants/needs (Vista/Office anyone?) and realize some of these apps the research people are working on.

Anyways, rant off. Now for this years amazing app. The tool is called Unwrap Mosaic and is described as Photoshop of video editing tools. Watch the video here. Imagine being able to take a video and changing something inside it just like you would in photoshop…..without having to go to every single frame of that video. The technology behind UM allows for changes by unwrapping the objects contained in the video into a flat image. It would be incredibly difficult to update the video in its original form, but making objects flat allows the new objects to be mapped into the correct positions. In the old days (like 1-2 years ago) 3D artists had to manually map things in 3D onto models and then composit them into the video…..well no more. This is amazing….koodoos to MS research. More info here.

SysInternals is probably the one set of tools that every Windows support person knows about. It is a collection of fantastic utilities that allows you to troubleshoot just about any problem under windows. It is so good that Microsoft decided to buy the company right out and I have to admit that they’ve done a very good job in maintaining them and making them available for free. Recently they’ve gone one step further and added the ability to run the utils via the network without having to download them. This is good news for anyone using a recovery boot CD (like BART or something similar). All you need to do now is open windows explorer and go to \\live.sysinternals.com\ to get live access to the latest version of SysInternal tools. Ofcourse there is also the standard bundle that gives you a copy of all the utils in one easy zip file.

Yeah, that’s why the OLPC team sold their soul to MS….right? Get ready for OLPC running Windows XO. Because there aren’t enough lemmings out there. This must be Bill G’s wildest dream, an army of illiterate starving kids who’ll program the next version of Winblows for food and water…..brilliant.

A lot of people seem to be running into weird network problems with Vista (MS’s latest abortion). The symptoms might include:

- Windows messenger issues (disconnects, slowness)
- Large network file copies get interrupted or are slowwwww
- Network file transfers that seem to hang for no reason
- Network ghosts turning on/off the network subsystem
- Routers having issues that lead to router reboot
- Outlook having synchronization issues

A possible solution is turning off auto-tuning. You see Vista being Vista, wants to always be in control, even when it gets on the network with others. MS has built a new feature into it’s network stack that allows Vista to auto-tune the size of the send/receive windows…..why would you want to do this by default when half the worlds firewalls discard non-standard packet sizes is a mystery (apparently only known to MS ppl). So guess what happens when the firewall downstream of you decides that your packets are “non-standard”……it drops them, along with your connection. So how do you fix this, simple, you do what MS should have done before they shipped you the abortion called Vista, you disable it. Here is how:

1) Get a command prompt in administrator mode. To do this go to Start/All Programs/Accessories and RIGHT CLICK on command prompt’s icon and choose “Run as Administrator”. On the next prompt press “Continue”.
2) Make sure the Title of the newly opened command prompt window says “Administrator: Command Prompt”, if not go back to 1).
3) Now type the following into the command prompt window. This will disable autotuning.
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
4) You should get a OK. in the command prompt window. REBOOT NOW.
5) If you need to turn it back on (why?) do the 1) and 2) and issue the following command
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
To check the status of this dumb setting (before or after you change it) do 1) and 2) and type the following command
netsh int tcp show global
Of course you could always reboot, format and install Linux and save your sanity and time