Rubénerd :)

Tuesday 29th June 2010

The saga of finding old Windows 98 discs!

Here’s a little narrative story thing that actually happened, as opposed to all those other narrative story things that kinda happened, but didn’t. Can’t think of any off the top of my head, but they probably have to do with grilled cheese sandwiches, somehow.

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Monday 28th June 2010

Format 720K floppy disk in Windows XP

Helping my dad today with some old disks, we realised that in XP Microsoft removed the 720K option from the GUI format tool, and the /F:720 flag is gone from FORMAT on the command line! Fortunately if you specify the tracks and sectors manually it recognises the 720K disk and formats it.

FORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9

I don’t have any machines with floppy drives running Vista or 7, but I assume this still works in later versions.

Sunday 20th June 2010

Ed Bott misses reason for Windows crapware

Checking out ZDNet I was redirected to an article by Ed Bott who dismisses many of the woes with Windows as being the fault of its antitrust lawsuit. Yeah, damn those big government people trying to break up an unethical corporation!

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Tuesday 08th June 2010

Hate mail on my mum, Windows

Icon by the Tango Desktop Project

While receiving little in the way of tangible benefits, blogging has turned out to be a great way to speak my mind and ultimately to relax… perhaps this is the reason I post entries the most when I’m the most busy! Other times though, mean people ruin the fun.

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Thursday 27th May 2010

Steve Ballmer, 20 years of Microsoft in Singapore

Steve Ballmer in Singapore

On Tuesday I announced on Twitter that I’d booked a seat for Steve Ballmer’s talk at Marina Sands celebrating 20 years of Microsoft in Singapore. At least, I thought I did until I got this message:

Due to overwhelming demand, we are unable to offer you a seat (-6).

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Sunday 23rd May 2010

Nostalgia at Windows 3.0 turning 20

Windows 3.0 turns 20 today

It’s official, Microsoft’s breakout Windows 3.0 “operating system” turned 20 today. Well, really it was yesterday but we’ll pretend it was today so I can write this post. Mikuru looks horrified at it running on the desktop ;).

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Friday 07th May 2010

Microsoft's consumer space woes

Madobe Nanami, Windows 7-tan

David Olsen on Twitter said something this morning which I think is endemic of the reason why Microsoft is being crushed in the consumer space and can’t understand why. For once, a more serious post here on Rubénerd.com!

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Thursday 22nd April 2010

Running Windows on sales terminals… sigh

Coles logo

ZDNet Australia is reporting on yet another bug caused by terminals running anti-virus software on a consumer level operating system instead of using a more efficient and secure embedded system that wouldn’t need such code running in the first place.

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Thursday 01st April 2010

My auspicious Windows 7 review

Windows 7

Back in the day I used the release candidate of Windows 7, but now that I finally have a student copy I’ve been using it in a production setting. These are some of my observations.

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Tuesday 30th March 2010

Visio 2007 trips Windows 7 compatibility thing

Program Compatibility Assistant error

Since installing my new student licenced copy of Windows 7 Professional in VirtualBox over the weekend, I’ve been testing how well my Windows-only software runs in it compared to my trusty ol’ Windows 2000 VM. So far as good as can be expected, but there are few very strange anomalies.

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Dedicated to my groovy late mum Debra Schade.