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I still use Windows XP on my Dell E520 although I haven’t been a serious, or even a frivolous, Windows user for many years now. However, one thing I always liked to do in Windows is to minimize the number of start-up programs seen by (in XP) going to Start>>Run and typing in “msconfig”. Then in the box that opens, hit the startup tab.
This will show you what apps startup at boot and by default there are a lot. However, you can use this excellent and very comprehensive guide to find out if you really need a lot of, or indeed any, of this stuff. If you haven’t done this before you may be pleasantly surprised at the number of included startup apps that you can remove from the startup list. As a result, your boot time may dramatically reduce.
After using this guide, I now have only four startup apps in my msconfig/startup list. They are msseces (Microsoft Security Essentials), GoogleDesktop (because I like the Google Sidebar), NvCpl (I have a nVidia GeForce 7300 LS gfx card. Even though I tried to leave this out of the startup list, it just reappeared) and Nexus (because I want the Nexus dock to appear at boot). As a result, I can now completely boot (from select WinXP in my multiboot menu to a fully functional desktop) in just 40 seconds.
Now and again I write about stuff other than computers and software and this is one of those occasions. The reason is because I had an exciting Christmas Eve in trying to track down the reason for a complete lack of hot water in any of the eight hot water taps in our house yesterday morning.
Yes, the overnight temperature was as low as -12°C which is, of course, way below the temperature at which ice forms. But, that was outside. Inside the house was warm and cozy.
But wait, I recently put in a major effort to insulate the attic/loft in order to prevent any of this coziness from entering the uninhabited loft space. However, there are water tanks and uninsulated copper water pipes in this isolated and, apparently very cold, space.
The fact that no hot water at all was available, despite the copper hot water cylinder being very hot to the touch, suggested that the problem was the pipe connecting the water storage tank in the attic to the hot water cylinder which is located almost entirely in the now very cold attic.
OK, so I’d identified the line needing to be freed of ice but how to remove the ice? The line was about 4 meters in length and completely horizontal.
I first tried a hair dryer but made little progress. What I noticed was that focusing the hair drier on one spot of the pipe for 15-20 minutes did not at all heat the pipe. Conversely, when I tried the same on a pipe that contained only water, noticeable warming of the pipe was obvious after just 5 minutes. I believe the explanation for this is that ice absorbs a lot of heat (latent heat) in melting so that the heat from the hair drier goes towards converting the ice to water but WITHOUT raising the temperature the the ice/water mixture above 0°C until all of the ice has been melted. Actually, I may use this phenomenon as the basis for a test in the future to check which pipes have ice within them.
In any event, the heat output from the hair dryer was way too low for my purposes so I needed something better. A little googling produced this article which suggested wrapping old towels around the pipe and pouring on boiling water.
So, I placed a variety of pots and pans under the 4 meter stretch of copper pipe, wrapped it entirely in old (and some not so old, this was an emergency) towels and then successively poured on as much boiling water as I could over about an hour. I was surprised at how much of the poured water stayed within the towel. For 2 litre that came out of the kettle, not more than 500 mls ended up in the pans below. Of course, this is why it works because the source of the heat stays where you want it, right next to the pipe.
After going through this in the sometimes confined attic space for about an hour, we heard water coming out of one hot water tap. Success and much relief.
Just came across this truly comprehensive collection of tips and tricks for the iPad from the HowTo Geek. This is really worth looking through if you have an iPad.
Picked up this useful tip from the HowtoGeek. By means of a registry hack, you can add Google Docs and some other Google apps to the New section of the contect menu in Windows Explorer.
I tried this in Windows XP and it works fine. To try it, just download the zip file from here, unzip it somewhere convenient and then click on the file AddGoogleDocsToNewMenu.reg to run it. It runs very fast and should give you a “successfully installed” message.
Next, from the same folder to where you extracted the .zip file, copy all five files OTHER THAN the .reg file that you just used and the uninstall file to D:\windows. Then reboot.
Now, right-click on the Desktop and open the New menu where you should see your new options nicely iconized. OK, but how useful is it really? Not sure, as it really doesn’t take that long to open Google docs but maybe it’ll be useful to some.
