Ask DACS
August 2013
Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef
Ask DACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem. The answers below include my own post-meeting research.
Q – I have a Nexus 7 tablet and they just updated the Android operating system. Since the update I cannot turn off the cellular 4G mobile data. The Wi-Fi continues to work but occasionally I notice something has been “delivered” to the tablet over 4G. I don’t want to accidentally use up the megabyte allotment of my data plan and then get a surprise bill from AT&T.
A – After some discussion we determined that this is a problem with the settings in Android. The problem is that the setting is “stuck” on. Changing to “airplane mode” would also disable Wi-Fi, which needs to be on. The problem was deferred to the Mobile Devices SIG meeting.
Q – My old machine running Windows XP has become very slow to boot up. Someone suggested that I need to “clean out the registry”. Is there a good, free registry cleaner that is reliable?
A – The consensus was that “reliable” and “registry cleaner” are an oxymoron. While individuals at past DACS meetings may have recommended one product or another; we do not suggest using any registry cleaner product, free or paid. Such products most often do more harm than good. The only truly reliable way to get a clean registry is to reinstall Windows and reapply all of the Windows updates. Given the time required to do that plus reinstalling all of your applications, the break-even time for the fast boot would be at least a decade in the future, when you would be back to where you are now. If the machine runs well otherwise, I would just leave it and endure the boot up time. Several members offered suggestions: Look at the list of programs that run on startup using the msconfig utility that comes with Windows. This allows disabling individual programs such as the various “quick start” programs that preload parts of applications. Also look in Add-Remove Programs in Control Panel and uninstall anything you no longer need. Then run the Windows Defrag utility two or three times to thoroughly defrag your disk. Another suggestion was to remove shortcuts from the desktop as each icon must be found and loaded when the desktop is first displayed. Combined, these suggestions should yield some improvement.
Q – Is there a resource where you can look up a line in the registry to find what it means?
A – The first suggestion on this was to paste the key into your favorite search engine and see what is returned. My approach is to look at the values or parameters assigned to the key and look for a path to an executable. If the path points to an application then you have a significant clue. Many dll files have the name of the company in their properties (find the dll file, right-click and pick properties; look at all of the tabs). The Windows registry is not intended to be an “open book” for the typical user so deciphering it is not easy!
D – There are several very helpful websites that can help determine the origin and safety of something on your computer. The first is called System Explorer (systemexplorer.net) where you can search on the name of a mysterious file to find information. You don’t even need to remember this name because searching on the filename in a search engine will often point to this site or the other one below. For example, I typed “green.dll” (I just made up this name) and one of the top results was a link to System Explorer which told me about three versions of my fictions file and assured me that all three seem to “safe”. The other helpful website is Process Library (processlibrary.com) which will often show when you search on a process name you see running in Task Manager.
Q – In Windows 8 how do I change the size of the font on icons on the desktop?
A – The Windows 8 desktop, where “regular” traditional applications run, is essentially unchanged from Windows 7 and supports scaling of text and other items on the screen. To start, right-click on the desktop and pick ‘Screen Resolution’. This should always be set to the native resolution of the display, which is what Windows will recommend (even if this makes the text too small). On this same screen, look for ‘Make text and other items larger or smaller’. On this new dialog, you have the choice of smaller, medium, and larger, which do what you would expect. There is another item in the menu choices of ‘Set custom text size (DPI). DPI is dots per inch. Here you can adjust the scaling up to 200% of the normal 96dpi. Once you have a setting you like, select ‘Adjust ClearType text’ to make text appear clearer. This works like an eye exam where you select the clearest text from several choices while Windows tunes things to fit your monitor.
Q – Will the update to Windows 8.1 come as a regular Windows update or will you need to go to a website?
A – The answer from the Microsoft presenters was that Win 8.1 will be available in the Microsoft App Store and it will be free. Warning: the Win 8.1 previews available on the Microsoft website will not allow an upgrade to the final version. Thus if you install a preview, you will lose everything on that installation when you move to the final release version. So the moral is: do not install a preview on your “production” machine.
Q – Has anyone used the “Action Center” in Windows 8?
A – Action Center was introduced in Vista. In XP SP2+ it was called the Security Center. It’s a central place where Windows tells you about things that Windows thinks you should change or fix. It displays an icon in the task tray (desktop only in Win8) with a little pennant flag. The icon changes with the severity of the message or action waiting for your attention. In Win8, the Action Center now monitors your Windows activation along with the traditional things like the firewall settings and whether or not you have installed an antivirus program. The Wikipedia article is wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Center.
Q – That’s not what I meant. What I’m looking for is something called “God mode”.
A – God Mode is a Windows “special folder” that contains shortcuts to all of the dialogs in all of the applets in Control Panel. I found all of the following by searching in my favorite search engine (Yahoo) for “win8 god mode”. God Mode is available for Vista, Win7 and Win8. To set up God Mode on your computer, pick a location somewhere (I did this in the Windows folder), right click and create a new folder. When Windows asks you to name the folder, paste in this string: “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}”. When you hit enter to save the name, the folder icon will change to the Control Panel icon. Open the folder to see a list of all the settings dialogs grouped by the name of the Control Panel applet. Very cool. To add polish and make this new tool easier to use, I created a shortcut to the God Mode folder in the Start Menu folder for Administrative Tools. Contrary to the questioner’s understanding, God Mode does not contain instructions on how to use these settings dialogs, and nothing in God Mode is not already available thru the normal Control Panel. If you can already find what you need in Control Panel, there is no advantage to creating a God Mode folder.
D – During the discussion, several members mentioned a utility called Belarc Advisor, a tool that inventories your computer and documents all of the setting and installed software on your computer. Searching for this I found it has morphed into a much more capable tool called Network Inventory Advisor (www.network-inventory-advisor.com). This newer tool does for your entire network, what Belarc did for a single machine. A license to inventory up to ten computers on a single network is free. Running this on my network I noticed several errors. It did not detect the anti-virus software (Vipre) on any machine. If you try it, I suggest that you not accept the report without verifying the results.
Q – I’m looking for a very simple backup program that is so simple that “even my sister can use it”. Any suggestions? It must provide a fairly simple way to restore a backup on bare metal, ie: restoring to an empty hard drive following a hard drive crash.
A – There were several suggestions, not all of them meeting the simplicity criteria or the bare metal restore. Cloud solutions like Mozy (www.mozy.com) or Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) would be appropriate. Both offer a variety of features including a local mirror image hard drive for a bare metal restore all for a variety of prices. Window 8 has a feature called ‘File History’ that keeps multiple versions of a file, but this is not a full system backup. Some external hard drives come with a backup utility. Another member asked about hard drive mirroring, also known as RAID0. This is best done in hardware, but mirroring is also available in Windows using software. Discussion continued with how to restore to bare metal from an off-site backup. The easy solution is to have your files and a restore program copied to DVD’s and sent overnite. For a large amount of files, I think this would be the fastest solution. If you have a fast Internet connection, it might be faster to download. The procedure would be to reinstall Windows, run Windows update, download and install the backup and restore software from the backup service and start the restore. A key here is that the restore must include a restore of the registry or your computer will not have all your old settings when the restore is complete. We ran out of time without reaching a totally satisfactory solution, so further research is left for the reader.
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Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org.
Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warranty as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!
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