Revo Uninstaller: Fast, Good, and Free

Back when I still did software engineering, one catchphrase I learned that has stuck with me is: “Fast, cheap, and good: Pick any two, and you’ll probably get them. Pick all three, and you probably won’t.” By that metric, Revo Uninstaller succeeds in delivering a highly improbable hat trick, along with great functionality, good support, and frequent (self-installing) updates.

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eSATA Drive Dock Offers Handy Outboard Storage

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got more disk drives than you have installed in your systems at any given moment. Until recently, I accessed these drives using an Antec MX-1 Hard Drive Enclosure with its top off for quick’n’dirty access to various SATA drives. Then I happened upon the Thermaltake BlackX ST0005U, a plain and simple SATA drive dock that accommodates both 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives.

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Post SP1 Cleanup, Part 2

When I started developing problems with a couple of SP1 Vista installs recently—application crashes, system instability, system software components shutting down—I started my troubleshooting by eliminating potential hardware-related causes. Once those were behind me, I encountered some issues with the accretion of application installs and uninstalls over time.

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Warning! Volume Shadow Copy Service Sometimes Eats Excess Disk Space

The Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service exists to produce clean snapshots of disk volumes, and to create shadow copies of data or files that are consistent, readable, and associated with some specific timestamp. Microsoft abbreviates this service as VSS, for some odd reason or another omitting the C, as in the command line program that manages its behavior: vssadmin.

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Help yourself to cool shortcuts!

If you’ve run Vista for a while, you probably know you can get to many programs by looking them up in Help and Support. This typically produces a list of help pages, among which you can usually find a link to launch the program you want. Take this infrequent but common Windows task, for instance: partitioning and formatting a new hard disk.

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Interesting Notebook Upgrade Shenanigans

Ed TittelI’m in the process of upgrading my 14-month-old Dell D620 Latitude notebook. As shipped from the factory, it included 1.0 GB of RAM (2 x 512 MB DDR2-667 SO-DIMMs), a 40 GB HD, and a T2300E 1.66 GHz Mobile Core Duo CPU. This was adequate for running Windows XP, but I quickly upgraded the SO-DIMM slot underneath the machine to 1.0 GB, increasing memory to a more workable 1.5 GB total.

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