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A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2013 5:40 pm
by Dwedit
Here are a few really good programs for Windows XP:

User Profile Hive Cleanup Service from Microsoft. Install this, and your computer shuts down much faster.
Link Shell Extension, and Symbolic Links Driver for Windows XP. Adds NTFS symbolic links to Windows XP, and an easy way to create them!

Seriously, symbolic links are amazing. They let you have a tiny hard drive, and put all your big files on a network share, and the applications that use the big files can't tell the difference. Or even have files from a read-only medium appear side-by-side with writable files in the same directory.

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2013 4:51 pm
by zzo38
Is there command-line version?

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2013 6:58 pm
by Dwedit
The symbolic links driver includes ln.exe, and I think that makes links. Might need to give it a different name if you already have a different program with that name.
Also, the symbolic links driver needs to be started manually before it works, so add "C:\WINDOWS\system32\senable.exe install" it to your startup folder on the start menu.

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2013 10:44 pm
by Jarhmander
It amazes me how things like symbolic links looks like an awesome thing in Windows, but they are one of the most common thing in *NIX OSes.

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Sat Jan 05, 2013 5:28 am
by dr_sloppy
Jarhmander wrote:It amazes me how things like symbolic links looks like an awesome thing in Windows, but they are one of the most common thing in *NIX OSes.
My thoughts exactly. :lol:

The unknown, unknown as it may be, is news to someone who didn't know.

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2013 1:20 pm
by SkinnyV
Thanks, if other people have cool thing like that to share it would be nice. More reason for me not to upgrade my trusted Win XP!

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2013 1:38 pm
by koitsu
I know it's not quite the same as what Dwedit provided links for, but this is software I use regularly (most of it almost daily). Mentioning 'em here in case other people haven't heard of these utilities/tools.

The only one that isn't mentioned on that page is something called "Tooltip Fixer", which I'll explain:

Occasionally I've seen Windows XP show a tooltip (those boxes seen when hovering your mouse over something for a while) behind the taskbar, and gets indefinitely stuck that way (reference / MS KB article with a shitty "solution"). Since Microsoft only cares about selling new crap and not fixing the old, we'll never see a fix for this problem.

Anyway, on occasion I've figured out how to get rid of it, but more often than not it's there indefinitely and requires one to end-task explorer.exe (Windows Explorer) -- which is absolutely horrible because tons of programs do not properly re-register themselves in the notification area if you've done that (so now you have a program that's running with no way to bring up any part of its UI), including some of Microsoft's own utilities. I'd rather reboot than end-task explorer.exe.

The technical root cause is stated here. My memory fails me often these days so I could be remembering a different thing, but I believe all the .exe does is run a single Win32 API function with a value of 0 or NULL (I forget which) as one of the parameters. I remember looking at MSDN to see the function to see what it did, and a 0 or NULL value resulted in "special behaviour", having originally been created back during Windows 3.x. APIs are hard when you have jackasses writing code.

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2013 1:21 pm
by zzo38
One program I use on Windows XP is the "process.exe" command-line program from Craig.Peacock@beyondlogic.org which I find better than loading the task manager all the time for such things.

I sometimes use this program when working on Windows XP computers:

Code: Select all

#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN /* Reduce number of system headers parsed */ 
                            /* during build. */ 

#include <windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>

typedef int bool;
#define false 0;

void main (int argc, char **argv)
{
   char * pszDosDeviceName,
        * pszNtDeviceName;

   bool  fRemoveDeviceName = false;
   bool  fResult;

   /*
      Command-line parsing.
        1) Make sure correct number of arguments are supplied.
        2) See if you should add or remove the MS-DOS Device Name.
   */ 
   if(argc==2) {
     /* Display information */
      pszDosDeviceName = argv[1];
      pszNtDeviceName = (char *)LocalAlloc (LPTR, MAX_PATH);
      fResult = QueryDosDevice (pszDosDeviceName, pszNtDeviceName,
                                MAX_PATH);
      if(fResult) printf("%s is linked to %s\n",pszDosDeviceName,pszNtDeviceName);
      else printf("error %lu: cannot find %s\n",GetLastError(),pszDosDeviceName);
      LocalFree (pszNtDeviceName);
      return;
   } else if (argc != 3)
   {
      printf("\nusage: %s <DOS device name> <NT device name>    to add\n",
             argv[0]);
      printf("usage: %s [-r] <DOS device name>                to remove\n",
             argv[0]);
      printf("\n\texample: %s d: \\device\\cdrom0\n", argv[0]);
      return;
   }

   fRemoveDeviceName = !lstrcmpi (argv[1], "-r");


   /* Now, add/remove the DOS device name. */ 
   if (fRemoveDeviceName)
   {
      /*
         Remove the MS-DOS device name. First, get the name of the Windows
         NT device from the symbolic link, then delete the symbolic link.
         
      */ 
      pszDosDeviceName = argv[2];

      pszNtDeviceName = (char *)LocalAlloc (LPTR, MAX_PATH);

      fResult = QueryDosDevice (pszDosDeviceName, pszNtDeviceName,
                                MAX_PATH);
      if (fResult)
      {
         fResult = DefineDosDevice (DDD_RAW_TARGET_PATH|
                                    DDD_REMOVE_DEFINITION|
                                    DDD_EXACT_MATCH_ON_REMOVE,
                                    pszDosDeviceName, pszNtDeviceName);
      }
      if (!fResult)
         printf("error %lu: could not remove %s\n",
                GetLastError(), pszDosDeviceName);

      LocalFree (pszNtDeviceName);
   }
   else
   {
      /* Add the DOS device name */ 

      pszDosDeviceName = argv[1];
      pszNtDeviceName  = argv[2];

      fResult = DefineDosDevice (DDD_RAW_TARGET_PATH, pszDosDeviceName,
                                 pszNtDeviceName);
      if (!fResult)
         printf("error %lu: could not link %s to %s\n",
                GetLastError(), pszDosDeviceName, pszNtDeviceName);
   }

}
One thing you can do with this is to use it to copy a disk image.

I use Linux too.

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 2:02 am
by Knurek
Total Commander is the best thing that happened to Windows since... well, ever. Some people swear by FAR, but those people are weird. The amount of life-improving tools this program has is staggering.

If you're looking for a good free text editor, I'd recommend PSPad. Has all the features of commercial editors plus a lot more (column block mode, mass search and replace, color picker/translator). Lovely little program.

If you want to switch from Winamp, but don't like foobar2000, you can always try XMPlay. Has support for Winamp input/dsp plugins, it's own plugin/transparent archive support/skinning system, very low memory footprint, the best module playback library out there and some very nifty features. Haven't used any other player ever since I discovered it, and I don't plan on switching anytime soon.

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 5:07 am
by Dwedit
Tried PSPad, I see a few things wrong with it:
* Tries to install extra unwanted adware
* When loading a UTF-8 file and entering Hex Edit mode, all characters are expanded into 2-byte UTF-16 words, it won't let you hex-edit the file in its original form.
* Only supports ANSI, CP437, UTF-8/16, and the Czech code page, doesn't support any other code pages.
* Seems to redraw the screen very slowly.
It does seem to have a lot of unique features though, like the hash generator and color pickers, I might give it a try when editing a web page.

I'm sticking with TextPad, Notepad++, MadEdit, and HxD (awesome hex editor) for now.
It takes some really great features to get me to move away from TextPad, and only two other text editors have won me over so far. NotePad++ is feature-rich with nice features like Regular Expressions, and it supports Unicode, and any other encoding you can think of.
MadEdit is the text editor of choice when your file isn't ANSI or Unicode. It does a great job of guessing a text file's encoding (except for CP437), and it's "Find in Files" feature actually works with encoded text, unlike Notepad++ which is UTF-8 only. MadEdit also has a hex editor, and it can view and edit multi-byte characters with no problems. Only problem is that when you copy and paste, it always uses text characters for the clipboard. It will only copy hex characters if you hold shift, and won't paste hex characters at all.

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 9:00 am
by Movax12
I was going to post something about Total Commander, so count this as another vote for it. It is an exceedingly useful file manager with a ton of features. (FTP, Various compressed archive support, File compare, Mulit-mode file viewer (Lister), Powerful file rename tool, Checksum functions.. etc )

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 9:12 am
by Knurek
Dwedit wrote:Tried PSPad, I see a few things wrong with it:
* Tries to install extra unwanted adware
I'm not sure whether that's a recent addition or something that the hosting site adds automatically - I'm sure the version I installed ages ago didn't have crapware.
Anyways, there's a portable version offered without all crap programs attached.
Dwedit wrote:* Only supports ANSI, CP437, UTF-8/16, and the Czech code page, doesn't support any other code pages.
ISO 8859-2 is used by all sorts of Eastern Europe languages, not only Czech. ;)
Out of curiosity - what other code pages would you like to have supported?

Re: A few awesome programs for Windows XP

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 2:31 pm
by Dwedit
Mainly code page 932 (shift-jis). Anything in Japanese made by Japanese programmers will use that code page, and never use Unicode.