I installed PowerArchiver on my Windows XP machine at work the other day because I wanted to read a .tar.gz file. The default installation of PowerArchiver takes over all of the compressed file associations on the computer, making PowerArchiver the program that opens all compressed file formats that it understands (which is quite a few). This all works great until you uninstall PowerArchiver. Then you lose your file associations.

I uninstalled PowerArchiver shortly after I used it for the .tar.gz file. Today I wanted to create a zip file, but the option to create a new compressed (zipped) folder didn’t appear on the Windows Explorer menu. Not good. Google to the rescue.

A search for “windows xp zip restore association” returned a link to Doug Knox’s Windows XP File Association Fixes. A quick download of the ZIP Folder Association Fix, and I was back in business.

If you’re looking for Windows tips, tweaks, and tricks, check out Doug’s Windows Tweaks and Tips. There is a lot of good stuff there. But be careful. You should have some idea of what you’re doing before you start applying some of those fixes.

After a little over four years, Debra outgrew the 6 gigabyte drive on her machine.  The darn thing’s been giving her trouble for months, but she wouldn’t let me do anything about it.  I tried to defragment the drive, but the Windows 98 defragger kept restarting for some reason and wouldn’t ever actually defragment anything.  When the system started telling her that there weren’t sufficient resources to run Word, it was the last straw.

A trip to Fry’s is always a good thing.  I stopped there on Thursday with about an hour to kill before a dinner meeting.  I was looking for a 30 gigabyte drive to put in Debra’s machine, but the smallest Fry’s had was a 40 gigabyte Maxtor.  I thought $75 was pretty steep, but since that was the cheapest they had, I took it to the register.  The guy at the door who checks receipts noticed the 40 gigabyte drive and informed me that the 80 gigabyte Maxtors were on sale for $50.  Twice as much for a third less.  So I returned the 40, picked up an 80, got the credit, and headed out.

Saturday morning I backed up all of Debra’s data on two CDs, opened the computer, and installed the new drive.  Then I installed Windows XP Home along with service pack 2 and all the other critical updates.  Installing software took most of the day, and even overflowed into today a bit.  But now Debra has Windows XP and about 70 gigabytes of free space.  It’s surprising how much faster XP is compared to Windows 98.  I suspect the new drive is faster, and I know for sure that the page file on the XP system isn’t fragmented like the Windows 98 page file was.

Whenever I upgrade to a new operating system, I buy a new hard drive.  The old drive stays in the system as the secondary device (“D drive”) so I have a live backup of the old data.  That’s saved my bacon numerous times when I’ve forgotten to back up some critical data.  I must have hooked up the IDE cable wrong this time, because Windows XP decided that the new drive (the boot device) should be drive F:, and the old drive was C:.  I managed to change the drive letter for the old drive (it’s K: now), but Windows won’t let me change the drive letter of the boot device.  Of course, by the time I realized this, Windows XP was fully installed and I wasn’t about to go through that again!

In any case, we now have a Windows XP box in the house with SP2.  It’s a huge improvement over Windows 98.  We’ll see how it does.  If I run into any problems, I’ll be sure to report them here.

I have a standard set of tools that I usually install on any machine that I’ll be working with on a regular basis. This set of tools is a hodge podge of stuff I’ve collected over the years, either written by me or acquired by other means.  The tools include a text search utility (grep), a hex file viewer (my home-grown DUMPJ program), an ASCII chart display (surprisingly, I still use that), file comparer, and various other odds and ends that I’ve found useful over the years.  Some of these tools are showing their age and don’t work particularly well with modern systems, but most of them are still quite useful.  I haven’t installed those tools on my development machine at work because they frown on “unauthorized” software installs.  I’ll eventually get the OK to install them here, but in the meantime I’m limited to what comes with Windows and Visual Studio .NET.

My task today was to find all the “RAISERROR” statements in all of the project’s stored procedures, which are stored as text files in one of the project directories.  “If I had grep,” I thought, “I’d just use it in that directory.”  Since I don’t have grep, I tried to use Windows Explorer.  No dice.  It reported no matches when I know for a fact that at least some of the files contain that statement.  Then I found the Windows FINDSTR command, which is something of a bastardized grep.  After fooling with the syntax for a while, all to no avail, I’d almost given up.  Then it occurred to me that the stored procedures are saved in Unicode rather than plain old ASCII text.  Sure enough, if I opened a file in Notepad and saved it as straight text, FINDSTR and Windows Explorer worked as expected.  So now I’m sitting here wondering how Microsoft managed to ship a Unicode-enabled Notepad with Windows 2000, but still hasn’t managed to add Unicode support to their text search programs.

I did eventually solve my problem, by the way. I used the “Find in Files” functionality of Visual Studio .NET to find what I needed.  I find it incredibly annoying to start Visual Studio in order to search for files that contain particular strings, especially when Microsoft is beginning to use Unicode in many more situations.  My hope is that Longhorn’s tools will fix this shortcoming.

I thought that everybody, Microsoft included, admitted that the Windows Registry was a really bad idea that looked good on paper.  The number of things that can go wrong with a single file containing all system and program settings is astronomical, and 7 years or more of tweaking and patching hasn’t made it any better.  The IIS team apparently agreed, because they decided to move most of their configuration to a separate file called the MetaBase.  Not that the MetaBase is such a good idea, either, being a weird indexed proprietary format, but at least it reduces the chance of losing your IIS settings when the Registry gets corrupted.

But, no, programs are still storing all manner of data in the Registry.  Today’s evildoer?  Outlook Express.  Would you believe that Outlook Express stores its message rules (blocked senders and other filtering rules) in the Registry?  No wonder I couldn’t find them by searching the hard drive.  You’d think that, since Outlook Express doesn’t provide a way to export or import message rules, it’d at least put them into a file so that you could back them up.  But, no.  In order to back up your message rules you need to start the Registry Editor,  navigate to the proper key, and then select “Export Registry File” from the File menu.  The proper key, by the way, is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{GUID}\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0

The {GUID} part is replaced by the globally unique identifier of your identity.  Likely there will be only one to select from.

In there, you’ll find keys for Blocked Senders, Rules, and Signatures.  Export what you want to a .reg file (which is text format), and you can edit to your heart’s content using Notepad or your favorite text editor.  If you want to import the rules to another computer (or for another user), then simply log in to the machine where you want to import the rules, change the {GUID} portion in the .reg file to match the GUID for the identity on that machine (get it from the Registry Editor), and then select “Import Registry File” from the File menu.  Note that this may very well overwrite any existing rules, so be careful.  It’s probably a good idea to back up your existing rules before you do the import.

My friend Jeff Duntemann has pointed me to PocoMail, which I need to try.  Not only are the message rules stored in plain ASCII text files, but it also looks like the program’s message storage is much more reasonable.