TeraCopy is a nifty little Windows utility which greatly improves file copy, and move, performance. Check it out at http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php. I like it enough to have bought the Pro copy to support the developers.
Category: Technology
Adobe Photoshop 6 & 7 are better than Photoshop CS and CS2? What? Huh?
Adobe Photoshop 6 and 7 are better than Photoshop CS and CS2? What? Huh?
Well not really, but one thing that version 6 and 7 did have, but was eliminated from CS and CS2, is the ability for Windows XP to display thumbnails of PSD images.
Since I had installed CS, and subsequently CS2, I noticed that I could no longer get thumbnail images to appear in Windows XP. I recently had a bit of time and tracked down the issue. Apparently, some people have had trouble with the thumbnail functionality so Adobe removed that feature. I have not had any real trouble with it. So I found out how to fix it.
Here is how to restore the thumbnail functionality.
Download the thumbfix.exe or thumbfix.zip file from my web site and extract the files to a new folder.
Copy the “psicon.dll” file to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\AdobeShell folder.
Once that is done, double click on the “ThumbsForCS2.reg” file if you are running CS2 or the “ThumbsForCS.reg” file if you are running CS. This will prompt you with a dialog box similar to the following:
“Are you sure you want to add the information in ThumbsForCS2.reg to the registry?”
Click “Yes”
You should see the following dialog:
“Information in ThumbsForCS2.reg has been successfully entered into the registry.”
Click Ok.
This .reg file tells Windows how to use the psicon.dll file.
You should now have Thumbnails once again!
Looking for Love in All the OS’s
What is your quest? My quest is to find the OS, the one OS to rule them all. Over the past twenty years I have been an avid Mac and PC user running both much of the time. About eight years ago I started using the PC most of the time, but the Mac was still nearby, on the next table, running Windows XP as my desktop. When Vista came out, I tried it and while I loved the new “eye-candy”, it had some idiosyncrasies. Mostly it seemed keen on making me wait. ; “Not Responding” seemed to be its mantra. So I began my quest for something better.
This was about the time when Windows Server 2008 was releasing so I did some research and with great expectation installed it as my workstation. Everything I read said it was everything Vista should have been but it was “stable”. It installed well and things seemed promising. After a few weeks I began to get pauses again. So much so, that I thought it must be a hardware problem. I created a diagnostic CD and ran a “level-1” diagnostic for a day – no problems were found! This was ridiculous. Now I have to tell you that this is my work computer. At home I had installed Windows XP x64 at about the same time I abandoned Vista and that has been going along just fine. Everything seems to be working well at home. So what should I do?, I thought. Being of the opinion that the “grass is always greener” and the Utopian view that some other technology will be just great, I decided to take the plunge and install Linux on my work computer, Ubuntu 8 to be precise.
So how did that work out for me? It’s been two weeks and it seems ok, it seems stable. Only a couple of times did it lose its mind, but at least it came back. I’m still waiting for the dust to settle, but I think this might just be a workable OS on my work computer. But — since we use Exchange as our corporate email server and I have been using Outlook Web Access with Firefox 3. While it is usable it is nowhere near as good as Outlook itself. I have a love hate relationship with Outlook; I love the functionality but I hate its sluggishness, talk about “Not Responding”. But its utility trumps its bad attitude. I did try Evolution and it is surprisingly good but not good enough. OWA is not great in Firefox, but it is more reliable than Evolution. I tried to use OpenOffice but it doesn’t work as well as Office 2003 or Office 2007. So I got WINE working and installed Office 2003 under Ubuntu.
I find that now I am doing less with my computer (in some ways because I am less familiar with how to do things in Ubuntu) and doing less seems to directly contribute to greater reliability. But since I am very used to Microsoft applications and can be very productive with them, I’m considering going back to Windows. Heck, Windows works pretty well, well except for Vista — so maybe I will switch to Windows XP x64 here at work. What do you think? Give me your advice, comments are welcome.