A Home Page, Start Page, or Toolbar to Open Favorites/Bookmarks and Start Programs

My Firefox bookmarks ("favorites," in Internet Explorer) had grown into a mess, over the years.  In a separate project, I had begun the process of emptying out the bookmarks folder and saving the bookmarks as URL link files.  At some point, maybe my Bookmarks folder would be uncluttered enough that I could go into Firefox's Bookmarks menu and move quickly to the desired link.  But in the meantime, I wondered whether there was another way to set up quick access to key websites.  This post describes the steps I took to set up that kind of arrangement.

Deciding on a Webpage

My first approach was to set up a webpage that would contain those links to other webpages.  For this purpose, the first question was, where would this homepage be located?  I had previously set up homepages on Yahoo! and other similar websites.  I found those pages somewhat inflexible.  But that had been some years earlier.  I thought that maybe I should take another look.  A good commercial homepage could have the advantage of incorporating features (e.g., nice appearance, news tickers) that I wouldn't know how to create.

A search led to About.com and Mashable reviews of some personalized start pages.  Both of those reviews mentioned Netvibes, iGoogle, Pageflakes, MyYahoo, Webwag, Inbox, and Protopage.  Mashable listed several others as well.  No doubt there were many additional possibilities not mentioned in either review.  The two reviews seemed to agree that, among these seven possibilities, Inbox was not a serious contender, MyYahoo was somewhat limited, and the top competitors were Netvibes and Pageflakes, with the rest having good functionality and some worthy special features.

I didn't expect to be needing anything special from this homepage, so a detailed investigation seemed unnecessary.  It appeared reasonable to narrow my focus pretty quickly to Netvibes and Pageflakes.  A search suggested that a number of others had reached the same conclusion.  Joshua Price considered it a choice between those two and iGoogle, and posed a good question:  did I want a homepage that would be larded down with all kinds of gadgets, or something that would load quickly?  Obviously, the latter, given my interest in having something that would be comparable to the Bookmarks folder.

Did that mean I couldn't have a fancy homepage?  I decided the solution would be to focus on getting a homepage with basic functionality, and it could include a link to my snazzy Netvibes or Pageflakes homepage.  But I decided to go ahead and write up, in this paragraph, a bit more about what I was learning in this area.  Mr Price and others seemed inclined to favor Netvibes for being more fully developed, apparently less inclined toward service interruptions, and (for my purposes) somehow more similar to a feed reader.

So I decided to start with Netvibes.  I signed up for their free Basic service (as distinct from their Premium option at $499/month) and chose their Default dashboard.  It took a moment to build itself and then gave me a little tutorial.  It said my page could have apps, blogs, and news.  As an example of an app, they showed me a New York magazine mini-page, in a box filling much of the visible part of the webpage.  It said I could have tabs; for instance, this New York thing was on my General tab (my only one, so far).  It said I could create additional dashboards, and I could switch between Widget and Reader views.  They took their sweet time sending me the confirmation email, and when I looked into it, their webpage seemed kind of screwed up.  I sent their webmaster a note.

Conceptualizing the Start Page

While the Netvibes process was underway, I moved ahead with the main project:  setting up a fast homepage that could include a link to my Netvibes page.  There were several options.  I could have just used a Show Desktop button and put the desired links on my desktop, but I didn't want to have to lose sight of the stuff onscreen.  I could have used a free website hosting site to set up a simple HTML page somewhere online, and add links to that.  I decided the best approach might be to have an HTML page stored right on my computer, and then link to that.

It seemed, in other words, that I should distinguish two different kinds of homepages.  There was the homepage that I hoped to set up on Netvibes, or that some people would set up on Facebook or elsewhere.  This could be a potentially public presentation of myself; whether public or semi-private, it could contain a list of my interests or key links or photos.  I would call this a homepage in the sense that, as far as other people (and possibly I, myself) were concerned, this was my home base, the place where people could go to find me.

I was after a different sort of thing.  What I was trying to build at this point was a start page, like the "Firefox Start" page that I would get if I clicked on the houselike "home" icons on the Firefox browsers.  (Chrome used a similar icon.)  Firefox and Internet Explorer unwittingly implied the misfit of this "home" metaphor by allowing users to designate multiple "home" pages, when people do not usually have multiple homes.  I did seem that "start" pages would have been more accurate.

As Wikipedia observed, the "home" and "start" terms were used in different ways by different people and programs.  The terminology I planned to use would distinguish the "home" page -- a potentially cluttered affair that I (and perhaps others) would hang out in, leave open, or return to -- from the "start" page, where I would go to start programs or otherwise follow links.

The Start Page, as I saw it, could be saved on and connected with my customized Start Menu.  For instance, the Start Page could have links to frequently-used programs as well as to webpages.  It could be saved in a special format whose default browser would be something other than Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer, for which I had developed other roles.  For instance, if my Start Page were saved as an MHT page, and if I named Opera (or, better, some minimalist browser) as my default MHT browser, perhaps I could open my Start Page, and run things from there, without losing sight of what I was doing in Firefox.  Possibly I could use the Start Page in different ways on different desktops.  There were probably more things that I could do with the Start Page, but this seemed like a good starting concept.

Creating My Start Page

What I seemed to need was an HTML (or similar format) webpage, saved in my Start Menu, to which I could point my browsers (e.g., in Firefox, the menu pick would be Tools > Options > General tab).  The first question was, how should I create that webpage?

One way was to use Firefox (Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks > Import and Backup > Export Bookmarks to HTML) or some other program that would convert a set of Bookmarks or Favorites into an HTML page.  I didn't like that solution.  In the past, that route had not required me to edit or manage the list of bookmarks.  No matter how many there were, I could just put them onto an HTML page, where the clutter would overwhelm me.  Often it would be faster to just do a new Google search for where that webpage was.  And that's how my old collection of bookmarks fell into disuse.  Too much of a good thing.

At this point, I wanted to grow a new Start Page with only the things that really needed to be there -- including perhaps some things that wouldn't normally be found in a Bookmarks menu.
To get a simple HTML page that would be accessible from multiple browsers -- indeed, from Windows Explorer and wherever I might want to put a shortcut -- I took the advice to paste something like this into Notepad:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Start Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><a href="http://www.cnn.com/">CNN</a></p>
</body>
</html>

The "a href" part would give me a link to CNN's webpage.  As this example shows, my HTML page would have two parts.  After the introductory line, telling the computer that it was an HTML page, the page would have a head and a body, each beginning with the appropriate tag (e.g., <head>) and ending with the pre-slashed version (e.g., </head>).  I would add the <p> tag to indicate a paragraph, so that there would be a bit of space between lines.

Among the endless things that I could learn about HTML, the only other thing I needed right now was to know how to add a link to a program on my computer.  I found, using Firefox as an example, that if I went into File > Open File, I could browse to a folder and open various kinds of files.  If I tried to open a DOC file, for instance, Firefox would open an empty tab and would offer to open the DOC in Microsoft Word, my default program for DOC files.  The empty tab would have the address of the file, in this format:

file:///D:/Folder/Filename.doc

So the HTML line needed to open that file, in a customized Start Page, would be like this:

<p><a href="file:///D:/Folder/Filename.doc">Open Filename</a></p>

But for some types of programs, Firefox would start the program in its own tab, instead of starting up the Windows default program (e.g., Word, for DOCs).  For instance, when I tried to start a WAV file, it played in the Firefox tab, without opening IrfanView, my default WAV player.  One suggestion was to add a "target" specification.  For my purposes, that line read like this:

<p><a href="file:///D:/Current/Test.wav" target="_blank">Open the Test WAV File</a></p>

I saved the Notepad file as "TestHTML.html" and navigated to it in Firefox > Open File.  The HTML page opened successfully, the link to CNN worked, and the link to the Test WAV File gave me an option to open that file in IrfanView (or some other program) or save it.  So that worked.  I now knew most of what I needed for a basic Start Page.

Finally, I wanted my Start Page to have links that would open Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer).  I would want a WinEx session to open up and go directly to a certain specified folder.  I figured I would use something like file:///D:/Folder.  Unfortunately, this was apparently no longer possible, for security reasons.  There did seem to be alternative ways to work toward the same result.  Aside from a programming solution, I could get to a special folder by making a shortcut to it, and sticking that shortcut on the desktop or Start Menu, or by pinning it to the taskbar, or maybe by finding a WinEx alternative or installing a WinEx add-on with Favorites and other capabilities.

Pending further investigation, it looked like I might have to take a roundabout approach to add a bookmark, to Firefox, that would open a Windows Explorer session.  The approach I saw would start with making a shortcut to that folder, using Windows Explorer.  Then I would put that shortcut in my Internet Explorer Favorites folder (C:\Users\Ray\Favorites, where "Ray" is the username); and then I would import my IE Favorites into Firefox.  I would take this route through Internet Explorer because it used a folder to contain its bookmarks, and I could add a folder shortcut to that folder; but Firefox's bookmarks were apparently stored within a single file.)

I could refine the Start Page as time and circumstances dictated. For instance, I had noticed, one time, that I could copy and paste a table from Excel (or probably Word) into an HTML page, thereby creating a table in HTML, without actually knowing how to program a table in HTML. A table would be handy if I found I had lots of links, and wanted to have several columns of them on my Start Page. I could create an HTML table by using the compositional tools available right here in a draft blog post on Blogger.com: paste the table into the draft post in Compose mode, and then switch to the Edit HTML tab to see the HTML code. Then I could probably then copy that HTML code out to Notepad. In fact, I might be able to keep a permanent draft of my Start Page as a draft here in Blogger, or as an HTML file that I would edit with a freeware HTML editor.

As I looked into this further, I began to realize there were quite a few alternatives.  I could have used some of the foregoing insights to pursue the possibility of using C:\Users\Ray\Favorites as my Start Page.  The idea would be that opening a new tab or otherwise invoking the Firefox Start Page would open a Windows Explorer session focused on C:\Users\Ray\Favorites, where I could put links and shortcuts to all sorts of webpages, folders, and programs.  Another possibility was to create a new toolbar and put icons on it for various websites, programs, and folders.  In all of these options, there were various combinations of ease of use, maintenance, portability, backup, and screen space.

Considering the Toolbar Approach

To my surprise, at this point the HTML homepage concept looked less appealing than a toolbar with the desired links.  I had used toolbars in the olden days -- in Windows 98, possibly, or maybe early in Windows XP -- and this research reminded me of some of the advantages of that approach.  If toolbars still worked the same, I could base the toolbar in my customized Start Menu, thereby making it portable and insuring that it would be backed up frequently; I could set it to auto-hide, so that I wouldn't lose screen real estate; and if all went well, there wouldn't be much maintenance involved:  just put the desired icons in the desired folder and maybe do a bit of rearrangement onscreen.  I also wouldn't have to be using a web browser to have immediate access to the various links that I would have put onto the HTML Start Page, and I wouldn't have to be fishing around in Windows Explorer to use its Favorites.

It was gradually becoming obvious that I really didn't need to be worrying about starting programs from my HTML Start Page or my toolbar.  That was the purpose of the Start Menu.  Where I was interested in having quick access to a particular file, I could include a link to the appropriate folder on the Start Menu.  So at this point it seemed that all I would have on the toolbar would be links to webpages and folders.

The toolbar setup process seemed to be very similar to the process years earlier:  right-click on an empty space on the taskbar (mine was crowded, so I had to grab a tiny edge of it) and choose Toolbars > New toolbar > designate the folder where I would be putting the shortcuts and such.  I decided to set up two toolbars:  Webpages and Folders.  Those two words now appeared on the Taskbar.  I wanted the folders to be on the left edge of the screen, not the bottom, so I tried dragging one of them over there.  This didn't work, with either mouse button.  Some users reported that, in Windows 7, Microsoft removed the ability to drag toolbars away from the taskbar.  That seemed consistent with what I was getting from my search generally.

The problem with a toolbar at the bottom of the screen was that the taskbar was already cluttered.  I could have tried to set it to two rows, but it made no sense to narrow my screen vertically even more, when I had horizontal space to spare.  I thought maybe Microsoft's concept was that I would use their Sidebar instead of a toolbar on the side, but I wasn't seeing obvious ways to add links to files, folders, and programs to the Sidebar.  It seemed more oriented toward stuffing my desktop with gadgets that would take up space and consume system resources.

The RocketDock Alternative

I searched for ways to do more with the Sidebar, and what I found instead was RocketDock, one of many third-party applications whose purpose seemed at least approximately what I might be looking for.  RocketDock appeared to be much-loved.  Sadly, though, it was not yet supported on 64-bit Windows. 

ObjectDock, an alternative, was actually even more highly rated on CNET.  I downloaded, installed, and ran it.  As expected, it added a Mac-style row of large, colorful icons across the bottom of the screen.  I was able to adjust it so that it was a small, auto-hiding bar on the left edge of the screen.  I tried dragging a folder from Windows Explorer onto the ObjectDock (OD) bar.  That didn't seem to accomplish anything.  Likewise when I tried to drag a JPG onto it.  I went looking for guidance.  I didn't see a manual on their support page.  Apparently my main option at this point was to go digging around in the support forum. It seemed like a lame way to begin.  I searched for a user's guide.  One page said that what I had done should have worked:  "To add more icons, click and hold a program icon then move it to a dock then release it."  Ah, but I hadn't tried to add a program icon.  I'd tried to add folder and file icons.  Could I not use ObjectDock to open specific programs or files?  I wanted to to back into the program to make sure I hadn't missed something, when I was looking for its built-in help information; but now that I had set ObjectDock not to always be on top, I couldn't find it.  There was no ObjectDock icon in either the system tray or the taskbar, and moving my mouse to where OD had been, last time I checked, achieved nothing.  Alt-Tab likewise revealed nothing.  I minimized Firefox, and there it was.  It had been hiding under Firefox.  I was running out of time for this project, so I just posted a question in the ObjectDock forum, asking where I could find a user's guide.

Meanwhile, in my travels, I had seen where someone said that RocketDock was not supported for x64, but that this didn't mean it didn't work on x64 machines.  The post said that a lot of 64-bit Windows users were using RocketDock.  So I went back to that and installed it.  I liked how its auto-hide feature made its toolbar slide out from the right side of the monitor, like I expected.  I was able to slide icons for a folder, an AVI, a JPG, and an XLS spreadsheet onto its toolbar, open those files from those icons, and remove the icons.  Exactly what I was looking for.

Now, how could I use RocketDock to make frequently used web links readily available?  A folder seemed to be the answer.  The specific need that had prompted me to start this investigation was that I often did searches in this blog, and in many cases I had to go out to Google for those searches (rather than use the search box at the top of webpages like this one) because I wanted to do a customized search that might have more search options than would fit in that search box.  It was a small task, with a bit of typing, but I did it often enough that I wanted a way to make it faster and easier.  I suspected there were more tasks like it, within my day's work at the keyboard.

I created a Special Searches subfolder in the Online folder in my Start Menu.  I ran the general-form search that I would do in this website.  This search contained only the specification that the search would be limited to this particular site.  Now, if I could get this search to run from an icon, all I would have to do, once it came up, would be to add the specific terms that I was searching for in this site.

So I had the search I wanted to save.  I went to the colored icon or space inside the left end of its address bar, and dragged that URL over to the Special Searches subfolder that I had open in Windows Explorer.  I would add other searches there later, but for now the next step was to put this Special Searches subfolder onto the RocketDock toolbar.  So I dragged the folder icon over from Internet Explorer to the toolbar and tried it out.  I had to do it twice, but it worked.

It seemed that I might be using the RocketDock toolbar often, once I got onto it.  The only other thing I added to it, at this point, was a folder containing shortcuts to frequently opened folders.  So now, instead of having to dig down in Windows Explorer to a particular folder, I could just click the Frequently Opened Folders icon on the RocketDock toolbar.  That would open up a Windows Explorer session, opened to the Frequently Opened Folders folder.  There, I would see the shortcuts that I had put there, leading directly to those various buried folders.  So within a couple of clicks I would be at my destination.

This was as far as I went with the RocketDock concept at this point.  I figured I would need some time to play with it and see how things developed.  Maybe there would be important new uses; maybe it would prove to be a minor addition.  I hoped that I had not invested all this time in a trivial pursuit.  It was not always easy to predict where this sort of inquiry would end up.  I certainly had come quite a ways from my original notion of using a Start Page to accomplish the desired outcome.

Windows 7: Additional Tweaks

I had installed Windows 7, and I had begun using it.  As I went forward with that, I came across some additional adjustments that I would want to keep in mind for future reinstallations.  This post describes some of those tweaks and adjustments.

One thing that I would surely do sooner, in a future installation, would be to set up networking between computers.  In the past, it had been very frustrating and not easy, though no doubt ultimately it would have paid off.  With Windows 7, I now found it to be pretty easy.

I installed VMware Workstation for Windows, but found that it was always running.  To prevent it from starting automatically when I started the computer, I went into Workstation's Edit > Preferences and set it not to show an icon in the system tray.

I installed and uninstalled some programs:

• I installed Virtual CloneDrive so that I would have the capability of mounting an ISO image as though it were a mounted CD, without having to actually burn the ISO to a CD and then put the CD in my CD drive.
• I decided to try BinManager, as a way to automatically empty out items in the Recycle Bin after they had sat there for several days or a week.
• I discovered that Win7 had a built-in defragmenting schedule (dfrgui.exe), and therefore I uninstalled IOBit SmartDefrag.
• Jing, the video capture program, had a five-minute limit in its free version, so I uninstalled it.
• I took the recommended steps to install GMail Drive as an alternate way to transfer files between computers and to keep selected files available from any computer if I didn't bring them along with me.  Basically, I downloaded it, installed it, right-clicked on the new GMail Drive entry in Windows Explorer, and went to Login As > my Gmail username and password, and waited for a little while in case I got the "enumerating folder" message that I was instructed not to disturb.  I didn't get that; I just went straight to usefulness.  I used it to store a copy of my customized Start Menu (below).
• I used Jumplist Launcher to set up shortcuts to commonly used files and folders on the taskbar.

The obligation to log in after a reboot mysteriously reappeared, for some reason, possibly due to a reboot.  At this point, I discovered that my registry edit was not working.  So I went into Start > type "control userpasswords2" > uncheck "Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer" > Apply > OK.

I customized the "Move to" option that I had previously added via .reg file.  This customization allowed me to name specific folders to move to, without having to hunt for them.  To do this, I downloaded and unzipped Movetofolder.rar, created by Omnicoder.  I put the unzipped MoveToFolder folder in the appropriate place in my customized Start Menu, so that it would be available on my portable drive (where I kept a copy of the Start Menu, with its portable apps) and on network computers sharing that Start Menu.  In the MoveToFolder folder, I edited folders.txt to include a link to D:\Current, which was my central clearinghouse for random stuff.  I created a shortcut to MoveToFolder.exe.  I put that shortcut in my SendTo folder, which I found by pasting "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo" into the Windows Explorer address bar and hitting Enter.  (Later, I found an easier address to type there:  "shell:sendto.")  So now I could right-click on an item and select Send To > MoveToFolder.  That popped up a Move to Folder dialog, where I had to select the target folder (even though there was only one listed) and click Move.  It didn't close automatically after doing the move.  This was useful but more cumbersome than a direct Move to ___ Folder context menu option would have been.

Bizarrely, as I discovered, Windows 7 no longer allowed users to select multiple files and open them all at once in Windows Explorer.  The seemingly senseless loss of this feature had irritated many users.  I found that I could at least open all files of the same type by using that SendTo tweak.  For example, I added a shortcut to Acrobat, in this SendTo folder, and was then able to select a bunch of PDF files and right-click > Send To > Acrobat to open them all at once.  When setting this up, I found that some shortcuts would work in the SendTo folder and some wouldn't.  The link to Acrobat that I had on my Start Menu folder did not work; I had to find Acrobat.exe in C:\Program Files, create a shortcut directly to that, and then move that shortcut to the SendTo folder.

While I was in that SendTo folder, I edited its contents to remove SendTo targets that I didn't want.  The Elder Geek advised creating a shortcut to the SendTo folder and putting that shortcut in the SendTo folder, so that I could quickly add other programs or folders to that folder as I encountered them.  Having the option of sending a file to a SendTo option seemed less cluttered than adding applications to the context menu; I had a customized Start Menu for that.  In search of a sleeker way to move to a specific folder, I tried FileMenu Tools.  It had other functions as well.  The ones that interested me (i.e., that I didn't already have an established solution for) were Delete Locked File, Move to ..., and Pack to Folder, though it had a lot more to offer.  I also tried out Context Menu Editor.  It actually looked like ContextEdit might be the best solution, if someone could figure out how to make it work.  There were other tools that might also have done the job.  I suggested that they add a button for this purpose to the Classic Shell utility mentioned in the previous post. 

In that Classic Shell utility, I clicked on the Shell button (top right, and then top center, after I unlocked the toolbars and moved it) and adjusted some things.  I was looking for a way to make another tweak, to disable auto-refreshing of Windows Explorer file lists.  (Refreshing would happen when I was viewing files in IrfanView and would delete one of the files.  All of the other files that I had selected at that point would then be de-selected.)  I did a search, but unfortunately did not find a solution there.  I posted a wish-list item on that, too, at Classic Shell.  Auto-refreshing remained a problem.

From various sources, I developed some additional registry edits, to add to my previous .reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00


; Add context menu option to copy a list of files to the clipboard
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\copylist]
@="Copy List to Clipboard"
"Extended"=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\copylist\command]
@="cmd /c \"dir /b /a:-d /o:n | clip\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\copylist]
@="Copy List to Clipboard"
"Extended"=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\copylist\command]
@="cmd /c dir \"%1\" /b /a:-d /o:n | clip"
; Remove context menu option
; [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell\copylist]
; [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\copylist]


I developed two tweaks using NirCmd.  One gave me a volume-muting hotkey.  The other gave me a program that would take screenshots as often as I liked, for as long as I liked.

Somehow, I overlooked the setting in Ultimate Windows Tweaker > System Performance > Enable support for 4GB of RAM on 32-bit Windows OS.  I enabled that now.  I did not pursue the hacks that apparently enable 32-bit Win7 to see 8GB of RAM, rather than the apparently arbitrary 4GB limit imposed by Microsoft.

Another step to incorporate in a tweaked Win7 installation was to install Firefox.  I overlooked it because I was thinking that the automated Windows migration from WinXP to Win7 would take care of that, but then I wound up not using that migration process.  Now I had to install Firefox, install and configure its extensions, and -- as I did do with Internet Explorer -- go to a YouTube page and play a video, so as to trigger a download of the Adobe Flash Player.  Although it acted like it wanted me to download and run an installer, that proved unnecessary.  Waiting a few seconds allowed the plugin installer to fire up and do the job.

While moving things around to accommodate my new system, I inadvertently deleted a bunch of them.  My backup was imperfect.  The solution was to run Recuva as soon as possible, before other changes to the drive would overwrite those deleted but still present files and folders.

In Firefox, I found that, in Google search results, it was hard to tell which pages I had already visited.  I wanted an add-on that would let me change the colors as the Webpage Decorator had done for me in Chrome.  Turned out to be easier than that.  In Firefox, I went to Tools > Options > Content tab > Fonts & Colors > Colors.  All I had to do was to change the colors for visited and unvisited links.  I also unchecked "Allow pages to choose their own colors, instead of my selections above," but that turned out to be a mistake:  it applied to all colors, not just font colors, so later I undid that.  Granted, these were global changes that would affect all visited and unvisited links in any webpage.  Not ideal.  But until I found an extension that took care of this, without the complexity of Firebug, this was my solution.

I belatedly discovered that my external USB drive was set to "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties."  To find and change that, I right-clicked on the drive > Properties.

At one point, I was unable to change drive letters.  There was a workaround:  in Regedit, go to e.g., HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\DosDevices\F: and rename F to the desired letter, then reboot.  There was a more elaborate explanation and also the apparent alternative of tinkering with (apparently making some minor change to) the problematic drive in a partition manager (e.g., GParted).

As described in a separate post, I compared programs that could identify and delete unwanted duplicate files.  I expected that investigation to persuade me to switch from DoubleKiller to some newer alternative.  It didn't.  The search for a good detector of redundant files was related to a project to take back drive D, in the sense of moving the customized Start Menu and its duplicative program files to a separate INSTALL partition.  Once those program files were on the new Install partition, I could do duplicate sweeps on D again.

I repaired an important cause of sudden and complete system crashes on one machine.  The culprit, I figured out, was static electricity.  I was wearing a staticy fleece pullover.  Nice and warm.  It seemed to be able to provoke an instant reboot even when it just brushed against the headphone cord.  After replacing the pullover, I had no more of these sorts of crashes.

I experimented briefly with multiple desktop software and decided to install and use Dexpot.  I was not sure how *much* I would use it.  Due to the limitations of Windows multiple desktop (as distinct from genuine virtual desktop) software, I felt that probably my work would continue to be mostly in desktop 1 -- but at least it was there to try when I had some need or interest in doing some things on a separate desktop.

GoodSync emerged as a way to keep files synchronized up-to-the-minute on two computers.  With this, I was able to access my files immediately on two distinct computers, with each serving as backup for the other and remaining ready to go to work as soon as the other became bogged down in any system administration, rebooting, scanning, or other tasks that might otherwise take control of a machine.  With GoodSync in place, I put the Teamviewer investigation on hold, waiting for spring and the possible arrival of improvements to Input Director.

I had set aside two internal partitions for frequent data backup.  The concept behind these partitions was that I would set up a Robocopy script to mirror one internal hard drive to the other.  This was distinct from the daily backup to an external drive, manually managed via Beyond Compare, so that I could see what was changing.  This internal backup was intended to run without my involvement.  One of the scripts I used went like this:

:: ROBUP-DATA-INTERNAL.BAT


:: Requires installation of Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools for XP; included in Vista
:: Download that from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/confirmation.aspx?familyId=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displayLang=en
:: Intended for frequent mirror backup of DATA partition to internal partition, excluding a few folders

set dest="Q:\\"
robocopy D:\ %dest% /MIR /R:2 /W:5 /REG /V /FP /COPY:DAT /XD $RECYCLE.BIN _gsdata_ "System Volume Information"


:: *  *  *  *  *  Syntax  *  *  *  *  *

:: MIR mirror
:: R retries
:: W wait time between retries
:: REG set R & W as default values in registry
:: V produce verbose report
:: FP include full pathname in output
:: COPY copy Data, Attributes, Timestamps
:: XD exclude these directories
 
With those scripts written, the next task was to automate them.  I went to Start > "taskschd.msc."  This opened Task Scheduler.  In the Actions pane, I clicked on Create Basic Task and essentially just filled out the form.
 
I did a search and found instructions on how to modify the PATH in Windows 7.  The PATH was just the set of places where Windows would look to find a program.  So if I typed a command referring to the program xyz.exe, but if xyz.exe was in a folder where PATH would not look, xyz.exe would not run.  To add that folder to the path, I could run a command like "PATH %path%;[newfolder]" where [newfolder] would be replaced by the complete path (e.g., D:\Scripts) where I wanted Win7 to look for these additional commands.  I added a PATH command of this sort to my STARTUP.BAT file

I found another page on converting Win7 to WinXP format. 
 
In this tweaking process, I discovered something new about myself.  I discovered that I was one of those many people for whom the Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) program included in Windows 7 would not run a batch file.  In my case, it would run one batch file, but it would not run another one.  I compared the two on all points, including their Properties and their Task Scheduler settings.  There seemed to be no difference.  After spending probably two hours trying to resolve this issue, I looked for alternatives.  One, which I quickly rejected for complexity, was to use Windows PowerShell to schedule batch files.  I was not able to find a Wikipedia page or other comparison of the program names that I did encounter, but it seemed there were enough freeware program schedulers so that I could dispense with the paid ones, such as Advanced Task Scheduler.  Free options I found included Splinterware's System Scheduler, Freebyte Task Scheduler, M2 Launcher, nnSoft Lite, WinUtilities Free Edition, Kirby Alarm and Task Scheduler, and Z-Cron.  Of these, WinUtilities had by far the most downloads on CNET, probably because it was a multipurpose utility suite.  Unfortunately, the scheduled tasks feature was not available in WinUtilities' free edition.  Several of the others -- System Scheduler, Kirby, nnCron, and M2 -- were old programs, not updated for Windows 7.  Both Z-Cron and Freebyte had been recently updated.  I had heard good things about Z-Cron previously, and decided to try that first.  Unfortunately, the installation process was pretty ragged, complete with Notepad display of a .dll file, and once the program was running, I had to use Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to kill it.  I decided to uninstall it and try Freebyte.  The uninstall process froze; I had to reboot.  But even then, it would not "de-install," as the shortcut put it:  I got "Falscher Aufruf."  (Some of the dialogs were in German.)  I deleted its program file manually and switched to Freebyte.  Freebyte turned out to be portable, which was a plus.  Unfortunately, its options were very basic:  run once, daily, or weekly -- not monthly or yearly, and not every ___ days or ___ weeks.  I decided to try re-installing Z-Cron, just in case it was a fluke.  I still got the .dll in Notepad, but otherwise the installation went better this time.  It had more scheduling options than Freebyte.  I decided to set up some tasks and try Z-Cron out.  It had quite a few tasks built in (e.g., alarm clock, empty trash) and ready to be scheduled, along with whatever I would want to schedule.  It was not very well organized.  I would get in the habit of closing windows to get back to the main menu; but then it turned out I was at the main menu, although in an unfamiliar place, and would thus inadvertently close the entire program.  Also, once I lost that list of built-in tasks, it was hard to find it again.  (The secret:  Task > Z-Cron Task tab > Tools.)  Unfortunately, after all this, the reason that my batch file would not run in Win7's Task Scheduler was the same reason why it would not run in Z-Cron, or so I assumed, because it was not running in Z-Cron either.  After all this, I went back and played with the Task Scheduler options some more, and found that the solution in my case was to list only the name of the batch file, without its path, in Task Scheduler's Actions > Edit > Program/script box, and put the path instead in the "Start in" box, without quotation marks.  Again, on uninstalling Z-Cron, I still got a display of a .dll in Notepad, and again it froze.

I discovered the possibility of right-clicking on the Windows Explorer icon on the taskbar, right-clicking on a folder location that I would often visit, and pinning that location to that icon.  This gave me a quick go-to list of favorite Windows Explorer locations, available by right-clicking on the WindEx taskbar icon (which was itself pinned to the taskbar).  This turned out to have some odd quirks, so as time went on I wasn't sure how much I would be using this.

I also discovered that I could add a slideshow to my Win7 desktop, using photos in a specified location.  This called for right-clicking on the Desktop > Personalize > Desktop Background (at bottom of screen) > Browse to pictures folder.  But this did not work for me, probably because I had no pictures in the folder to which I navigated.  The pictures were in subfolders under that folder, and apparently this program could not recurse those subdirectories.

Since AvaFind Pro didn't run well in Win7, I tried replacing it with Instant File Find.  But I found that IFF lacked valuable features.  I wondered whether I could use Win7's compatibility features to make AvaFind work after all.  I ran a search and found Microsoft's advice on how to proceed.  Their page told me that I could run the Program Compatibility Wizard at Control Panel (category) > Programs > "Run programs made for previous versions of Windows."  But they warned, "Do not use the Program Compatibility Wizard on older antivirus programs, disk utilities, or other system programs because it might cause data loss or create a security risk."  I wasn't sure whether AvaFind would count as a disk utility or system program for that purpose.  I decided not to risk it.  Instead, I took their advice to right-click on the AvaFindPro.exe installer file and choose Properties > Compatibility Tab > Compatibility Mode > WinXP SP3.  I also clicked on "Change settings for all users" and in both I said "Run this program as an administrator."  I exited Instant File Find, but AvaFind would not run until I rebooted.  Sadly, this did not do the job; AvaFind was still forgetting that I had bought a Pro license key, each time I ran it.  On one computer, it wouldn't even install.

To enable Audacity to record streaming audio, I went into Control Panel > Sound > Recording tab > right-click on empty space > make sure both are checked ("Show Disabled Devices" and "Show Disconnected Devices") > enable Stereo Mix > OK.  Then, following advice, I started a new session of Audacity and went into Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O tab > Recording > Device > Stereo Mix > OK.  That didn't work, so I ran a cable from the computer's Line Out (speaker) port to its Line In port.  I noticed that this gave me a Line In option in the Control Panel > Sound dialog.  Unfortunately, it still did not let me record streaming audio.  I was not able to resolve this.

Windows XP & Ubuntu RAID 0 Dual Boot: Error: No Such Device

I had set up a dual-boot system with Ubuntu 10.04 on a two-drive RAID 0 array and Windows XP SP3 running from a third hard drive.  I replaced the WinXP drive with a different one, copying the files over from the old drive's partitions to the new one, and rebooted.  When I selected the Windows XP option in the GRUB2 boot menu, I got an error message:

error: no such device: [apparently a UUID number]

error: invalid signature.

Press any key to continue...

As described in comment 90, within a long thread on this Ubuntu bug, with an alternate approach in another post, the solution to this problem was said to involve editing grub-mkconfig_lib.  Since I was able to get into Ubuntu (though not Windows), I took the approach described in comment 90.  In Ubuntu, in Terminal, I typed these commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install grub-common

The first command ended with errors along the lines of "could not connect to archive.getdeb.net."  This turned out to be an indication that the getdeb repository was down.  I repaired it by editing sources.list to refer to a mirror site instead.  Next, I typed this:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib

and changed gedit's Edit > Preferences to show line numbers.  I went down to line 174, ready to insert a # sign before whatever was on that line.  But it was just "fi" which, I thought, marke the end of an "if" statement.  What they wanted me to add did not look like it belonged there.  The long thread had not been visited for nearly four months; I suspected the file had been changed in a bid to fix the problem.

I got that error in the first place, as noted above, not because of an obvious malfunction in GRUB2, but because I had moved the partition containing the Windows XP program files.  I heard that just typing "sudo update-grub" would cause GRUB2 to search for operating systems.  And it did:  in the process of "Generating grub.cfg," it reported that it found Windows XP on /dev/sdc1.  I wondered if that would fix the problem by itself, so I rebooted and selected the Windows option again from the GRUB menu.  And that was it.  Problem solved!

Organizing Portable Applications in Windows XP

In a previous post, I have noted what I felt were several advantages of portable software, but have also mentioned one or two problems with my attempt to use the PortableApps.com framework.  This post describes my progress toward another approach to using portable applications in Windows XP.

For quite a few years, I had used drive D to hold portable applications.  These were programs, links, and other materials that I would not have to reinstall, if Windows itself needed to be reinstalled on drive C.  So now it was pretty easy to set up a folder called D:\Installation\Portable Apps.  Under that folder, I set up a subfolder called _Menu.  (With the beginning underscore, Windows Explorer would put it at the top of the list of folders.)  In _Menu, I arranged shortcuts to each of the programs I had brought together into the Portable Apps folder.

This approach had its own advantages and problems.  On the positive side, it could be much faster to run programs from the hard drive than from a USB drive.  So treating drive D as the authoritative source, to be backed up and copied from, made sense.  Then, if I took the USB drive off to some other location and made changes on it and/or on drive D, I would want synchronization software that would let me reconcile those two drives in their changed form.

On the negative side, this rigid file structure, which worked well enough on the hard drive, might not work so well with a USB drive.  Imagine copying a program from drive D to a USB drive that would be plugged into some other computer, where drive D would not be available.  The jump drive would take some other letter -- say, G.  At this point, all of my menu shortcuts to portable files stored somewhere on drive D would fail.  Worse, every reference to drive D within my portable programs would fail.  For instance, if the program kept its settings in D:\Installation\Portable Apps\CoolProgram\coolprogram.ini, it would now be unable to find those settings.  (Fortunately, portable programs usually seemed to refer to other files within the same folder, so this might not be too much of a problem.)

To avoid problems with references to drive D, I went looking for another approach.  In the Portable Freeware Collection (PFC) website, I found a list of portable program launchers, ranked in terms of popularity.  At the top of that list, I found a program called PStart.  Its webpage said, "Unlike Windows shortcuts, PStart uses relative paths, when installed as a portable application. If your USB key drive gets another drive letter when you insert it into another computer, your portable applications still can be started properly" -- as long as those applications were on the same drive as PStart.  This appeared to be an improvement on PortableApps.com, where there was some indication that relative addresses might not work for programs other than the .paf files you would get through PortableApps.com itself.

So I downloaded PStart and ran it.  It acted like a normal installer, with advice to close all other programs before continuing.  It seemed that it might not let me install it as a portable application.  I went to the PStart FAQs page for guidance.  It seemed to say I could just go ahead.  Sure enough, I came to a screen that gave me a choice between local and portable installation.  But the portable one was not seeing any portable drive -- because, of course, I had not plugged one in.  That is, it was not going to let me do a portable installation directly to D:\Installation\Portable Apps.  I plugged in a USB drive, backed up, and tried again.  But it was still just saying "other drive" -- that is, it was not recognizing the USB device.  So, OK, I canceled the installation and tried again.  This time, it found the USB drive.  I noticed that, now, it did offer me a Browse button, and that led to any drive on the system.  So perhaps I could have installed it directly to somewhere on D after all.  But it was OK; I went with the approach of putting it in the default location, which was the root of the USB stick.

When installation was done, I accepted the option of starting PStart now.  It gave me a little pop-up window that said, "Rightclick to add items."  I didn't want it to add items to the USB drive, so I killed it, went to the root of the USB drive in Windows Explorer, and moved PStart.exe (the only thing I found there) to D:\Installation\Portable Apps.  Then I double-clicked on it and it ran.  But now I noticed I had two PStart icons in my system tray, so I killed this newly started session, right-clicked on one of those tray icons and selected Exit, and then right-clicked on the other one to show the pop-up window again.

Since I had already accumulated a boatload of portable apps in D:\Installation\Portable Apps, I didn't want to right-click and add each of them manually.  I didn't find guidance on the webpage, but in the program itself, File > Search for Executables seemed to be just what the doctor ordered.  This placed a single top-level item in the Items tab, called simply D:\Installation\Portable Apps, with an indication that it had found 429 items.  I opened that item, dragged the corners of the little window to make it bigger and easier to read, and started down the list.  There were a lot of items to delete.  For example, in the case of 7-Zip, it found 7-Zip Portable, 7-Zip Console, 7-Zip File Manager, and 7-Zip GUI.  I had to decide which ones to delete, and then select and delete them one at a time.  Sometimes I had to try them out; sometimes I had to consult D:\Installation\Portable Apps to see which ones I would actually want to run.  In this way, I reduced the list to 102 programs.

Now there was the question of organizing them.  In my _Menu folder, I could create subfolders for various categories of programs -- web browsers, for example.  PStart's list of 102 programs was not the easiest thing to sort through and find what you were looking for.  I sent PStart's makers a question about that.  In the meantime, I planned to keep both organizing approaches.  I would use PStart for its dynamic ability to start a program regardless of the drive letter assigned to the USB drive; but I would use my menu and its submenus of shortcuts, when copying the Portable Apps folder to another hard drive, because I had long been running portable apps from the same place (i.e., D:\Installation) on my various virtual and native Windows installations.

Before long, I found that I was not using PStart very much.  One reason was that it was just more familiar to use the menu of shortcuts.  I wasn't doing very much work in situations where I actually needed a portable drive.  When I did need to run an app from the jump drive, I could just navigate to its folder and click directly on its .exe to run it.  I wanted portable apps primarily so that I could reduce the number of program complexities and reasons for a system crash in Windows XP.  I wasn't sure if portable apps would actually help in that, but that was the nature of the investigation in process.  So I was just using shortcuts to run my portable apps from their own menu, with the idea of adding that menu to my regular Start Menu at some point.

If I had tried to depend more heavily on PStart, it seemed that I would have had some problems.  First, it was not easy to keep its menu updated.  If I brought in a batch of a dozen new portable apps that I had just downloaded from some website, there didn't appear to be any way to detect just the newcomers.  If I ran PStart's regular "Scan for executables" menu option, I would get the list of 400+ executables again, and would have to go picking among them.  I didn't have that kind of time to devote to this.  In some future iteration, I hoped, the program would remember what it had found previously, and would present me only with the newcomers.

A second problem was that PStart did not provide a way to categorize shortcuts.  I was just stuck with this list of 102 programs.  The office software, video software, file utility software -- it was all just lumped in together.  The Edit > Add Folder option didn't mean that I could add a folder to the PStart file list; it meant that I could add a folder that I wanted to list along with all these applications.  If I knew I needed a video program, but couldn't remember its name or just wanted to see which ones I had available, I couldn't go to a subfolder entitled "Video," within the PStart panel, and choose the most suitable app from there; I'd have to just go down the list of 102 programs, one at a time.  Even then, I'd be limited to those whose names made sense.  If a killer new video program called itself XPQ, it just might not occur to me that this was what I was looking for.  I'd have to edit its name, in the list, to make sure I could recognize it -- thereby increasing the amount of reading I'd have to do when I went searching for a program.

Instead of PStart -- indeed, instead of a menu that I would have to maintain -- I decided to try something different.  It occurred to me that I could just arrange the portable app folders themselves in a menu structure.  So under my Multimedia top-level folder, I would have an Audio subfolder; and in there, I would put the actual program folders for each program that I thought of as being primarily audio-related.  I made a copy of my Portable Apps folder and experimented with this.  Along the way I noticed that I (or whoever I got the idea from) had been mistaken:  shortcuts did seem to keep track of their targets, even when they were copied to another drive -- at least as long as they were all copied together.

This hierarchical arrangement seemed to work pretty well, and I decided to make it my approach, at least for the time being.  The next question was how to integrate that hierarchy into my regular Start Menu, with its shortcuts to installed programs.