Windows 7 File Finder: Review of "Everything"

I had used the pro version of AvaFind in Windows XP for years.  AvaFind was a pop-up file finder.  I would hit Shift-Esc and it would come up and let me search for files; no need to mouse around to start the program from Start Menu or system tray.  It was more intelligent than others that I had used, in terms of flexibility with wildcard searches.  It also allowed me to do file manipulation by right-clicking and choosing Explorer options.  So if I searched for a file and found it in an unexpected place, I could right-click and move it to another folder, or copy or delete it.

In Windows 7, unfortunately, AvaFind kept crashing.  I could not get it to install at all on one computer.  It was past time to find a real replacement.  I had searched previously and had found that Instant File Find functioned as a poor imitation, but after a while I had gone back to trying to keep AvaFind alive.  At this point, however, that had pretty much ceased to be possible.  AvaFind was just not working in Win7.

After another look at a Gizmo webpage reviewing file finders, I decided to try Everything, another file finder that I had often encountered in these searches for an AvaFind substitute.  I downloaded the zip file to get the portable version, which I could then install (and keep backed up) on my customized Start Menu on one computer and have it automatically propagate to the other on my network, thanks to GoodSync.

Part of my reason for choosing Everything was that it did not index file contents.  I had already bought a copy of Copernic Desktop Search and was using that for that purpose.  Content search tended to mean that the program would often if not constantly be searching the contents of files.  Having two separate programs doing that could seriously slow the computer down.  I could have relied on Copernic solely, but its search for file contents (instead of a search solely for file names) made it relatively slow, and buried me in search results that were not what I wanted.  Copernic was 90% satisfactory for my content searching purposes; I just needed a substitute for the filename search capability formerly provided by AvaFind.

After extracting and moving the Everything.exe portable file to my Start Menu, I ran it.  I went into Tools > Options and made several adjustments.  I needed to look up what some of these options meant.  The FAQs were helpful but not very informative.  For instance, they gave me a favorable impression of Everything's extensive search options, but that happened when I was actually trying to understand whether it was possible to set a hotkey to bring up the search dialog.  (No info on the hotkey in the FAQs.)  There did not seem to be a manual.  And who could complain, for a free program -- though it did seem that a wiki might have been a good alternative.  Whatever:  the point is, I had to search around in the forum and, when that yielded too many results, I had to run a more targeted Google search.  Eventually, I found an explanation that got me partway to the answer to my question.  It turned out that, to set the Everything hotkey to be the same as the one that I had used to start AvaFind (i.e., Shift-Esc), I needed to go into Tools > Options > General tab.  There, I set "New window Hotkey modifier" to be Shift, and I set "New window Hotkey key" to be VK_ESCAPE.  I saw that the Escape key would also close the pop-up Everything search window, just like in AvaFind.  So far, so good.

The search results were not perfect.  I searched for HP*manual and got nothing.  I had to change it to HP*manual*.pdf to get the file called "HP Officejet Manual.pdf."  This was odd because a simple search for HP would find the manual, among a million other files.  A search for HP*manual*.* worked too.  Instant File Find had had the same weakness:  with the wildcard, it had to have the extension specified.  I felt, at first, that this flaw would not be major, except in those instances where I would not think to tweak the search in just the right way.  As I continued to use the program, however, I found it increasingly frustrating to be unable to guess how I was supposed to arrange wildcards.  Probably a majority of my first searches produced nothing.  Example:  a search for 2011-03-15*.pdf produced no results, even though the drives being searched contained at least four PDFs beginning with 2011-03-15.  The FAQs seemed to indicate that the asterisk was used both as a wildcard and as a regex indicator that there must be "zero or more" occurrences of the preceding character.  A search of the Everything support forum for "asterisk" yielded nothing.  A search for "wildcard" led to very little:  eight posts, of which five were in a thread titled "Wildcard searches not working."  This thread had some advice.  First, I was to go into Everything > Search > uncheck "Enable Regex."  That made an immediate difference.

Many things about Everything impressed me.  It was a very smooth program.  I wish it would have shown the results of my last search by default when I killed it too soon and then restarted it -- or at least that it would have had a drop-down box remembering what I had searched for.  Somewhere in the process, I came across a reference to another program, UltraFileSearch, that sounded very intriguing, but by that time I really had little hope that I would find a program more like what I wanted than Everything, so I did not investigate it.

Portabilizing Apps with Ceedo Personal

I was trying to create a portable version of Microsoft Office 2003.  That effort had led me to discover a positive review of Ceedo Personal and a favorable contrast against PortableApps.com by PC Magazine.  I decided to take advantage of a free trial to explore Ceedo.  This post described that exploration.

I was running this test on Windows XP SP3, running in a cloned virtual machine (VM) in VMware Workstation 7.1.  This VM was running a bit slow, but a VM generally would give me the option of wiping out everything and just making another clone, where I could start the experiment over from the beginning.

In the case of Ceedo, the VM did not seem to matter.  When I tried to install Ceedo in that VM, it insisted, instead, on being installed to a removable device.  That seemed unfortunate.  I had been working on developing a folder full of portable apps that I could use on my own computers and could also copy to a USB drive.  Running them from the hard drive was much faster than running them from the USB drive, so that's what I planned to do when working at home.  It now seemed that Ceedo was not going to cooperate with that plan.  But I hoped that a solution to this problem would emerge as we went along, so I went ahead with the installation on the USB drive.

During the installation process, I got a balloon pop-up telling me that the Ceedo Tray Icon Indicator would light up whenever I was using a program that was running under the Ceedo environment.  I guessed that this was a replacement for the previous approach that I had read about, where Ceedo would surround its own programs with an orange line.  Then Ceedo installed a toolbar at the top of the screen.  When installation was done, I had the option of taking a tour, which I did.  The gist of it was that Ceedo gave me that toolbar, which I hated, with its four buttons -- three of which were completely unnecessary, since they merely opened My Documents, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express.  The fourth button opened something that looked like the Windows Start Menu, with Ceedo-specific choices (in addition to yet another set of My Documents, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express).  There was no entry for Ceedo in the real Windows XP Start Menu, which made sense from a no-impact perspective; apparently the top toolbar was running entirely from the USB drive.  I used the top toolbar to open My Documents and no, the orange line had not been removed; it was there after all.  Since the only thing I needed from the top toolbar was the imitation start menu, and since I could get that by clicking on the Ceedo icon in the system tray (bottom right corner of the screen), I went into Ceedo's Options and instructed it to hide the toolbar when it was not in use.  I also changed some other settings.

I felt that Ceedo needed to give that imitation start menu a name.  For present purposes, I will call it the "Ceedo menu."  I went into that menu > Add Programs > Programs Directory.  It seemed to wish to open its own session of Internet Explorer, and apparently could not tolerate the fact that I already had Internet Explorer running.  It said, "iexplore.exe is already running.  Click 'OK' to open Ceedo's Internet Explorer and close the local Internet Explorer."  So I said OK.  Ceedo could perhaps instead give users the option of searching automatically for installed programs (or at least those having Start Menu entries) in the background; then, when users actually sought to open a file, they might have the option of doing so in those installed programs rather than mandatorily running them from the USB drive.  This would have avoided both the need to shut down the running program (Internet Explorer) and the slowness that I was experiencing when Ceedo did everything from the USB drive.  My present understanding was that speeding up Ceedo (if I could not run it from the desktop instead of the USB drive) would require buying a faster USB drive, such as the Kingston Vault (presently $40+).  In any case, the Ceedo menu did not stay onscreen during this process; it vanished as soon as I chose Programs Directory.  Programs Directory, itself, turned out to be just the Ceedo webpage listing the various freeware apps that you could apparently run from Ceedo.

I was more interested in seeing if Ceedo could portabilize my apps.  I experimented, first, with IrfanView.  To portabilize Irfanview, I went to the Ceedo menu > Add Programs > Argo Application Installer.  It offered to show me a list of programs supported by Argo, so I clicked on that option.  Nothing happened.  After playing around a bit, I found that it was trying to take me to a different list of applications than the one that I had just seen.  There weren't many items on it, and it didn't seem to contain any deep, dark secrets.  So apparently Ceedo was still in the process of trying to organize its website.

So anyway, back in Argo, I tried to point toward the IrfanView .exe file.  It was very slow in identifying the .exe files in My Computer.  It occurred to me that I wasn't sure whether it wanted the setup .exe or the installed, ready-to-run .exe.  I tried the IrfanView setup .exe.  That, in itself, was a bit perplexing, because there were two IrfanView setup .exe files -- the setup itself, and the plugins -- and I would want them both included in my IrfanView installation.  There wasn't an option, as there had seemed to be in JauntePE, to include materials that had been incorporated into a previous iteration of the portable app.  But anyway, on the next screen, Argo confirmed that I had guessed right:  it said, "The wizard will now launch the following setup file."  It gave me an option of installing in "reduced machine separation mode," which a webpage said would entail some permanent installation on the host PC in order to use that machine's resources.  Another page said, somewhat obscurely, that this "reduced separation mode" would enable the portable app to "interact" with apps on the host.  The idea seemed to be that you should choose this option only if you or the program actually needed that kind of interaction.

So I went ahead with the Argo process.  It gave me the IrfanView installation screen.  I went through the IrfanView installation process.  When that was finished, Argo was gone, and I had an IrfanView installation in the designated folder on the hard drive.  I realized then that maybe I should have designated a folder on the USB drive.  I couldn't tell if Argo had done anything in particular to make IrfanView portable, since IrfanView tends to be portable anyway.  I also couldn't tell what I should do to install the IrfanView plugins, other than (I guess) just run them through the Argo process and point to the same output directory.

So, OK, maybe IrfanView wasn't the best program to experiment with.  I tried again, this time with Microsoft Word 2003.  I started Argo, browsed to the Office 2003 installation executable file, and ran it.  After a while, I got this:

Microsoft Office 2003 Setup
Error 1719.  The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed.  This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed.

That was odd.  I had just installed and uninstalled Office 2003 in that same VM.  The installer had worked fine then.  But OK, I created another clone VM, in which there had been no prior Office 2003 installation, and booted it up.  This time around, I did something that perhaps I should have done last time:  I rebooted when I got the message that the hardware (i.e., the USB drive) had been recognized but might not work properly until I rebooted.  After I rebooted, I got a Ceedo Action Window that gave me the option of enabling Ceedo AutoDetect.  That, according to the Ceedo help file, was a "tiny" optional component, installed on the host, to detect whenever a Ceedo drive was connected.  I said yes, do this.  It took Ceedo a long time to load; and when the "Loading Ceedo" message did finally disappear, I was surprised to see that the Ceedo icon likewise disappeared from the system tray.  I went to the USB drive in Windows Explorer and restarted Ceedo manually from there, but it said, "Ceedo already running."  Yet it did start a new "Loading Ceedo" message anyway.  If Ceedo was running, where was it?

Eventually, I did get a Ceedo icon in the system tray, and when I clicked on it, I was able to go back into Argo and start the Office 2003 installation again.  I tried again to install Office 2003 and again got that Error 1719 error message.  This was occurring in a VM clone like those that I had been using repeatedly in recent days to test various programs.  To test it, I closed Ceedo, removed the USB drive from the system, and tried installing Office 2003 natively in that VM.  It ran without difficulty.

That concluded my test of Ceedo.  Moreover, since my investigation had not turned up any superior alternatives to Ceedo that would do the job, this concluded my search for tools that would give me an affordable, portable copy of Microsoft Office 2003.  So at this point I returned to the main project -- of developing a set of portable applications for Windows XP -- with the sense that I might need to consider alternatives to Office 2003.

Review: Kodak C653 Digital Camera

I like this little camera. And it is little. Its thickness is comparable to a thick wallet, but it is a bit shorter and narrower than a wallet would be. Its manual says it came with 256MB of internal RAM, which I didn’t see on the specifications pages I reviewed. I thought it had only 32MB. So I may not have needed to spend the extra $20 for an optional 1GB SD Memory card. The LCD is large but exposed; there is no way to protect it except to buy a case (and make sure there is no sand or anything inside it. If space is not an issue, the ideal might be a soft case or sleeve inside a harder protective case. Pictures seem to be averaging around 850KB on the 3.1 megapixel setting, and 1.5MB on the 6.1mp setting. It takes more than 12 seconds, from the time I push the button to take a picture, until the digital viewfinder comes back to life and is ready to show me another scene. (It’s much faster if you use the flash.) But you can take other pictures in the meantime, while the LCD is frozen or black; and if you need to see roughly what you're shooting during that time, they do include a tiny optical viewfinder. To test that, I pressed the button about 30 times in a 10-second period. From those 30 presses, I got seven 6.1mp photos. The video is really choppy. They should have allowed for more frames per second. Like any video – actually, more so in this case – if you wheel it around and point at lots of different things, it will make you seasick on playback. It saves video in .MOV format. The accompanying software is irritating. It lacks options, and it does things I don’t want it to do. Example: so far, I haven’t figured out how to tell it to erase photos from the camera, other than to reformat the memory card. The manual describes a View switch that doesn’t seem to exist on my model. (This may be the explanation for the memory misunderstanding too; Kodak’s webpage does say the C653 has only 32MB RAM, so maybe the more expensive cameras get the greater amount of internal memory.) They seem to have defeated the option of viewing the contents of the device’s memory using Windows Explorer, when the camera is cabled to the computer using the convenient (apparently proprietary) supplied sub-mini-USB cable – so I can’t just go into Windows Explorer and empty out the camera’s contents that way. Their irritating EasyShare software pops up every time I connect the camera to the computer; there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop that; and I can’t even use that software to delete photos. I strongly recommend they build in an Advanced mode so that people can actually use their software. Battery drain means more expense. Regular alkaline batteries will power the camera, but it looks like you can expect to waste a lot of them. A pair of freshly charged, previously used NiMH Ray-O-Vac AAs (1600 mAh) gave me only seven flash photos before dying. Ultimately, I broke down and spent another $10 on a pair of 2500 mAh batteries on sale; but that meant I would be dependent on that pair. So far, I have recharged them weekly and that has been good enough. I used the camera to shoot some video. It acted like it was continuing to record for more than 15 minutes before the camera shut off due to dead batteries. It ultimately turned out that the camera would use up the batteries in just a few minutes; the video indicator was incorrectly conveying the impression that recording was continuing when it wasn't. Unfortunately, the camera didn’t save my video file in usable format. I couldn’t view it in QuickTime, Windows Media Player, or IrfanView. The best I got was that WMP played the audio. So don’t let your batteries die, I guess. Kodak’s own EasyShare software played it, but it would not save it in any format other than .MOV. So I saved it to another MOV file; but to do that, EasyShare played the whole thing again. In other words, it took 15 minutes to make a copy of the downloaded MOV. When it was done, I did find that the copy was playable in QuickTime and IrfanView. I was still getting nothing but the audio portion in WMP. Anyway, it seems that I won’t be using up the full capacity of 30:11 of video that the LCD reports – not unless I buy more expensive batteries and/or an optional power adapter and shoot while that’s plugged into the wall. Once the batteries are dead, you have to replace them before you can download your shots; the device does not seem to draw power from the USB connection. The camera is slow downloading video. I didn’t time it, but I think those 15 minutes of video took something like 10 minutes to download. Definitely not USB 2.0! The file size for that video was 486MB, so it consumes memory at a rate of about 31.5MB per minute when shooting video. I like the camera. I didn't expect it to be a video camera. It has some rough edges, but it does what I wanted. The software is the real weak point.

Review: Canon imageCLASS MF5770 Multifunction Printer/Scanner/Fax

I'll start with an excerpt from writeup I recently prepared to sell my MF5730, which I have recently replaced with an MF5770. I have used the MF5770 for only a week or so. It is virtually identical to the 5730 (and, I assume, to others in the MF5700 series); the main difference is that the 5770 has a fax capability.

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Re: the Canon imageCLASS® MF5730 Laser Multifunction Printer - Copier - Scanner. The CNET editor says, “Any small office shopping for a no-nonsense laser multifunction should count this model among its top picks.” (See their video on it.) The Consumer Guide expert review gives it 3 out of 5 (average), but they also gave it a Best Buy award, and the reviewer’s only complaints were that it is only for Windows computers and it doesn’t have a fax feature. I have used this model primarily for scanning. I have used a half-dozen scanners over the past ten years. This one probably has the most reliable paper handling of any of them. Scan quality depends on your settings and so forth; you do have the option of making very good scans. Overall, this has been a reliable and good-quality performer.

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Since writing that note, I have come up with a number of things I would add to it, as follows: 1. There is no on-off switch on either model. According to Canon, "The scan lamp for the MF5730 [and also the MF5770] will stay on constantly, even in the Energy Saver mode. This is normal operation. The reason for this is to reduce the warm up period on the first copy or scan after coming out of Energy Saver mode. The scanner has been designed to operate in this manner and should not adversely affect the life of the lamp." This seems like a design flaw to me. It uses electricity unnecessarily. Also, as I have discovered, when you turn out the lights and leave, your scanner may be the brightest light in the room -- which means that, if there is a moth in the room, you will find pieces of it sticking to your scans and smeared across your scanning lamp when you come in the next day and insert some papers for scanning. Or, if you happen to be using the scanner in your home office, you will now have a nightlight which may brighten your room more than you would have preferred. 2. Speaking of design flaws, they should have hired a designer for the shape of the machine. It is big. They have done a good job of driving the size upwards in a tapered way that reduces the footprint. But it is still big. Also, the "natural bridge" design, in which the printer shoots paper out from the machine's midsection, is one that had great potential. Somehow, though, it turned out ugly. While we're on the subject of design, I would also suggest changing the paper tray concept. It sticks out the back, at the bottom. It seems like it is just begging to get broken, the first time someone puts it down on an uneven surface. The paper tray, like a few other parts, unfortunately departs from the machine's overall solid feel: it feels flimsy and cheap. So does the alternate sheet feeder, which easily loses its grip on pages, resulting in a real or imaginary paper jam. Meanwhile, the printer's output paper tray holds just a few printed sheets, before pages start spilling out. Something similar happens with the scanner's output tray, if one outcoming sheet happens to snag one that's already in the tray. Also, for some reason the scanner's paper feeder does not self-clear when you restart the machine; there will be times when you will have to tug pages out manually (and it's not easy). 3. They neglected some important details. I was dismayed at the poor quality of their documentation on scanning. I wished they had provide calibration marks along the sides of the platen, so I could tell how big your documents were and could adjust my settings accordingly. I was also very disappointed that there is no possibility of scanning above 300 DPI. This is a real step backwards; I think every scanner I have used in the past ten years has been superior in that regard. On the positive side, they include a starter cartridge that prints 2500 copies. Printing quality is good; so is scanning quality, though I have to use weird settings (Brightness -20, Contrast +13) to achieve it. You don't get that sharp, high-pitched whistle, from this scanner, that you will get from some others. Tech support is very responsive and, in my limited experience, is adequately knowledgable, at least if you reach them over the phone. In sum, as you can tell, I appreciate the MF5700 series and I expect to be using my new MF5770 for years to come.