Samsung SMX-F34BN Camcorder Software & Accessories: Cluelessness

I bought a Samsung SMX-F34BN camcorder on eBay.  It came without a software or driver CD, cables, or power supply.  This was not quite the condition I had bargained for; but now that I had it, I proceeded to see what I could make of it.  I already had the cables, but it was a hassle to find the powers supply and software.  I decided to record these notes for the aid of anyone else encountering a similar situation.

Power Supply

I figured that the manufacturer would charge a fortune for a replacement power supply.  Their support webpage was hard to find:  their camcorders product page did not link to the SMX-F34BN (indeed, it led only to two standard camcorder models), and a search for SMX-F34BN yielded exactly one hit.  That was a link to the User Manual download webpage.  The User Manual was helpful, but that was the only help I got:  there was no link, on that webpage, to any hardware or accessories information. 

I ran a search on Radio Shack's webpage.  I wasn't able to verify, from the pictures and descriptions, whether they would have what I needed.  The User's Guide said the power requirements were 8.4V, 2.0W, but Radio Shack's pictures didn't make clear whether the plug would fit.  I called their 800 number, but their recording told me that they provided technical guidance only through their individual stores.  I called the nearest Radio Shack, located about nine miles away, but the guy said he couldn't advise without seeing the unit.

I went on eBay and bought a power supply for $14.  I didn't think of running a Google Shopping search for the needed product until I had already made that purchase, but it looked like I would have paid about the same price if I had gone that route.  When the power supply arrived, I plugged it in, and it worked.  End of problem.

Software and Drivers

To find the necessary software, I want back to Samsung's download webpage.  The Support Overview tab on that page yielded a list of questions about SC-X105L and other models unrelated to the SMX-F34BN.  That tab also contained a guide on "How to Edit Video with Intelli-Studio."  The Community Q&A tab on that webpage contained a number of questions, including several about how or where to get a power supply; virtually all of these questions were unanswered.  The FAQs & How-Tos tab did contain links for, among other things, Hardware, Power, and Software/Applications, but none of these led anywhere helpful and, again, many had to do with other models.  This was frustrating because, as one of those FAQs warned,

Before transferring digital images through the USB connection, you must install your camcorder's driver and software onto your computer. The driver and software are on the disc that came with your camcorder.

One FAQ did contain a reference to CyberLink MediaShow 4 software.  I guessed that MediaShow might be included in the software provided with the camcorder.  MediaShow was apparently a media management program, list price around $50.  A search, in response to the foregoing reference to Intell-Studio, suggested that Intelli-Studio was Samsung's own "play-edit" product, and that it did come with the SMX-F34BN.  I already had satisfactory software for these purposes, but didn't have the drivers.  Also, even if I didn't get a free copy of MediaShow out of the deal, at least I would want Intelli-Studio and any other utilities that Samsung could have provided.

On Samsung's download webpage, I clicked the Chat link.  This led to the following exchange:

Please wait for a Samsung Agent to respond. 

You are now chatting with 'Rosemary'. There will be a brief survey at the end of our chat to share feedback on my performance today.

Your Issue ID for this chat is LTK56401073602X

Rosemary: Hi, thanks for reaching out to Samsung tech support. How can I help you today?

Visitor: Hi, Rosemary. I have acquired a Samsung SMX-F34BN camcorder. I didn't get a CD or other software with it. I'm surprised that there's no option to download software from the Support downloads page that has the user's manual. Can you point me toward a download location?

Rosemary: Hello.

Rosemary: I understand that you wish to download the driver or software for the camcorder.

Rosemary: Would you mind holding a few minutes while I gather the required information for your request?

Visitor: OK.

Rosemary: Thank you.

Rosemary: Thanks for holding.

Rosemary: Was that an open box purchase?

Visitor: eBay.

Visitor: Normally, a manufacturer's support page will provide software downloads and, where applicable, updates.

Rosemary: I understand your concern.

Rosemary: But for few camcorders, the software and drivers are not provided on the support page.

Visitor: I don't understand. For camcorders as for other electronic devices, manufacturers normally supply downloads on their support pages. I am surprised that Samsung does not. Regardless, could you please tell me where I can download the software?

Rosemary: I apologize; the only place for the download of the software and driver is the support page. If the downloads are not provided on the support page, it is not possible to download the software online.

Visitor: Then where can I get the software?

Rosemary: Shall I provide the link to purchase the software CD?

Visitor: OK.

Rosemary: Before that could you please confirm if the camcorder is an open box purchase or a sealed purchase?

Visitor: Open box.

Rosemary: Thanks for confirming.

Rosemary: Please click on the link below to order the software CD for your camcorder:

Rosemary: http://www.samsungparts.com/Products/Parts_and_Accessories/PID-AD46-00192A.aspx?model=

Rosemary: You can even order it through phone by contacting J&J parts dealer at 1-800-627-4368. Hours of operation :Mon - Fri from 9:00 A.M to  8:30 P.M EST. They are the genuine Samsung parts dealers.

Rosemary: Are you able to access the above link?

Visitor: Yes. That webpage seems to offer only a CD containing "Mediashow" software. Is that the complete set of software that comes with a new camcorder?

Rosemary: Yes, I see that is the only CD included with a new camcorder,

Visitor: That website indicates that the shipping cost will be $5.75 minimum. $5.75 to mail a CD seems very expensive.

Visitor: I am disappointed that Samsung does not allow users to download the necessary software. This is unusual.

Visitor: That's $5.75 in addition to the purchase price of the CD.

Rosemary: I understand your frustration.

Rosemary: I will forward your concern to the webmaster.

Rosemary: I apologize for all the inconvenience.

Visitor: Thank you for your help, Rosemary. Have a good day.

I wasn't sure why Rosemary asked twice whether it was an open box purchase, when I told her I bought it on eBay.  Maybe she was thinking that there are traditional retail merchants selling unopened products on eBay.  Maybe she would have given me a CD without charge if I had said I had bought from one of those.  I can't say.  At any rate, the website she pointed me toward seemed willing to send me a copy of MediaShow (version 4, not the current version 6) for only $7.60 ($1.85 purchase + $5.75 shipping), plus whatever (if anything) else that might be on that CD.  This was better than other prices I found.  But, as I say, I didn't really need it.

I tried a search to see whether someone else might have the drivers and essential utilities available for download, but found nothing immediately obvious.  I sent an email to the people at the SamsungParts.com webpage to which Rosemary had directed me, asking if they could verify what was on the CD before I spent $7.60 and a week buying and waiting for it.  Their automated reply said I might have to wait a day for a reply, so I called them (800-627-4368).  She wasn't able to confirm exactly what was on the CD, but she said (a) this was not the CD with the user manual, and that was good (I had gathered, from a quick start page included with the camera, that there were actually two CDs, and the user manual CD was not the one containing the drivers), and (b) her company, SamsungParts.com, provided exactly the same accessories as would have been included with a new camera.  So despite their cryptic indication that this was the "MediaShow4" CD, it appeared likely that the CD contained more than just MediaShow.  So I went ahead and tried to buy it.  But now they wanted to charge me $8.25 for USPS Priority Mail.  I had to change from a PO Box to a street address to get it back down to $5.75, still via Priority Mail  Odd.  And then, when the order was nearly complete, here they are -- welcome to New Jersey! -- adding on another $4.15 handling charge.  So now we're up to $11.75 for a CD that cost $1.85.

I killed that and called Samsung (800-726-7864).  I explained to the lady that I didn't need or want a software CD; I just wanted a little driver program.  She confirmed that they could not help me with this -- that I would have to buy the CD and wait for it to be delivered.  I asked to speak to her supervisor.  She put me on hold for what would be, she said, just a minute or two.  That was at 1:33 PM.  The supervisor came on, ten minutes later, and after I explained the situation again, she put me back on hold while she checked it out.  When she came back, she said that it was an old item, which I found, again, to be an odd statement:  my impression was that the camera had come out within the past two to three years.  I appreciated that it was no longer within its brief one-year warranty, but I doubted that most people would buy a camcorder expecting it to last only one year.  That is, people are going to need support for products for several years at least.

She was ultimately unable to help me obtain the driver program.  In fact, she tried to steer me to CyberLink, where she said I could download a trial copy of MediaShow.  I explained again that I didn't need that, or Intelli-Studio either; I just needed the driver.  She apologized that she was unable to help me with this.  I asked to speak with her boss.  She said she would transfer me to the executive customer relations office.  She warned me, however, that this person would give me the same information that she had given me.  That was at 1:54 PM.  A few minutes later, someone else came on and listened as I explained the situation.  This individual said that the camera was plug-and-play and, as such, did not need any drivers.  This contradicted the language quoted above, wherein Samsung's FAQ had warned that it was necessary to install drivers first.  It also meant that, if this guy was right, Samsung's customer service representatives had repeatedly given me incorrect advice, to the effect that I had to buy the CD if I wanted to address the driver problem.

I had wondered if perhaps Windows 7 would detect and install the drivers automatically.  I could have just waited until the power supply arrived, a week or so later, and then I could have plugged in the USB cable and watched to see what happened.  One problem with this approach was that, if it didn't work, I would then have another wait of a week or so, until a CD or some other software source came through at last with the drivers.  Another problem was that users are often warned not to connect USB cables until drivers have already been installed.  There was, in other words, the possibility that waiting and then simply plugging would have made things worse.

I asked this individual if he would kindly pass along a suggestion to their webmaster, so as to include this information on the product webpage, along with FAQs that would relate to this model.  He said he would be submitting a report on this conversation.  At best, we seemed to be in a situation where Samsung would not think of this without someone like me to suggest it.  But anyway, the conversation was finally done at 2:01 PM.  So it took about a half-hour to get to him and get what was, I hoped, the correct information.

The upshot was that the software CD contained only (as this last person put it) editing software.  So if I wanted, I (or anyone else) could obtain MediaShow and Samsung's own Intelli-Studio for only $12, along with whatever else might be on that CD.  But I could not obtain a list of what was on that CD.  I wondered whether I could at least obtain a free copy of Intelli-Studio.  It didn't seem to be available in either CNET or Softpedia.  Posts in a CNET forum pointed me toward webpages from Software Informer and RapidShare, but someone seemed to have problems with the RapidShare approach and I distrusted Software Informer.  Another page -- a Samsung.com webpage, believe it or not -- said that, actually, Intelli-Studio was preloaded on the camera and could be installed onto the PC from there via USB cable.  That webpage pertained to the Samsung MV800, a still camera.  I would apparently not know, until the power supply arrived, whether the SMX-F34BN had the same capability.  There did not seem to be a download location on Samsung's own website for Samsung's own software.  (But let us not think too harshly of the Samsung webmaster.  I did find a Samsung webpage that, in exchange for the opportunity to keep resizing my browser window, was willing to tell me how to prevent Intelli-Studio from installing automatically on an unspecified Samsung camera model.)

When the power supply arrived, I did as advised:  I simply plugged in the USB cable.  It worked.  So the last guy's view was correct:  I didn't need drivers after all.  Unlike the MV800, there didn't seem to be an option to install Intelli-Studio from the camera to the computer; no menu option along those lines came up when I connected the USB cable.  So at this point, almost despite Samsung's best efforts, I was able to get the camera working.

Uploading Videos to YouTube without Letterboxes (Big Black Borders)

I was doing some occasional video editing, mostly using Adobe Premiere Elements.  Now and then, when I would upload a video to YouTube, it would have a letterbox.  That is, the video would be encased within a wide black rectangle.  This made the video smaller.  I didn't want it.  Getting rid of it was not easy.  This post presents a few notes in that direction.

One suggestion I encountered in a few different discussion threads was to add a certain tag to the Tags field available for each YouTube video.  The recommended tag was yt:crop=16:9.  I was supposed to type that into the Tags field, presumably separated from other tags by a comma, and that was supposed to expand the video.  I did find that this worked with one video, where I inserted that tag while the video was still uploading.  I found that it did not work with two other videos that were previoulsy uploaded, where I added the tag after the fact.  An alternative was to use yt:stretch=16:9.  That, too, failed with the previously uploaded videos.

I came across some Adobe suggestions on adjusting pixel and frame aspect ratios.  They didn't look terribly technical, and at some point I realized I would probably benefit from understanding them.

In the meantime, however, I found that I could sometimes resolve the issue by producing my video, in Premiere Elements, as an AVI, and then importing that AVI back into a new project.  Sometimes the re-importation would provoke Premiere Elements to ask if I wanted to correct my aspect ratio.  I didn't seem to lose any quality from this step, it didn't seem to require much additional time, and the MP4 that I would then output as my final project seemed to upload and display on YouTube without any letterbox problems.

Ghosting, Connectors and Adapters: VGA, HDMI, and DVI (DVI-I, DVI-D, DVI-A, etc.)

I was using two monitors.  Each had both VGA and DVI connectors.  Connecting the second monitor via VGA gave me occasional ghosting (i.e., a block of color would smear from left to right, slightly visible beyond where it was supposed to be).  It appeared to be a VGA-related problem.

I guessed (maybe with the aid of some previous browsing) that the problem would go away if I used DVI or HDMI instead.  I would have liked to connect both via DVI or HDMI, but the computer had only one VGA, one DVI, and one HDMI jack.  I had a spare video card, but it too had just one DVI and one VGA jack.  It looked like video cards with two DVI jacks or two HDMI jacks were expensive.  (Later, prices on at least one such card had dropped to $70, though that was still more than I cared to pay.)

The motherboard did have an unused HDMI jack, so I bought a DVI-to-HDMI adapter.  But the HDMI port was right next to the DVI port, on both the motherboard and the optional video card.  The adapter was too big to fit there, if I was also using the DVI jack.  The adapter had a female DVI connector, so I couldn't use it on the other end, at the monitor, where a male connector was needed.

It seemed that I needed an HDMI cable to run from the computer to the monitor, and a male DVI adapter to connect to the DVI port on the monitor.  The question there was which kind of male DVI adapter I needed.  Based on drawings at Wikipedia, there appeared to be at least a half-dozen possibilities.  As elsewhere in life, it seemed the ideal solution would involve the minimum number of pins on the male side, and the maximum number of sockets on the female side.  That would minimize the risk that there would be one or more male pins without a corresponding female socket, in which case no connection would occur.

All DVI configurations seemed to consist of a spadelike (flat, wide) connector at one side (let's say the left) and one or two roughly rectangular arrays containing 12 to 24 small round pins on the other side (i.e., in the center and toward the right).  The DVI-D offered one ideal male configuration, insofar as its spadelike connector was not surrounded with four extraneous round pins.  The Single Link option offered another ideal male configuration, with only 18 pins arranged in two clusters of nine in the center and on the right (rather than 24, as in the Dual Link alternative).  Putting these two together, the most available male was the DVI-D Single Link:  its spade side would match any DVI female, and the two sets of nine pins on its right side would match all DVI-I and DVI-D females.

The DVI-A appeared to be an especially troublesome case, with four additional pins on the spade side and irregular groups of four and eight pins on the right side.  It seemed that a female DVI-A would be able to mate only in an equally irregular DVI-A male cluster setting.

The female DVI jacks on both the computer and the monitor offered a relatively agreeable DVI-D Dual Link connector, with the maximum number of sockets in the right-side cluster.  They fell slightly short in not offering the extra four sockets on the spade side that a female DVI-I Dual Link connector would have provided.  This would have mattered if I had been trying to use a DVI-I cable, but I wasn't.  Both ends of my cable had the felicitous DVI-D Single Link male connector, which would be able to get along with almost any female aside from the DVI-A.

It seemed, then, that my HDMI cable, running from the computer to the monitor, was looking to be teamed up with a male DVI-D adapter, not a male DVI-I.  (As a mnemonic, I thought of the harder-to-mate DVI-I male as Idiosyncratic, in contrast to the more agreeable Dude.)  The male DVI-D could be either Single or Dual Link, thouigh the former would be more suitable for other possible connections in the future.  On the other hand, not being familiar with video electronics, I thought maybe the greater number of pins in the Dual Link might yield more pleasing results.

I viewed some debates on DVI vs. HDMI. The sense I got was that HDMI was more convenient (easier connectors, audio inline) but DVI-D was more reliably good.  If my monitors had offered an HDMI jack, I could have tried an HDMI Y-adapter to get around the single HDMI jack on the computer, but that wasn't in the cards for me now.

I was able to order a generic HDMI cable and adapter for about $7 total.  When they arrived, I hooked them up.  The HDMI-connected secondary monitor looked great!  Now I had a new problem.  The primary monitor, connected by DVI cable, was blank.  Device Manager (in Control Panel) was fine with the idea that I now had only one monitor.  Device Manager > View > Show Hidden Devices did not make any difference.  I went into Device Manager > Display Adapters > ATI Radeon HD 4250 > right-click > Properties > Driver tab > Update Driver > Search automatically.  It said I already had the best driver.  I ran a search.   There were the inevitable suggestions to update drivers, but that didn't seem to be helping these people.

I tried unplugging the HDMI.  Now the DVI was working.  Replugged the HDMI; now no DVI.  Evidently I could have one or the other but not both.  Tried using VGA instead of DVI for the primary monitor.  Same result:  I could have one monitor or the other, but not both.  But then, correction:  unplugging and replugging did give me VGA and HDMI working simultaneously:  primary VGA, secondary HDMI.  No VGA ghosting at the moment.  Funny, Device Manager listed both monitors as being Analog.  Maybe I didn't need HDMI -- maybe I should have just tried using VGA (primary) - DVI (secondary) instead of the opposite, DVI-VGA?

Anyway, I left it like that:  VGA primary, HDMI secondary.  When I finished this writeup for posting, a couple weeks later, there was still no ghosting, so this seemed to be a fix.

Windows 7: Windows Media Encoder: No Specified Device Driver Is Present

I had downloaded Microsoft Windows Media Encoder (WME) 9.0.  I was aware that it was unsupported and otherwise limited in comparison against Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 Pro ($199).  I was trying to use it to do video screen capture in 64-bit Windows 7.  I went into New Session > Capture Screen > Specific Window and Capture Audio from the Default Audio Device > designate the window > name the output file > high quality > diplay information (blank) > Finish.  At that point, I got this error:

Windows Media Encoder

No specified device driver is present.(0xC00D0072)

A search led to a Microsoft webpage that said this occurred because DirectX Media 6.0 was not installed.  Unfortunately, the page to which they directed me for the appropriate download was defunct.  Wikipedia said that DirectX 6.0 was released in August 1998, that the current version was DirectX 11, and that DirectX had been included in Windows ever since Windows 95 SR2.  (I also saw an indication that this problem might arise only when trying to record audio along with the video.  I didn't investigate that; I was only interested in video plus sound at this point.)

My theory was that DirectX had grown and that WME had not been maintained to keep up with it, and therefore I needed to install an older version of DirectX for that purpose.  I was not sure that this would work without screwing up the more recent DirectX.  I made a System Restore point and then downloaded DirectX 8.1 Runtime for Windows 2000, released in November 2001.  I wasn't sure whether that was the right thing; I also downloaded the DirectX Media Platform SDK Redistributable (June 2001).  Both were around 6-8MB.

Before installing them, I looked at a few more posts.  One post said that what was missing was actually a WDM (Windows Driver Model?) driver for the microphone.  The plausible theory in this case was that I would gain nothing by installing a retrograde version of DirectX; instead, I just needed a current driver.  But I was using onboard audio; I had only installed the motherboard recently; and I had made sure to get the latest drivers at that point.  I guessed that the motherboard drivers were no longer attempting compatibility with WME.

There was always the option of using a handheld audio recorder to record sound from the speakers.  Or if I didn't mind risking blowing up my handheld recorder, I could try running a cable directly from the computer's headphone output to the recorder's microphone input.  I would still have the hassle of synchronizing audio with video in a video editor.  That would be more difficult if the video showed lip motion or other things that would become bothersome if they weren't closely aligned.

There was also the possibility of doing further research into who was using WME on Win7 successfully at this point, and what hardware they were using, and buying the appropriate sound card.  I was out of time for this project, but it could also develop that further research would turn up a solution I had overlooked.  But good video capture had been elusive.  I had bought Debut and had been using it with good results; the question only arose because there was a hopefully temporary licensing snafu where Debut didn't work for me in the middle of the night.  Debut was now working again, so I shelved this question for the time being.

2011: Best Videos of the Year

The contents of this post have been merged into a new Best Videos Ever post.

Documenting Computer Work Onscreen - Second Try

I had previously used my Shotshooter.bat batch file to capture screenshots once or more per second, and had combined them into an IrfanView slideshow .exe to display a timelapse account of what I had been doing on the computer during a certain period of time.  I preferred to create a regular video file rather than an executable, and I also wanted to be able to add music, narration, or other audio.  So I tried again.

The problem wasn't video capture per se.  I had purchased a copy of Debut for that, after mixed results with freeware alternatives.  The problem was getting from the raw Debut output to the final video.  When I would import the Debut .avi into a video editor like Adobe Premiere Elements or CyberLink PowerDirector, the video quality would be seriously degraded.  It was possibly a problem with a simple setting in the editing program, but I hadn't yet figured out the solution.  At this point, for whatever reason, the resulting video of events on my computer's monitor was so poor as to be unreadable.

But let me back up.  Here's how I started.  I decided to try capturing my work in writing an essay.  It would wind up being a one-page document, so the whole thing was visible onscreen in Microsoft Word.  I had Word set to remember changes, so after hours of editing, I held down the Ctrl-Z key combination to keep undoing changes until I was back at the beginning.  (Before doing that, I saved a copy of the text.  One false keystroke would have destroyed the trail, and my essay would have been lost.)  When I was back at the beginning, I started the screen capture, using Debut.  Then, in Word, I held down the Ctrl-Y key combination to redo everything I had done, at a very rapid pace, while Debut was capturing.  I think I had set Debut to capture at seven frames per second (fps), so as to keep the .avi file somewhat smaller than it would have been at 30 fps.  When it was done, I stopped Debut and saved the .avi.

Now came the hard part.  Adobe and CyberLink weren't the only ones having problems with the Debut .avi output.  Media Player Classic (MPC) would likewise display that .avi in a severely distorted form.  In other trials, MPC played the audio but gave me only a black screen for the video.  QuickTime did just the opposite, playing the video but crapping out on the audio after a few seconds.  But for some reason, VLC and Microsoft's Windows Media Player (WMP) had no problem with it.  It was not clear why.  I would have guessed that my codecs needed updating, but I had just installed the latest K-Lite Mega Pack.

After much playing around, I found that VirtualDub was able to add an audio track, adjust the length of the video to the length of that audio track, and produce a relatively small .avi (but, regrettably, not an .mpg or some other compressed format) that WMP would play.  This video was about four minutes long and, at a 250 kbps setting (Microsoft Video 1, quality 100), it was about 70MB.  That was still huge in comparison to the IrfanView output, but it was nice to have the audio option.  At that bitrate, the video contained fade-like artifacts.  That is, when I deleted or changed some text in the original video, it faded out rather than just instantly disappearing.  It actually wasn't a bad effect, and I didn't want to upload a 700MB video, so I left it at that for now.

There seemed to be some artistic possibilities for this technique.  At some points, the beat of the music would coincide with the disappearance of lines of text, as if there were a rhythm to the editing.  Maybe there was, in some cosmic sense.

The remaining question was whether anyone else would be able to view this video.  I wasn't sure how it would turn out on YouTube.  So I uploaded and tried it.  It looked OK in full-screen mode on YouTube, viewed in Firefox and also in Chrome.  I downloaded it from YouTube, using NetVideoHunter.  The download was in .mp4 format.  It still didn't play right in WMP, but it played better in QuickTime, and it was less than half the size of the .avi I had uploaded.  So I thought perhaps I could have uploaded the 700MB version and used YouTube to compress it for me.

I still didn't have a straightforward process for putting high-quality screen capture video into a format that I could edit in a normal video editing program like Adobe Premiere Elements.  It seemed that, next time, I might try recording my original video in something other than Debut, to explore the possibility that that particular program had saved my video in an odd format that Premiere Elements and other programs couldn't handle.  I could also explore rapid Shotshooter screenshots, at least to the extent that my computer would be able to save multiple screenshots per second.  Then maybe I could also try using Premiere Elements, instead of IrfanView, to stitch those screenshots together into a time-compressed but visually high-quality production to which I could also add audio.

Documenting Computer Work with Screenshots and Duplicate Detectors

I was doing some work in Windows 7.  I wanted to log the changes periodically as I went along.  I had already developed a batch file, which I called Shotshooter.bat, to take screenshots and save them as .png files periodically.  (I think this will work in all versions of Windows.)

Having already done the NirCmd setup required to make that batch file work, I slightly revised it to read as follows.  (If the print is too small, use Ctrl-+ or copy and paste into Notepad.  Batch files are best not edited in a word processor like Word, since they change characters sometimes.)

:: Shotshooter.bat

:: Captures a series of screenshots.

:: See http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html for info on NirCmd.exe.

:: Takes two arguments:  how many shots, and how many milliseconds between shots.

:: Sample usage:  shotshooter 3600 1000
:: That example would take screenshots every second for an hour,
::   assuming the computer could work that fast.

:: To kill the program sooner, use Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) > Processses > nircmd.exe.
:: IrfanView provides a fast way to play back results.

:: Create Screenshots folder on drive D

D:
md \Screenshots
:: Go to the drive and folder where you put NirCmd.exe

W:

cd "\Start Menu\Programs\Tools\Programming and Scripting\NirCmd"
:: Run NirCmd with the desired settings

nircmd.exe loop %1 %2 savescreenshot D:\Screenshots\scr~$currdate.yyyy-MM-dd$-~$currtime.HH_mm_ss$.png

:: Go see what you've created in D:\Screenshots

start explorer.exe /e,"D:\Personal Projects\View These Weekly"

Having created Shotshooter.bat, now I wanted to run it.  I had already used Ultimate Windows Tweaker (UWT) to install a right-click option to open a command window in any folder I would select in Windows Explorer, so all I had to do was open a CMD window where I had saved Shotshooter.bat, and just type "shotshooter 1200 30000" and hit Enter.

(If I hadn't installed that option with UWT, I could also have gone to Start > Run > cmd and then navigated manually to the proper folder with change-drive (e.g., D:) and change-folder (e.g., cd "folder name") commands like those used in Shotshooter.bat, above.  Note that quotation marks are necessary if folder names contain spaces or possibly if they are too long.)

Those parameters of 1200 and 30000 meant that Shotshooter.bat would use NirCmd to take a screenshot every 30000 milliseconds (i.e., every 30 seconds), and would take a total of 1200 screenshots (i.e., would run for 10 hours).  It would save them in D:\Screenshots, and now I would have to decide what to do with them.

When I was writing up these notes, I didn't recall whether NirCmd could also produce JPGs or other image formats.  It probably could.  But after getting used to IrfanView, it probably would have been easier to just use IrfanView (File > Batch Conversion/Rename) to do a mass conversion of PNGs into JPGs if necessary.

The problem with a straightforward slideshow was that, if I allowed a few seconds for each screenshot, I could easily wind up with an hourlong show that would feature extended periods of no change.  On this particular day, I had gone to the store and out to lunch, so presumably nothing was happening during those periods.  The changes that I would want to see might pop up for only a few seconds in that hourlong show.

It seemed I had better get rid of the PNGs that merely repeated the same unchanging screenshot for long periods of time.  To do this, I tried a couple of approaches.  After making a backup of my Screenshots folder, I started with Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder (ADPF).  I adjusted its settings to examine PNGs and told it to search only the D:\Screenshots folder.  It felt that, out of my 1,200 screenshots, 1,160 were potential duplicates.  Closer examination revealed that, while many of those files were not what ADPF considered 100% identical, hundreds were.  Unfortunately, ADPF did not offer a way to bulk-delete the 100% matches.  I did not take the time-consuming approach of just letting ADPF guide me through the 580 pairs of images comprising those 1,160 alleged duplicates, making manual choices as to whether I should delete one of the two images it showed me.

I tried another approach.  Among the many free duplicate file finders, I had long used DoubleKiller.  (Exact Duplicate Finder gave the same results as one type of DoubleKiller comparison, but offered fewer comparison options.)  For some reason, a CRC and size comparison in DoubleKiller gave me only 161 duplicates.  I suspected DoubleKiller was being too precise.  Doing an unreliable size-only comparison, it still found only 340 duplicates.

Following the advice on a page that recommended five duplicate file detectors, I downloaded and installed Dup Detector.  It was not easy to understand, but some tinkering I was able to get it to work.  The first time I ran it, I told it to search only for 100% matches.  (By default, it was set to search for "Dup if within 98.5% to 100% match.")  The thing that made it work was to go into its Options > "Automatic and Semi-auto delete setup," highlight the "Delete left image" criterion (the only criterion I needed to use in this case) and use the "Swap up" and "Swap down" buttons to make "No delete" come after "Delete left image."  Then, to make it run, I had to start with Get data > Build.  Also, because of the number of files, I thought I had better start with Find > "Find dups setup (method and restrictions)" set to find 9999 pairs.  I still wasn't sure, at the time when I was writing these remarks, whether that was a good number to put there.

When I ran Dup Detector to search for only 100% matches, it found that about half of the PNGs were duplicates.  I eyeballed some of them, using IrfanView to flip through them quickly with just a right-arrow keypress.  There did appear to be a lot of exact duplicates.  I ran an automatic delete to get rid of those dups.  Then I ran a DoubleKiller search for matches that had both identical sizes and identical CRC checksums.  DoubleKiller still turned up 79 pairs of duplicates.  Apparently there had been more than 9999 pairs, first time around.  (If there were more than 100 exact duplicates, then there would be more than 9999 possible pairs.)  To check this, I ran another Dup Detector search for 100% matches.  It found a bunch more.

It seemed, then, that the best strategy would have been to run DoubleKiller first, so as to get rid of one item in each exact pair.  I did that now.  Then I ran Dup Detector, looking again only for 100% matches.  It found none.  I tried again, this time with a search for 99.9% to 100% matches.  Again, it found 9999 pairs.  Some looked identical, in the program's necessarily reduced and imperfect matchup screen, but the differences in others were visible -- more than 0.1% different, I would have thought.  I tried another search, this time adding a decimal point -- looking, that is, for 99.99% to 100.00% matches.

While that was underway, I ran another of the simple comparisons available in ADPF.  It said that, of the 851 pictures remaining (out of the original 1,200), it found 811 similar pictures.  In the bottom pane, I clicked twice on the Similarity column heading, so as to see what it considered the 100% matches first.  I couldn't tell any difference between the ones that I looked at.  I wasn't sure why ADPF had not considered them identical.

Before doing anything with that ADPF comparison, I went back to Dup Detector.  It had completed its 99.99% search.  It was still finding 9,999 pairs.  I had already noticed that, unlike ADPF, Dup Detector was not able to show the right portion (maybe one-sixth) of my widescreen screenshots.  I also noticed that the first line of the Dup Detector report, in the top left corner of the screen, said that it was comparing 99.9% (not 99.99%) matches.  So unless there was a bug in that report, apparently one decimal place was as precise as it got.

I preferred ADPF's visual comparison, so I went back to it.  In the bottom pane, it looked like about two-thirds of its similar pictures were at the 100% level.  That would apparently mean I would have to do hundreds of manual comparisons:  Picture 1 might match Picture 2, and also Pictures 3, 4, 5 . . . I went down to the 99% matches.  These, too, were identical, as far as I could tell.  I had noticed, in IrfanView, that the only thing that had changed since the previous screenshot, among some screenshots, was that the system clock, in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, had moved ahead by one minute, so maybe that sort of thing kept ADPF from catching them at the 100% level.  ADPF wasn't showing the taskbar or other outer edges of the screenshots, so I couldn't tell for sure.

With hardly any exceptions, I found that even the 95% matches in ADPF were virtually identical.  The only differences that I could detect, in the 50% of less of matches where I did see a difference, was that a different window might be foregrounded -- that, in other words, its title bar would be a different color in one screenshot than in the other.  In other words, the ADPF matching levels seemed more realistic than those in Dup Detector:  this was the kind of difference that I would expect to be detected at the 96% level, well before the 99.9% level.  A 99.9% match, I felt, should involve no more than the tiniest flyspeck of difference.

For my purposes, I did not get regular, visible differences in matches, in ADPF, until I was down at the 91% level.  There were few matches at that level, so I decided to err on the safe side, manually deleting duplicates down to the 95% level.  But in the process, I stopped along the way to re-run Dup Detector.  It seemed I might be able to calibrate it against ADPF.  In other words, I first deleted all of the 100% matches in ADPF, and then ran Dup Detector.  There were about 360 of those, or about 45% of the 811 similar pictures detected by ADPF.  Deleting them was pretty fast, once I got the keystroke combination worked out; it probably took 6-7 minutes.

Rerunning Dup Detector at the 99.9% setting, after deleting ADPF's 100% matches, still produced 9999 matches from the 482 screenshots remaining.  I expected it to produce matches that were extremely difficult to tell apart.  This was not the outcome I got.  There were a number of rather obvious (although still very minor) differences.  It seemed, at this point, that Dup Detector's supposed 99.9% match was not realistic and, for my purposes, not meaningful.  In general, it seemed that Dup Detector had been useful only for purposes of automated deletion of 100% matches, though possibly that function would have been served equally well by an easier DoubleKiller comparison in terms of file size and CRC.  It didn't look like Dup Detector had anything more to offer me at this point.

In the interests of automating future comparisons, I looked around for a free bulk CRC calculator, but ultimately got better results searching for an MD5sum program in CNET.  I thought about FSUM but finally went with the somewhat higher-ranked MD5summer.  Both would do batch work and yield text-file output, but FSUM was command-line.  MD5summer did give me the option of saving its calculated sums as a text file, which I then imported into Microsoft Excel.  Using text parsing functions (e.g., MID, LEFT, TRIM), I extracted the 32-character checksum, sorted, and used a formula to compare cells.  MD5summer had evidently identified only 322 duplicates in 161 pairs.  Possibly the reason the duplicates were found only in pairs was that I had run Shotshooter (above) in 30-second intervals:  there would be only two screenshots per minute, before the system clock changed, producing a screenshot with a different checksum.  That had probably been the case with the DoubleKiller CRC checksum results as well.

One workaround would have been to see if I could conceal the system clock before starting, or I could batch-trim the PNGs in IrfanView (File > Batch Conversion/Rename > Advanced > Crop) before running the checksum, but in this case I wanted the clock to be visible on the output.  (I could also have used cropping, or could have drawn circles and arrows on my PNGs, using something like Photoshop, to narrow the focus to particularly interesting changes on the screen, so as to reduce the percentage match that ADPF or other duplicate detectors would calculate.)  I could have done the batch-trim with a copy of the snapshots backup folder, so as to produce a list of files to be deleted without harming the originals (or, in this case, the copies).  But what if the only thing that changed (in some future application) was a small item in the center (i.e., not at the edge) of the screenshot?  I could use the spreadsheet to identify not only the duplicate pairs but also the time periods during which every minute had a matching pair, so as to lead me toward large stretches of time when nothing would change, and then maybe a manual comparison in ADPF would be manageable for the rest.

So those were possibilities for future projects.  At present, having deleted the ADPF matches down to the 95% level (leaving a few near-duplicates where I could quickly see a difference), I continued on a bit further in ADPF, deleting some additional near-duplicates.  At the 91% level, almost every pair of near-duplicates contained visible differences, so I stopped there.  So I was done with ADPF.

I now had 442 fairly distinct screenshots, out of the original 1,200.  I would have had more if I hadn't abandoned the computer for several hours while Shotshooter was running.  I viewed a bunch of them in IrfanView, again using the right-arrow key to move quickly to the next.  I had already set IrfanView (Options > Properties > Browsing/Editing) to go to the next file after I deleted one -- or maybe it did that anyway, by default.  It now occurred to me that some of my ADPF work might have been faster, and that differences might have been easier to see, if I had just paged through the screenshots (or at least some of them) in IrfanView, using the Delete key (alternately, the X button, up by the menu bar) to delete apparent duplicates.  When I ran into a stretch where there seemed to be many duplicates, I stopped hitting Delete (in case, by deleting too fast, I would accidentally delete one after the screen did change) and instead just selected and deleted many at once in Windows Explorer.

Holding down the right-arrow key in IrfanView allowed me to page quickly through obviously similar or dissimiliar screenshots.  There were still quite a few, requiring as many as 90 virtually duplicate screenshots to be deleted in one case.  It seemed that ADPF may have been fooled, not only by the system clock (which still seemed to be the only thing that was changing, in many cases), but also by relatively complex screenshots (e.g., showing photographic or Google Earth images rather than just text documents, spreadsheets, and Windows Explorer sessions).  That is, to my way of thinking, many of these images were 99% similar, but ADPF hadn't even considered them 91% similar, so possibly its comparison engine was miscalculating similarities in some conditions.

After these other steps, I took a final trip through the snapshots, in IrfanView, and deleted a few more that were very similar to the ones immediately preceding them.  I wound up with 207 snapshots, out of the original 1,200, that seemed to represent fairly well what I had been doing over a 10-hour period.  Again, the number could have been substantially larger -- maybe around 300-350 -- if I hadn't spent a few hours away from the computer.

Now I wanted to put these snapshots into some kind of slideshow.  I rarely made slideshows.  On a few of the screenshots, I decided to use Adobe Photoshop Elements to draw circles and lines to draw attention to changes, from one slide to the next, that might otherwise escape attention.  Then I figured I would use IrfanView (File > Slideshow > Save slideshow as EXE/SCR) to create a slideshow.  (I could also have used something like PowerPoint, except that apparently that would have required me to create 207 slides and then import a photo into each.)  But IrfanView wouldn't let me add circles and arrows or, as seemed increasingly appropriate, a voiceover, to explain what was going on.

I tried using both Adobe Premiere Elements and CyberLink PowerDirector, but neither of them wanted to let me export to a full widescreen format.  Saving it in a reduced format (e.g., 720x480) lost so much detail that it was hard to read what was being displayed.  They also created huge files.  These programs -- especially Premiere Elements -- were also pretty terrible at giving me a simple way of arranging slides.  I wound up just creating an IrfanView EXE slideshow in full-screen mode -- and you know what?  It was beautiful.  Visually, it was perfect.  It looked exactly like the regular computer screen from which I had created all those screenshots.  And it was only 91KB.  Tiny!  The only drawback was that it couldn't incorporate a voiceover and lines and arrows.  So the output side of this project was still in development.

Windows 7: KVM in a Multimonitor Setup

I was using two monitors with two computers.  After reflecting on multiple monitor possibilities, I installed an ASUS EN210 video card in each computer.  This allowed me to connect dual displays.  I decided that monitor A would be available to both computers, and monitor B would be available only to computer B.  To make this happen, I connected monitor A to a keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switch.  So computer A was visible only on monitor A, whereas computer B was visible across the two monitors (assuming that's where I had the KVM set).

Problem:  every time I switched back to computer B on the KVM, monitor A would go blank.  This was not a problem when I was using the KVM only to switch the mouse and keyboard, leaving each monitor dedicated to one computer.  It arose only in the dual-monitor setup.  It seemed that the computer was not remembering the dual-monitor settings for monitor A on computer B.  Each time, I had to go back into Control Panel > Display > Change Display Settings > Detect.  (This KVM problem also seemed responsible for screwing up Adobe Acrobat 9. It was no longer remembering my toolbar settings the way I had previously set them. This seemed to be fixed by going into Acrobat's Help > Repair Acrobat installation.)

A search led to the suggestion that the problem I was having with monitor A was with the KVM:

It is a problem found with those KVM switches which did not pass the console display's EDID and DDC information to all the systems connected to the KVM switch. ...
Windows 7 checks display and display card constantly different from what XP and other operating systems did.
To solve this issue, just replace the KVM switch with those KVM switches supporting FULL TIME Active DDC function.
Please check ConnectPRO new UR or PR serial KVM switches which support Active DDC function to all the ports.

That post pointed me toward a Microsoft webpage with more technical information.  I did another search and saw references to ConnectPRO there too.  A different search suggested that lots of users were running into this problem.  Newegg's Power Search didn't offer an operating system selection, and they didn't seem to carry ConnectPRO KVMs.  A Google Shopping search led to two ConnectPRO KVMs, each costing at least $130.  I ran across a workaround suggestion to hit Win-D before and after switching with the KVM, but apparently that worked only with XBOXes, or anyway it didn't work for me.  There was another workaround, too technical for my blood.  Another thread prompted me to check for the most current driver for my ASUS EN210 graphics card.  As I recalled, the usual advice was to look for the latest drivers on the chipset manufacturer's webpage, so after consulting the details on the EN210, I went to the NVIDIA website and searched for GeForce 210 drivers.  I went with the most recent WHQL-certified driver.  After reboot, I saw that this did not solve the problem.  Note:  the machine had all current Windows updates at this point.

It seemed I had a choice.  I could go back to using one monitor per computer, or I could look for a hardware multimonitor solution.  Going back would mean waiting for Microsoft to fix this problem with Win7.  There was no guarantee that that would ever happen.  Basically, if I wanted multimonitor support for KVM-type functionality for two computers running Win7 (as distinct from one Win7 and one WinXP), it seemed I would either have to buy an expensive KVM or maybe come up with some other kind of funky plugging and switching.  For instance, I wondered whether I could make a go of it with two keyboards, two mice, and a switch just to flip monitor A from one computer to the other.  But this wouldn't circumvent the problem that Windows 7 was constantly polling the monitor, and that was the only thing that counted.  I found a device called the Geffen DVI Detective, which for $80 would remember the EDID and therefore defeat the problem (but only for monitors using DVI connectors).

Then I saw that Amazon carried a bunch of ConnectPRO KVMs, and some were far less expensive.  They did not carry the PR-12, which was the one PS/2 (as distinct from USB) KVM that ConnectPRO offered for my humble purposes:  two computers, one keyboard, one monitor, one mouse.  USB did not work reliably for both keyboard and mouse when Win7 was not running -- when, for instance, I was booting from a CD, or was adjusting the BIOS settings before the operating system booted.  But then I remembered that my new motherboards had only one PS/2 port, and the PR-12 would definitely require two (one each for keyboard and mouse).  I did have the option of using USB mice, one dedicated to each computer, and in fact had been doing that for a while, partly for the reason of pre-boot capability just mentioned and partly to reduce the strain on either wrist.  Another option was to use an adapter or some other gizmo to give me a second PS/2 port.

From ConnectPRO's product comparison page, it seemed there were several options to consider.  One was the choice between VGA and DVI.  DVI provided superior video, but VGA (using D-Sub connectors) was functioning well for me at the moment.  (DVI achieved using DVI-VGA adapters had, in my impression, the same risk of video problems as plain old VGA.)  It seemed that a couple of inexpensive video cards had eliminated problems of ghosting that I was getting when I had the monitors connected directly to the motherboards.  There was also the choice of two- or four-computer KVMs.  I needed only two.  Switching via hotkey was preferable to having to reach up and punch a button on the KVM in order to switch between computers.  All of the relevant ConnectPRO KVMs had All-time Full DDC, which was evidently the core need behind this KVM search.  ConnectPRO's Pro line of KVMs apparently did not have the Dynamic Device Mapping (DDM) technology that would remember attached USB peripherals (e.g., speakers, mice) and would thus eliminate lag time required for the switched computer to re-detect the devices.  It was confusing, shopping among these devices on Amazon, because there were various "kit" options that were described as "new" and yet did not appear on ConnectPRO's website, and also because now it started to look like some of these products did not have Full DDC and/or DDM.  What I came up with was a choice, for me, between the UR-12 PRO, with VGA and DDC but not DDM and no hotkey option ($102 with shipping from ConnectPRO through Amazon); the UR-12 PLUS, with VGA, DDC, DDM, and a hotkey option ($176); and the UD-12 PLUS, which was the same as the UR-12 PLUS but with DVI (and therefore with VGA as an option, via adapter) ($191 from a couple of sellers).

Since I was having no video issues at the moment, and might not have any again for some time, I decided to go with VGA rather than DVI, all other things being equal.  If I did get video problems, I could sell one KVM and upgrade to another later.  So then it was a question of whether I was willing to pay an extra $74 for DDM and a hotkey option.  DDM was nice -- I had noticed the lag in responsiveness at some point, hard to recall at the moment but apparently when I had upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 -- but that was not really bothering me much at present.  Those delays, and the hotkey, were especially important when I was doing a lot of switching between computers, which happened primarily when I was testing or tinkering with hardware or software on one machine and logging the developments on the other.  I was not presently doing much of that, and didn't plan to be doing much of it anytime soon.  It occurred to me that, if the DDM lags did bother me at such times, I could always dedicate one mouse, one monitor, and one keyboard to each computer at those times.  I could arrange that on my desk, and then the only lag would be the time needed to reorient my hands on the other keyboard.  Indeed, for purposes of working with the BIOS and such, I could simply keep a PS/2 keyboard always plugged in and standing off to the side of each computer, in addition to the USB keyboard connected to the KVM.  (PS/2 was not hot-swappable; it would be necessary to reboot to have the keyboard be recognized if it were not plugged in at time of bootup.)  Looking at the choice again, I reconsidered that the price difference between the UR-12 PLUS and the UD-12-PLUS was only $15.  From that perspective, I would choose the latter over the former, so as to wrap up the best product at not much additional cost; and in that case, the price difference between the solution with or without DDM, hotkey, and DVI was substantial:  the UD was almost twice the price of the UR.

As long as I was sure I did want to use dual monitors on computer B, sometimes swapping monitor A between computers A and B, I would need Full DDC, and it seemed the choice was then to spend $102 on a ConnectPRO UR-12 PRO KVM.  If I hadn't gotten the video cards for only $18 each, the decision to add dual monitor capability (with KVM and video cards) would then have cost me more than $150.  It was worth it -- dual monitor capability added a lot to a workspace -- but it was turning into more hassle and expense than it should have been.  I belatedly realized that perhaps I should have looked for a motherboard with dual monitor capability and with enough video memory so that the computer would not struggle to switch between windows on the same monitor, as computer A had been doing before I added the video card.  Desk space permitting, that kind of expense also raised the question of perhaps having three dedicated monitors -- one for computer A and two for computer B, and recabling one of the latter to computer A if a multimonitor need arose there -- thereby reducing the KVM need to a simple $20-30 device that would swap keyboards and mice, assuming those were not likewise dedicated to single machines.  The temptation to just get a third monitor and forget about the Full DDC KVM would be even stronger if I were looking at the nearly $200 price tag for a ConnectPRO UD-12 PLUS KVM.  But even without that, as I considered the time I had devoted to screwing around with KVMs, on this and on previous occasions, I did think that possibly the best approach would be to go with the third monitor, wait for someone to compete with ConnectPRO and/or for Microsoft to get its act together -- to buy a third monitor as an interim solution, in other words, and to sell it when and if a superior KVM alternative emerged.

Windows 7: More Tweaks & Fixes

I had installed a customized version of Windows 7, and then tweaked it in a variety of ways.  This post describes additional random issues that needed to be fixed.  Some of these issues are described in separate posts:

• Remove the InstallShield Update Manager.
• Eliminate the "You need permission to perform this action" error message.
• Eliminate the option to speed up browsing by disabling add-ons in IE 9.

Verify That You Have Access to That Directory

I was working along, minding my own business, when Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro decided to update itself.  Then it gave me this error message:

Error 1310.  Error writing to file:C:\Config.Msi\c33075c.rbf.
Verify that you have access to that directory.

I clicked Retry.  The message returned.  A search led to a seemingly comprehensive Adobe webpage on the problem.  (The webpage said that products affected included Creative Suite 4.0, which included Acrobat.)  I had to cancel out of the error message and the Acrobat update to proceed with the steps it advised.  I started by trying the option of changing properties on the folder named in the error message:  Windows Explorer > right-click on C:\Config.msi > Properties > Security tab > Advanced > Owner tab > Edit > select Administrators > click box "Replace owner on subcontainer and objects" > OK > OK.  Now the Properties dialog was closed.  That gave it a chance to adjust itself.  Now I went back into the same right-click on C:\Config.msi > Properties > Security tab > Advanced dialog, but this time I went to Permissions tab > Change Permissions > verify Full Control for SYSTEM and also for Administrators > check the two boxes (i.e., "Include inheritable permissions" and "Replace all child object permissions") > Apply.  I saw that I now had two different entries for SYSTEM and Administrators here, so I departed from the official instructions here to remove the ones that did not have Inherited permissions.  I had to remove them one at a time.  The "Replace all child object permissions" box did not stay checked.  I went back into Acrobat.  It started doing the update installation again.  The error recurred.  Going back to that same webpage, I tried the option of renaming C:\Config.msi to C:\Config.msi.old.  The error recurred.  I rebooted; same thing.  But now Acrobat was seeing that it wanted to install an update, so I let it.  Apparently this was different from whatever it had been trying to install before but had failed; this one succeeded.  It required another reboot.  After the reboot, the problem was gone:  I was able to start Acrobat without having it first try to run that failing update.  I wondered if perhaps renaming C:\Config.msi had triggered the update that apparently solved the problem.  A week or two later, unfortunately, I found that Acrobat was still malfunctioning.  I tried a repair and that didn't solve the problem, so I uninstalled it and tried alternatives.

Revise Robocopy

In a previous tweak, I had set up a Robocopy script to mirror my data drive to another internal drive every hour.  Now I wanted to have incremental backups, so that I would back up changed files every hour or two, with a reset every 24 hours.  Ultimately, my solution to this item was to install Backup Maker (see below) and let it do its thing.  I didn't like its nag screen, though, and felt that more work on a Robocopy solution might have been better.

Running AvaFind in Windows 7

I had bought a license for AvaFind, a file finder utility, but I'd had problems trying to use it in Windows 7.  AvaFind had not been updated since version 1.5, back around 2003.  I had tried using it in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP3, but that hadn't worked very well; it was still crashing.  As a temporary workaround, I installed a shortcut to AvaFind in my Start Menu, and just clicked there to restart it whenever it crashed.
Meanwhile, on a second machine, I was getting an error message when I tried to install AvaFind.  The error message was:

Ava Find Internal Error
Ava Find has detected an internal error and must be closed.  Error information was saved to AvaFindErrorData.zip on your desktop.
Ava Find Version:  1.5.218.040106-1058p

The failed installation left an error log file on the desktop.  I unzipped it and found that the log insisted on being printed as a PDF.  The error message inside that PDF was:

[0x0008062e] Win32Exception 0x80070003: SHGetFolderPath[0x18 COMMON_STARTUP] failed. (0x80070003 The system cannot find the path specified.)

I did a search but found nothing.  Another search turned up some results, but then it occurred to me that AvaFind was functioning correctly on another machine, so what would happen if I just copied over its C:\Program Files\AvaFind folder?  I did that and double-clicked on AvaFind.exe.  It ran.  But getting it to function as a registered copy apparently required installation.  I stored a copy of the AvaFind folder in my customized Start Menu, where I kept all my portables, but I also went ahead and installed it.  As time passed, though, AvaFind was still not working well.  Ultimately, I adopted Everything as a good alternative.

Capture Streaming Video

I was once again looking for video capture freeware.  I had previously tried Camstudio, but had audio problems and poor quality, and TipCam, which seemed temperamental.  I found a list of programs and tried several.  Among these, GetASFStream would only work with a URL, which wasn't helpful for my purposes because the video I was trying to download would pop up in a separate window without its own URL.  I had previously found Debut to be excellent, but it had stopped working after a trial period, requiring me to spend $30 to continue.  Not an unreasonable expectation, but I was not doing much video capturing and had just decided to do without, at that price.  aTubeCatcher had some pretty good reviews on CNET, so that was one option.  Other options included StreamTransport (significantly less praised on CNET), Coojah (not listed on CNET), Orbit Grab Pro (a Firefox extension) and Orbit Downloader (heavily downloaded and fairly well liked on CNET), and the RTMPDump command-line option.  I had previously used Orbit; I saw some remarks about bugs on the CNET page; I decided not to start there.  The CNET review said I would need a URL for aTubeCatcher, so I didn't start there either.  There seemed to be another option, involving some technical adjustments.  Before trying it, I wondered whether maybe Debut had changed their licensing policies or had forgotten me -- it had been a year or more since I had last tried them out.  When I closed this post, this was still an area in development on my system.

Internal Incremental Backup

I had previously used a Robocopy script to mirror a hard drive to an internal partition, and had used the built-in Windows 7 Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) to run it.  There were several things not to like about this arrangement.  First, I had the script running in a batch file, and I couldn't figure out how to teach batch files to run minimized.  So I would be working along, and then suddenly this thing would pop up and start running.  Second, Task Scheduler didn't have an option to run every two or three hours, and that was what I was needed, because otherwise this script was popping up every hour and running for a good chunk of that hour.  I wasn't sure whether it was actually slowing the system down that much; I just didn't want it running that frequently if it was going to be so visible.  Third, my Robocopy settings were doing a mirror, whereas I decided what I really needed was incremental backups, so that I would have multiple copies of files that I was working on, going back in time.  I came to appreciate the value of this once again, as if I had not learned it many times before, when a file I was working on got corrupted and then got backed up, overwriting the last good copy, so I lost several hours' work.

I decided to scrap the Robocopy approach and go with a more traditional backup program.  For right now, I decided to start with the built-in Windows 7 backup program (Control Panel > Backup and Restore).  But it didn't have an hourly option.  I found a webpage that said I could set up an hourly backup by going into Task Scheduler > left pane > Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows > WindowsBackup.  This didn't give me the options they were seeing, so I assumed I first had to have the built-in Backup and Restore program set up.  So I went back into Control Panel and finished setting up a backup.  But now I wasn't sure if the built-in backup program could do incremental backups.  I found one of the invariably useful Gizmo webpages.  It recommended Backup Maker.  German homepage, but mostly English download page.  Backup Maker was not my ideal, but it worked.

Adobe Acrobat 8:  Comment & Markup Toolbar Reverts to Default

I was using Acrobat 8.2.6 in Windows 7.  I had a problem that I had also encountered when using Acrobat 8 in Windows XP.  The problem was that, when I would start Acrobat, often it would start with what was, I guessed, the default set of tools in the Comment & Markup toolbar.  I would select the tools I wanted, lock the toolbars, shut down Acrobat in an orderly way (i.e., File > Exit), and yet the default set would reappear when I opened certain documents.  It seemed that the desired set of tools had to be set manually for each PDF document -- that those that I had not yet opened in Acrobat 8 would favor the default set of tools until otherwise instructed.

I ran a search and found a thread with a few suggestions.  I tried the one about deleting my preference file.  I wasn't sure where to find that.  As I poked through another search to locate it, I saw that deleting the preference file seemed to be common advice for fixing random problems with Acrobat.  It took yet another search to find a post that seemed to address the topic.  The advice here was that I could automatically delete a preference file in some Adobe products by holding Ctrl-Alt-Shift as the program starts.  Just click the Acrobat icon, he said, and immediately hold those three keys down until the program finished starting.  This did not work for me, regardless of whether I started holding those keys down before or immediately after clicking on the Acrobat icon.

I decided to search for the preferences file and delete it directly.  As advised in one thread, I tried looking for it in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Adobe PDF\Settings.  Unfortunately, I was not able to open that folder.  Attempts to do so gave me an error message:

Location is not available
C:\Documents and Settings is not accessible.
Access is denied.

In Windows Explorer, I right-clicked on the folder and used the nifty "Take Ownership" context menu option that I had previously installed via registry edit.  Now I was able to go in.  I had to repeat that step for the Documents subfolder.  But Adobe was not in there.  I had a general sense that, in Windows 7, the "Documents and Settings" folder was just a placeholder or shortcut to a different folder, but I didn't yet know clearly where that other folder was, and right-clicking on the Documents folder itself gave no clues.  Searches for pref*.dat gave me only Adobe Updater preference files.  It was possible that the problem was due to a flaw in the registry rather than in a preferences file, but I wasn't sure how to find a registry problem either.
At the time when I closed this post, this problem was still unresolved.

Do You Want to Allow This Webpage to Access Your Clipboard?

For some reason, I suddenly started getting this question whenever I tried to copy and paste something in Win7. It may have been the result of an upgrade to Internet Explorer 9. The solution was to go into Control Panel > Internet Options > Security tab > Trusted Sites (green checkmark) > Sites > Add this website to the zone. (This seemed to be the more conservative approach; I guessed that the more adventurous approach would have been to do these same steps under the Internet icon rather than under the Trusted Sites icon, so that they would apply to all websites.) I added the website in question. To do it, I had to unclick the "Require server verification" option. Then I went to Trusted Sites > Custom Level. In the Scripting section, not far from the bottom of the long list of settings, I checked Enable under "Allow Programmatic clipboard access." 

Schedule Defragmenting

I thought I had already taken care of this, but it appeared I had set up automatic defragging for use with a third-party program that I no longer had installed.  Third-party programs may well have been superior for this purpose, but I was OK with just average defragmenting for the time being.  With guidance from a Windows 98 webpage that came up in response to a search, I automated the Win7 defragger by going into Start > Run > taskschd.msc > Action > Create Basic Task.  I went through the wizard to set it up.  When I got to the Action step, I said Start a Program.  The program I wanted was Defrag.exe, and it was to "Start In" the C:\Windows\System32 folder.  In the "Add arguments" space, I typed "/c /u /x" from among the possible options.  At the end, I checked the option to go into the task's properties.  There, under the General tab, I checked "Run with highest privileges" (not the same as high priority) and "Configure for" Windows 7.  Under the Settings tab, in addition to whatever was already checked, I checked "Run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed."

The problem with those settings, as I soon discovered, was with the /c option, which would defrag all volumes, and perhaps also with the /x option, which was much slower than I had expected.  Even though I had this scheduled to run during the night, I would sometimes find that it was continuing on into the daytime.  I had a choice:  set up different defragmenting tasks to run on different nights, or switch to a different defragging program.  Microsoft said IOBit's Smart Defrag was compatible with Windows 7, as it had been with Windows XP, and it still had great ratings on CNET, so I decided to download and use it after all.  I decided not to go with the option of using Security 360, which IOBit offered as another freebie after Smart Defrag installed.  That decision was based on criticisms I saw in several posts I viewed about it.  Anyway, with Smart Defrag installed and configured, I disabled the Defrag.exe scheduled task described in the previous paragraph.