I have hundres of files to rename help me Admin!

Yes, we know you have taken a million digital photos over the last year, on your fancy shmancy new camera. And we also know the holiday season is almost upon us. Being the geek that you are, you could not just leave your pictures named digital_image_13456.jpg for your slide shows…

We just couldn’t have that now, could we?

Oh, how well we know you.

Wayne from Florida wants AtA’s help to create a script that will batch rename his purty pictures. Instead we are going to point him to some FREE software our friend Daniel at HackYourDay blogged about.

The software is called Batch File Renamer (clever eh?) from Cerebral Synergy.

Daniel says:

Here’s one software that productivity nuts will love. If you’ve ever needed to catalog files, change extensions, add something to a filename in large batches you know the suffering that is “right click, select, type, enter” done over and over and over again. If you need a tool that can simply edit filenames, rename extensions and so on in a very powerful, customizable way, read on!…

I set out to find some sort of tool because I need to catalog files in batches of 100 about every two days. I get a batch of stuff in txt format and I need to do the following operations.

• I need the files to be in the following format [ID - Number.txt]
• I also need them in this format [ID - Number.html]

Practically this means that I need “032 - 001.txt”, “032 - 002.txt” and so on (all the way to 100), also in .html format and I need to be able to customize all of this because for the next batch I will need “033? at the beginning.

Doing a Google search and trying a lot of free software that popped up I finally found Batch File Renamer. Not a fancy name, not a fancy program, but it gets the job done better than I’ve seen with other apps. First, head over to the Cerebral Synergy download page, scroll down and download Batch File Renamer.

He was able to change file extensions, mass change file names and it comes with all sorts of other free geeky options! Check out Daniel’s article at HackYourDay here and the Free Cerebral Synergy download is here.

_TheRenameThisAdmiN_

4 Simple Steps to Change Your Computer Sounds

Tired of your standard Windows Startup and Shutdown tunes?

If you’re like me, you use your Windows-based computer almost every day.  The startup and shutdown sounds have just gotten a little boring to be honest.  Here are some simple steps to use your favorite voice, music excerpt, or sound for your computer’s start-up and shutdown sequence.  You’ll need two soundbites.

Step 1. Choose the soundbites: Choose the track which you want to play at start-up and shutdown jingles.  Key to note:

1. It must be in the .WAV format.
2. The soundbite shouldn’t be too long otherwise you could be waiting for the bite to end before you begin computing.

Your preferred file is likely an mp3, but regardless, if its not in .WAV format, you can easily convert it using  any converter.  My preference is audacity, which is an open source music editor <– it allows you to actually select a “soundbite” from any song.

Step 2.   Rename the new files. Rename these files as “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV” respectively.

Step 3. Rename the old files.

1. Goto “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”
2. Find the files “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV”, and rename them to Windows XP Startup_old.WAV and  Windows XP Shutdown_old.WAV respectively. This step is required for the case if you need to revert back to these sounds, otherwise you can ignore this step and just delete them (not recommended).

Step 4. Save your new files. Just copy your files from step 2 into the directory “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”

You now have new startup and shutdown tunes.

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website.  You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.

What are Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files? Can I delete them? Do I need them and how can i make them stop coming back?

James from Virginia wanted to know if it was safe to delete these Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files from his network. Check out our answer and step by step removal tips.

Running in a mixed Windows/Mac environment I find it annoying to deal with all the little artifacts the great OS’s leave behind. All of our mixed shares and network drives are full of these frickin ‘Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.

Each folder with initiated thumbnail views (that is where they have displayed a Thumbnails or Filmstrip view in Windows Explorer) will have a Thumbs.db file.

They do nothing for me. I look at them like litter on the ground. I looked up what they do and started deleting them. But they came back…

Some times I get caught up in doing something after in enrages me enough. So I was now determined to get rid of these files from my shares here on out. I did some research on how to get rid of them permanently and how to prevent them from coming back!

Here is how you prevent Windows and OS X from creating these annoying files.

Prevent the creation of Thumbs.db in Windows:

Now this doesn’t help you deleting the files that already may exist.

To accomplish that you may be interested in BlueHarvest to scrub your network of .DS_Store files and you can do a simple find and replace on Windows.

Find and Replace:

To delete all the existing Thumbs.db files on your computer you just:

For those of you who are scared to delete system files, the Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files are strictly cosmetic on network volumes and will have almost no impact on pretty much anything! Do you use them for something? Let us know in the comments.

_TheOCAdmiN_

Can I hide the Sceduled Tasks and Printers Folders in the Network view?

By default your windows XP machine shows the Printers and Faxes share along with the Scheduled Tasks folder. You can make use of the scheduled tasks folder like this or use a remote printer share to quickly install a remote printer.

Some people like this, most people don’t use it and a few people REALLY hate it. So here is a quick how-to on peacing it out:

To hide the Scheduled Tasks from the network share view, follow these steps:

• Click Start, Run and type REGEDIT
• Navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \RemoteComputer \ NameSpace

• Backup the key by exporting it to a .REG file. (You need this to revert back!)
• To remove Scheduled Tasks, delete the following key:

{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}

• To remove the Printers folder, delete the following key:

{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}

• Close Registry Editor.

By deleting one key or the other you are removing the folders from the network view and not disabling printing/scheduling in any which way. To restore the shares after removing them import the .REG file you saved in the third step above.

_ThePeaceYouOutAdmiN_

Last night Ubuntu saved my life - How I used Ubuntu to recover ALL my files…

Hello Boys and Girls,

Commodore 64 here to bring you another horror story from binary-land. Lord knows I’ve been through hell and back with computers. Overheating CPUs, which were fixed by the cold of the winter outside my apt; crashing hard drives which were fixed or accessed by various means; faulty power supplies, which had me gutting and re-assembling my machine; and many more.

Up to this point, the only time I actually lost data, was to my ex-wife, who got to keep the computer with all my stuff in it, while I made away with a crappy laptop. Other than that, I’ve always been able to salvage my data somehow.
This time I had a new problem. Upon conferring with the Admin, to whom I have exclusive access (belonging has perks people, hit the comments if YOU want to belong as well) we came to the conclusion, based on past problems that were brought to his attention, that I have a power supply which is not supplying a steady stream of power to my hard-drives and various other internally powered devices. Now so far, to the best of my knowledge, a hard drive and ram are really the only components that can suffer from a faltering power supply. For the past 6 months, my computer has eaten through 3 Western Digital hard drives, which I’m sure were perfectly fine from the get-go. I will note here that I DO NOT blame Western Digital for these issues. I am a fair consumer which doesn’t point unnecessary blame where it is not due. I will however give them a call and will update this blog with their responses and whether they are able to help me at all along the lines of some replacements.

My problem started because of me. I let waaaay to much time go by before I blew the inordinate amount of dust out of my computer, and more importantly, my power supply. I have gotten into the bad habit of leaving my case open, as I am also inordinately lazy. This probably contributed to the systematic weakening of my power supply. My hypothesis is that the dust caked up on the power supply fan, causing the power supply to rise in temperature, and over time this started to affect it’s power output. This, in turn, caused my hard drives to fuzz in a very weird, intermittent way. At first we thought that my snazzy hard drive enclosure was the culprit. I had one of my drives, my all-important work drive with all my years of work, in an enclosure which, through an lcd display provided me spin-up and temperature info, but more importantly this enclosure allowed my drive to be cold-removed from my machine easily. My justification was, that in the case of a fire, or a world-wide Huxley style pron hunt, I would have the ability to simply slide my drive out of my machine, and make off with my all-important stuff. Karl and I had hypothesized earlier on, that this was the culprit to the failing of my first WD-320 drive. At the time this was my data drive on which I kept all my data, but I also had a recent copy of the data on another drive, so it was no big deal.

So I removed the offending enclosure and drive, and continued on with a slightly bruised ego and one less hard drive in my collection. For about a few months this was fine. Most likely there was now less power being drained from the power supply so this proved to be a stop-gap measure which lasted only a few months, which I only know now.

Then the unthinkable happened. Something that hasn’t happened to me in years. A full-out dead freeze in Windows, which upon rebooting, no longer existed according to the cryptic error message my BIOS was giving me. Windows was gone. Since I couldn’t deal with the problem right there and then, I popped in my newly burned Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD to leave some semblance of a usable computer intact on my PC.

A few days later I was actually able to spend some time recovering or repairing my machine, whichever came first. Since I had turned the machine off the night before, I booted up and noticed that Windows was beginning to boot. Hooray!
By some miraculous feat, Windows was booting up! However, my beloved work drive was not showing up. Upon checking BIOS I noticed that the hard drive was being detected, but Windows couldn’t see it! Before I could do much else, Windows froze again. At this point I realized Windows wasn’t coming back, and that I had to concentrate my efforts on damage control rather than repair. Recovering my work files became my top priority.

Enter Ubuntu.

At first, Ubuntu did not recognize my work drive. Then, after a few minutes, my work drive appeared in the My-Computer-esque Home window Ubuntu had given me. Eureka! The OS sees my drive. I quickly connected my LaCie external USB drive and double clicked on the WD-320 drive which contained all my precious work files. One more obstacle: I received an error which said something to the effect of (loosely translated) “Ubuntu needs you to give it the command, in the command prompt, to mount the drive with the force option activated.” I popped open Firefox and Googled just the first part of the error and was presented with some results to some blogs which contained the exact command, with switches, that I was to use to successfully get my drive accessible in Ubuntu. The command worked an I proceeded to copy the 130 Gigabytes of precious data from my half-broken, limping hard-drive to my ever solid external USB drive. A few hours later the operation was complete. I can rest easy now.

A later memory test, courtesy of the good people that brought the Ubuntu Live CD, revealed that my memory chips were fried too - looks like a job for Crucial.com.
It’s been a week now, and thanks to Ubuntu, getting my data accessible after a hard system crash like that was not something I had to lose sleep over. Since I was able to safely offload my data without having to overhaul my computer, I was able to get some sleep that night, and many other nights following the incident. Sleeping is not an issue when you know your data is safe, even if for the time being.

Now I can slowly work on getting the $500 together to buy 2 new hard drives, and 2 new ram chips, so that one day my computer will be restored to it’s former dual-screen, design station ala Commodore glory. But in the meantime, I can survive rather comfortably using my Mac, and my resuscitated PC running Ubuntu 7.10. In all fairness this was a harrowing situation, but the availability of a self-contained, graphical operating system, that can run off a CD on a PC with nothing in working order besides a power supply, a motherboard, and some limping hard drives and memory chips, enabled me to not have to put my life on hold again to ensure access to my important stuff.
Piece of mind, that’s what it came down to.

_TheSleepingCommodore_

Can I disable the RESTART option after completing windows update? Is there any way to cancel a Reboot?

MJ writes to us that her machine runs updates around lunch time and she keeps getting the prompt do you want to restart now?

Not only is it annoying - sometimes she clicks yes by accident and her whole world comes crashing down. (See the fix for this at the bottom of the post - not for the faint of heart or slow typers!!!)

Not only will we show you how to disable the automatic restart option after updates via Group Policy we will show you how to quickly cancel a reboot.

1. Go to Start –> Run, type “gpedit.msc”.
2. Go to Computer Configuration –> Administrative Templates –> Windows Components –> Windows Update.
3. Look for option “No Auto Restart For Scheduled Automatic Update installation” and Enable that option.



4. This will make sure that your computer is not rebooted automatically, instead it will just notify you for a reboot. It will be users choice as to when to reboot your computer
5. If in case you want it to notify you again and again, after a specific interval of time, then look for option “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations”. Enable that option and specify the time.

Everything above is all easy, its just editing some policies which you can perform easily. [TechiesDen]

Now to cancel a reboot:

1. Start
2. Run
3. Type Shutdown -a and hit enter

Thats it, that will cancel your impending doom if you hit it fast enough!

_TheStopRestartingMyComputerAdmiN_