• Install VirtualBox > 4.1
• Install Windows 7
• Install Guest Additions
  • DURING the install, manually select 3D Support
  • Select Yes WDDM video driver
  • Ignore the warning about safe mode and continue
• Reboot
• In Control Panel, Personalise re-select the Window7 Default Aero Theme.
• Done

References:

• http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#guestadd-video
• http://www.howtogeek.com/75417/ask-htg-enabling-aero-in-virtualbox-raid-array-disk-overhead-and-raw-processing-without-photoshop/

My Googling suggests that a German and Swedish bloke/bird/person have fixed this issue but no-one in the UK.

Attached is my UK Keyboard layout, also the source file so you can use microsoft keyboard layout creator to make your own.

To use, simply unzip, run setup, and then in your keyboard settings (control panel) change to “English UK – Apple MacBook Pro” … you may wish to remove the default UK keyboard to avoid confusion.

This works well for me in VirtualBox, I would expect it to work in VMWARE / Parallels but I’ve not tested it, as with everything I do YMMV

Recently I had a requirement whereby if a folder was larger than 30Gb (approx 95% of a partition) then the oldest files should be deleted, usually bash would be the answer but in this instance I needed to use a visual basic script.

This is what I came up with, it’s not neat (cause I don’t know vbs) but it works, if you want to use it find and replace “D:\Files” with your directory then find & replace “35000” with your required size in Mb (35000Mb is approx 35Gb) , save the attached script .txt file (vbs_script_disk_clean_up.txt) as script.vbs, then use task scheduler to run everyday, job done!

The guys in the office recommended that I should run JKDefrag to help “optimize” things. I downloaded a copy, and read that you have a variety of options to run the software including a screen-saver; my laptop is on pretty much most of the time so I’ve decided that I would run JkDefrag as a scheduled task over night.

I’ve not scheduled anything on Vista before and in my investigation I found that vista by default at 1am every wednesday defrags the hard drive!

This changed my plan, instead of scheduling JkDefrag to run, I would replace the default defrag task.

If you would like to do the same, download a copy of JkDefrag and unzip it into a directory, take a note of where you unzip the files as you’ll need the directory path later.

To get started open the vista task scheduler (it’s in admin tools). From the tree in the left browse to:

Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Defrag

Next download the XML file attached to this post (Nicks Scheduled Defrag) and within the Task scheduler, click on “Import Task” from the action bar on the right hand side… browse to and choose my file, once done right click the old “Scheduled Defrag” task and disable it, you should end up looking at a window like this…

Cool! You’re nearly there, the task you’ve installed is a copy of the default defrag task, with the date and action changed to suit my need, you will need to do the same! You remember you wrote down a directory path earlier, well you need it now….

My scheduled task runs Jkdefrag from a directory called C:\Users\nick.bettison\Software\JkDefrag-3.36\, I’m 99% sure you won’t have that directory

Right click on NicksScheduledDefrag and select properties , click the actions tab, select “start a program” and click edit. Change the path C:\Users\nick.bettison\Software to where ever you have your JkDefrag, you will need to make changes in both the “Program / Script” field, and “Add arguments field”…

When done, click Ok. If you feel like it you can change when it runs under the “triggers” tab, edit the “weekly” trigger to suit your needs.

You can now choose to wait (until 1am saturday night – or whatever you changed it to), or click run; either way after the task has run in your JkDefrag-3.36 directory you will hopefully have log.txt showing the results of the defrag!

Installing.
I found this didn’t work 1st time, so these are the steps.

• Install GTK# for Windows from medsphere.org/projects/gtksharp, I used this SDK .msi
• Reboot
• Now download this, and use it to replace (over-write) C:\Program Files\Medsphere\Gtk# SDK\etc\gtk-2.0\gdk-pixbuf.loaders
• Open the new gdk-pixbuf.loaders, find “Gtk# Runtime” & replace with “Gtk# SDK“
• Install Tomboy

You should now be able to run tomboy… it appears in your system tray.

Importing Notes.
If like me you have a linux box with a load of notes you want to read, then follow these steps.

On your linux box:

• cd into $HOME/.tomboy
• copy all .note files

Transfer the .note files to your windows box.

On your Windows box:

• Exit tomboy
• cd into C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\tomboy
• paste all your .note files

Start Tomboy & Enjoy!

References:

• [tomboy-list] Windows status, binaries
• [tomboy-list] Windows status

Finding something that can sync between my home linux box and work windohs machine is a real pain so I’m really hoping this will be the answer I’ve been looking for; it’s not that win-linux sync’ing is impossible, it’s just that it’s usually restrictive or so complicated/ un-user-friendly that I never bother.

The only thing the service needs is some WordPress to “public box” integration and the solution is dam’ed near perfect

While I to keep my fingers crossed that dropbox is everything I want it to be, why don’t you try it out?

Now this post isn’t a Linux vs windows rant, more, a note about how it’s effecting me. To start with, I’ve been using evolution for so long that I’ve actually forgotten how to use outlook !!!!!! Other stuff is IM & RSS readers, I’m using thunderbird because I can’t find a suitable replacement for lifera , and MSN it’s got adverts all over it, back to gaim I think !

What’s most noticeable about going back to windows is that I’m working more, using Linux at work seemed to distract me, because I have my web development stuff on my machine, and RSS feed me with cool Linux things to check out I was never ‘bored‘…. notice how nothings changed on this site for a while ?

At least I can find solitude at home, fedora core 5 is out in a month, and I’m really looking forward to putting my new amd64 thru’ it’s paces, and for the time being the dell laptop work have given me can stay windows; although thinking aloud I might have enough RAM to run vmware player so I could move the windows stuff to that, although if I end up using the vmWindows more it’s kind a pointless running Linux.

Ho-hum, one good thing of using windows is that I can compare google desktop to beagle !