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The long awaited development of a portable version of the cross platform music (media) player has now reached the stage of a “Development Test Release”

The Songbird website http://www.getsongbird.com/ describes Songbird as:

The Open Music Player

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that’s under active development.

We’re working on creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music. There are lots of ways to contribute your time to the project. We’d love your help!

There are several features we’re proud of, but we’ll be the first to admit that others need ironing out, are experimental, or are just plain missing. There’s still a lot to do.

Visit the Songbird site for more details on all the functions, options and Add-ons available for the player.

PortableApps.com has now released the test development release with only the following note:

Release Notes:

Development Test 1 (2008-08-28): Initial release

Enjoy.

There are a few comments appended to the post at PortableApps.com but little feedback as yet against this very recent release date of 28 August 2008.

I f you want to give it a try the download link is available at PortableApps.com Songbird Portable 0.7 Development Test 1 the download is 19.3MB and the ”installed” size is 56.2MB.

I haven’t tried it as yet but I have been waiting quite some time for this portable version to see what it will do. I am sure any feedback will be very welcome at PortableApps

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Why You Want to Use Portable Freeware Applications

Freecom ToughDrive 2.5" - Strong and Reliable Pocket Sized Storage

Use a Laptop as a Cheap & Silent Media Center or Extender

TIP - Format a USB Flash Drive for Speed or File Size - What’s Best and How to Overcome Some Problems

A Better Way to Run Windows and Linux Together

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What is This all About?

Most users will think of Windows Explorer (Not Internet Explorer the browser application) as the program they use to access their files. In fact Windows Explore is much more than this, in simple terms it provides the graphical user interface(GUI) between the user and the operating system. It gives access to the all the programs including the control panel and various system utilities such as System Information, System Restore and the Management Console. If Windows Explorer freezes or cashes then you no longer have access to the Windows Taskbar and the Desktop icons amongst other important ways that you interact with your PC to make it do what you need. (Windows Explorer is also referred to as the shell which interacts with the core operating system).

Tip 4 may be the most important Tip as this helps to protect against fatal Windows Explorer crashes

Why Do You Care?

For a multitude of different reasons Windows Explorer may freeze or crash at any time. Windows XP is certainly more stable than earlier Windows operating systems but it still happens, particularly if you load lots of programs and give your PC a heavy workload. This is another reason why it pays to reboot your Windows OS fairly frequently, as the longer he system runs in any one session the more likely it is that it may freeze or crash.

Once Windows Explorer is no longer available then how do you access such things as the Shutdown Menu or your open programs that are still running?

What Can You Do?

First of all, except for the most inexperienced of users of a Windows OS will be familiar with CTL-ALT-DEL (or the 3 finger salute) where you press all 3 keyboard buttons at the same time as an emergency “get out of jail” solution.

By the way – if this doesn’t immediately work give it a minute after which you will need to use the powerswitch or restart button with all the possibilities of loosing data or file corruption. So only ever do this as a last resort!!!!

When you use CTL-ALT-DEL from a User Login/Password system you see the following screen:

(Click on Screenshots to enlarge)

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Just a quick post for my loyal readers.

My current installation of Windows XP is now grinding to a halt. (Not sure if that is the right expression as whenever a Windows OS reaches this stage, in my experience, it is in fact resulting in endless disk activity and very little else

Anyway the time has come to reinstall an earlier backup, update with the latest “Windows Security Updates” and then reinstall the essential software.

This gives me a great opportunity to share with you all the details of the software I currently have installed, the programs I consider essential and the ones I won’t be bothering with in future . Of course this will be my very subjective view but I hope it will be of some use to you all in your decision making. A you probably know by now one of the main aims of my Blog is to help you in making decisions about what software and particularly Freeware to install. So the next couple of pots starting next week will cover this aspect.

So I intend to produce a table of my currently installed software, whether I will or won’t reinstall it and the reasons why!

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What Is This All About?

Yesterday I wrote about the basic things you can do with the Windows Toolbar functionality in the taskbar. Today will tell you about some clever little tips and tricks that allows you to use toolbars to help you get more productive and generally make your computing life a little easie

Today will show you how you can go from this:

to this:

(Click on screenshots to show full size/enlarged)

and a lot more!

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What Is This All About?

Going from this:

to this:

(Click on screenshots to show full size/enlarged)

(OK ignore the wallpaper in terms of this post)

I am sure everyone is familiar with the Windows Quick Launch Toolbar as part of the Taskbar. Dragging and dropping new shortcuts to it, or having them automatically installed as part of setting up a new program. Perhaps even dragging and dropping the icons in the Quick Launch area to get them into some sort of practical order. If you are like me it’s soon full of icons and you can’t remember what program they start so you rely on hovering the mouse cursor to get the tooltip. My own experience is that the tooltips don’t always work or take for ever to appear and it all becomes very frustrating. You want to show text and you can but then there isn’t enough space to get everything in!

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The Microsoft  Remote Shutdown Tool can also be used to shutdown or restart a local computer. Creating shortcuts to do this using the various options available enables different user defined alternative shutdown procedures to be defined. Also you can create a shortcut to STOP the shutdown process once started providing this is within the timeout period .

This is certainly not a new tip but a post today on one of my favorite blogs also showed how a GUI can be started, more of this at the bottom of this post. What I thought may be useful would be to give a overview of the available options and how to create the shortcuts to help less experienced readers.

This is a screenshot of three shortcuts I have created to shutdown, restart and stop the shutdown process.

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What Is It?

DeskPins is a program that will “Pin” any window to keep it “Always on Top” of other windows. While there are many other programs out there with this facility and some programs have this as a built in option for themselves, DeskPins has the extra ability to “Pin” by rules based on the Window name.

Why Would You Want It?

Loosing focus on the current window you are working in can be anything from irritating to disastrous if, like me, you are frequently looking away from the screen while typing. My recent post TIP - Stop Applications in Windows Stealing Focus gives you more information and a way to change settings to help deal with this problem. However, due to the different ways in which developers implement their programs the solution suggested doesn’t always work. DeskPins is a way of making sure that important programs that you are working in never loose focus (depending on how you set the rules ).

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Keeps any Window “Always on Top” (Topmost)
• Allows Rules to be set to Automatically “Pin” a window
• Wildcards allowed in rules
• Set Global Hotkeys

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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Applications in Windows have a nasty habit of stealing focus from the program you are currently using. Generally this is because the default registry settings have been overwritten by a program installation. It is quite easy to change the settings back to the default either by editing the registry or by using a “Tweak” program such as Microsoft’s TweakUI. This problem has recently been driving me mad, I am not a touch typist so tend to spend a lot of time looking at the keyboard while typing. So, every time a program steals focus I loose the work I am typing and sometimes make changes to the program that stole the focus.

UPDATE - Also see this post DeskPins - Help to Stop Other Windows Stealing Focus

To change settings install TweakUI from here:

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News

Today I receive a notification box for Google Calendar Sync on my main PC so I duly said yes to the update offer and it installed flawlessly.

I have previously posted Google Calendar Sync Test - Very Good But Not Perfect which gave a review of version 0.9.2.8 which gives details of some of the problems I found. (See the post for details )

A quick visit to the Google Calendar FAQ site didn’t reveal any details of what has been changed but a visit to the Google Calendar Forum resulted in finding a post that listed current issues:

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USB flash drives, memory sticks, etc. normally come preformatted as FAT (FAT16). This has four main advantages and one big disadvantage.

FOR:

• FAT16 is quicker than FAT32 or NTFS for writing files to the drive.
• The number of read/writes is less than NTFS for any given set of files actions.*
• Data loss is less likely when unplugged without using “Safe Removal” ** (more…)

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