Windows 8 is coming !!!!

So, it's time to welcome a new operating system - Windows 8 !
Unfortunately, I knew it was going to be bad from the first moment I heard the name.
I never liked Windows Vista, and I had a hard time trying to suck in the fact that Windows is going to be like  it when Windows 7 was out, and now, we're in the edge of a new Windows era !

The new Windows 8 offers quite a lot of features: It's very tablet friendly. It is good with gestures and seems to have a lot of new stuff introduced.
Although, the Start button is gone. Yup, that's right. The key button to identify Windows now is gone.
There's a whole crazy process from opening the computer to getting to your desktop, also.
After all, you're not supposed to use your desktop as your "desk top" any longer, but you should use the Start Metro View.

Here's a video about Windows 8:

There's a whole lot of people saying that "hey, let's give it a chance". Why should I?
Wasn't XP convenient to everyone using it? I'm still on XP, and I don't feel bad about it. In fact, I'm glad that I didn't need to spend my time in learning how to use my mouse from the beginning !

I'm really unhappy with the fact that Windows 8 is changing the desktop concept. I'm not unhappy with the Login being hidden, I'm not sad with the Start screen with all the tiles, not even the apps on the right click or anything.
I'm just sad with the fact that you cannot use your desktop as you used to. I'm against filling the desktop with a lot of useless things, but I do have a full Quick Launch, and I consider it very useful.

Also, 1000s of applications rely on the System tray as their main interface, including great apps: Gmail Notifier, AVG, Team Viewer, Spybot Search & Destroy, μTorrent, to name some.

I'm not old - I'm 23 years old, and I appreciate new technologies. Although, I won't appreciate this new version of Windows, because it is clear that it's not ready, and once again, they're rushing into decisions, as they did with Windows Vista.
Here are some proofs: There is a Control Panel that looks like 7 and Vista, but there's also a Settings view.
There's a Start Screen and a Desktop. There's no X button to close an App, when you use it from the Start view. You have to drag it out and down to actually close it.
When you're in the Desktop, you have to search for the Start view, instead of clicking a simple button.

To summarize: Would it really hurt to make the Start Metro View act like a Window inside the Desktop, and be triggered by the usual Start button?

How to empty the stuck print jobs queue, on Windows XP, from the command line !

So, I found this really useful article on the Microsoft website, on what to do when your Windows XP printer queue is stuck (as mine was, at the time) and I decided to write about it here.
I will not include the link to the microsoft page, because everyone knows that links to the Microsoft site simply won't work for more than a month, or probably a year, if you are very lucky!

Here are the commands you need to write. You can either save these in a .cmd file (Create a new text file, edit it with Notepad and change its extension to .cmd) or you can directly execute these in the Command Prompt.


net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl
net start spooler

So, what is it that these commands do?
1. Stop the Printer Queue process.
2. Delete all shd files in the Windows directory
3. Delete all spl files in the Windows directory
4. Restart the Printer Queue process.

That's all! The only side-effect I noted is that the Printer Queue tray icon will stay there until your next reboot.
Thanks for reading!

Essential freeware for a new PC !

I would like to present a quick list of the freeware I think is essential for a PC.

• Mozilla Firefox (free, Internet browser)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (free, Email client)
• Google Chrome (free, Internet browser)
• AVG (free, Antivirus)
• Spybot Search & Destroy (free, Anti-spyware)
• OpenOffice (free, office suite with very nice features)
• Windows Live Essentials (free, mostly Windows Live Messenger, the rest is far from essential)
• CCleaner (free, Cache, Registry and much more cleaner)
• 7zip (free, for zip, rar, 7z archives)
• Skype (free, Computer Telephone Like Communication)
• TeamViewer (free, All-in-one remote control of a PC. Please purchase if used commercially)
• TextPad (free, file editor, personally I prefer the 4.7 version)
• Foxit Reader (free, PDF viewer)
• FLV Player (free, name is self-intuitive)
• Virtual Clone Drive (free, mounts iso images as drives)
• Irfanview (free, image viewer with a great batch conversion feature)
• Gmail Notifier (free and great for Gmail users)

I personally couldn't use a computer as effectively as I do without all these free programs.

A big thanks to all the developers!

P.S.: Links are not provided for the freeware because it is quite easy to find them all with a single Google Search.

How to change the awful Joomla 404 page!

So, you have a Joomla site, and you constantly add and re-arrange stuff around, like renaming menu-items, aliases and turning on or off the SEF configuration.

Here's a great article that helps us do that.
http://www.hotjoomlatemplates.com/blog/joomla-template-tutorial/28-joomla-404-component-not-found-page-change

But what if I want to take one more step ahead of that? You might not want users to see a 404 page, even if that is a nice and pretty customized one.

You can add the following in the file %joomla_site_root%/templates/system/error.php ,
if you believe you can handle the PHP coding:

<?php
defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );
if (($this->error->code) == '404') {
  $url = "http://".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
  // Here is the part where we can distinguish what was the user's request about.
  if (strpos($url, 'content') != false) {
    // The user was probably looking for an article
    header("Location: http://yoursite.com/url_for_your_main_list_of_articles");
  }
  else if (strpos($url, 'contact') != false) {
    header("Location: http://yoursite.com/contact_page");
  }
}
?>

Depending on your content, and knowledge of your previous URLs that people might click, you can also check for the whole URL like

if ($url == 'http://yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55') {
  header("Location: http://yoursite.com/new_nice_sef_url_for_that_article");
}

Warning: You should always keep a backup before editing a joomla core file. Keep a backup before you start, and a backup of the edited file, after you are finished. This way, you can restore the original if you fail to do something, or restore the edited if Joomla replaces your work in an update.