Is Good Stuff

Over the weekends, I was trying to learn the ways on how to work faster without typing much codes and minimizing errors. The solution is learning to use Aptana’s Snippet View. Firstly, before we start – I would like to suggest rearranging your IDE into more simpler view.

I like to close unwanted views and combine three of my mostly used View into ones dock to the left side of the IDE namely, File, Project and Snippets.

Let’s move on, we will then need to create our own set of snippets – be it JS script, XML, HTML, CSS or whatever you are programming with this IDE.

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Simply put, a registry cleaner is a tool designed to remove unwanted information and repair invalid information in the Windows registry. A registry cleaner tool has many benefits. Let’s take a look at some of the most useful ones.

• The first and perhaps most important benefit is that a registry cleaner helps you maintain a healthy and error-free registry. This is required because the registry is a centralized database in which all configuration information related to software, hardware, system settings, and user profiles is stored and it controls almost all operations on your Windows computer. Windows does provide a registry tool, Registry Editor (regedit), however, it is very difficult to repair the complex registry using it. So, you can opt to use a good third-party registry cleaner tool that simplifies registry cleanup and repair by automating the whole process. In other words, by using a good registry cleaner you can repair and clean your registry within 2-5 minutes.
• Most of the registry cleaner tools available today are GUI-based and have a very simple-to-understand interface. So, even if you are not aware of the technicalities of your computer, you can use registry cleaner to perform regular registry maintenance.
• Many times, when you remove programs from your computer, some no-longer-required orphan keys and place-holder empty keys are left behind. These unwanted entries unnecessarily fill up the registry and generate registry errors. A registry cleaner tool helps you easily detect and get rid of these unwanted entries and enables you to fix registry errors.
• A registry cleaner also comes in handy when you are trying to remove some malicious virus or spyware from your computer. Many of these malicious programs add entries in the registry that are quite difficult to detect and remove. Using a reliable registry cleaner Vista or XP tool, you can perform a deep scan of the registry tree and weed out all malicious information. Additionally, you may use the tool to repair any registry entries that may be altered by these malicious programs.
• If the registry is large in size, it tends to get fragmented. As a result, the data access speed of the registry goes down. This, in turn, affects your PC performance and you may start encountering frequent system freezes and crashes. To help you counter this problem, a good registry tool helps you defrag your registry to rearrange the fragmented files and make them contiguous. Defragmenting the registry also helps in compressing the size of the registry. So, when you defrag, the size of your registry goes down and its files are contiguous. This helps in speeding up the registry and as a result enhances the performance of your computer.
• Because the registry is so important for your computer, it is a good idea to make regular backups of it. A good registry cleaner makes it very easy to create these backups by automating the backup and restore process. Also, a good feature that almost all good registry tools have is that they make a registry backup before making any changes to it during the registry cleanup and defrag process. So, if anything goes wrong with the repair process, you can easily restore the registry from the backup taken earlier.

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Computer errors may occur on Windows computers due to many different reasons. For example, error 0x80072ee2 occurs when your system faces problems while performing Windows update and spoolsv.exe error occurs due to problems encountered during printing. At times, problems such as svchost.exe Vista process showing high CPU may not generate an error message, but will still affect you by dramatically slowing down the system.

All these errors and problems occur due to different reasons and prevent you from working normally. This is the reason why it is essential that you take the proper measures to perform preventive PC maintenance and fix several computer errors.

Update your Software

Many Windows errors occur if your operating system and other software is not updated. Many security threats are built around vulnerabilities in various software products that may be installed on your computer. So, if you fail to update your software, you open up your PC to these threats. What’s more, you may miss out on many enhancements that manufacturers may include in these updates to improve the performance of their product. Therefore, make it a practice to update your software on a regular basis.

Detect and Remove Malware

If you are suddenly bombarded with errors, it may indicate a virus infection. In this case, it is recommended that you update your antivirus tool and then perform a thorough full system scan to detect and remove the infection. If an error message is displayed, you may search for a solution on the Internet. If you are lucky, you may be able to locate a tool to help you remove the specific virus with which your computer is infected.

If your desktop is bombarded with unwanted pop up ads, you Internet Explorer pages are hijacked, and your system suddenly deteriorates in performance, it may indicate a spyware infection. To remove a spyware, you need an antispyware tool. Update the tool and perform a full system scan to get rid of all spyware.

Clean your Registry

The Windows registry is a centralized, hierarchal database in which all system configuration and system settings related information is stored. So, whenever you work on your computer the registry is continually referred and updated. Because it is constantly working, the registry becomes quite prone to several problems pertaining to outdated, redundant, invalid, and malicious entries that may accumulate in it overtime. This unwanted data, causes the registry to grow to a very large size and become unstable. A large, unstable registry database can easily get damaged and generate errors. To prevent this problem, you must regularly scan and clean your registry. To do this, you may use a good, third-party registry cleaner tool. In addition to cleaning your registry, a good registry tool will also help you:

• Get rid of unwanted entries to prevent registry from bloating up.
• Compress your registry by defragging and reindexing files and thus improve the data access speed.
• Remove malware entries to ensure complete removal of virus and spyware.
• Fix specific computer errors, such as DLL errors, ActiveX errors, and COM/DCOM errors.
• Backup the registry database that you can use in case of system crashes to restore the registry.

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Working on project and worrying about what backup software to use? As a developer I often worry about my backup source other than SVN, how accurate is my daily backup, is it done hourly, daily etc?

For me, I would prefer a folder sync software to a remote destination. Much like the rsync command of the linux/unix platform. Basically a sync does is that it compares the target and destination folders – analysing the files modified and the copy over if needed be.

Sync is much a lighter process when compared to a routine full backup plus compression. Normally, if you are developer like me – project source codes don’t take much of a space so, syncing folders a indeed useful. A good software to get for this matter will be SyncBack Freeware Edition.

This freeware works like charm and dandy in all windows platform managing folder sync routine.

What we need next is also to set up a NAS (network accessed storage) is the best and affordable solution for a small IT setup or some can manage it at home with a simple network setup.

We just need to sync folders with the NAS with a followings settings

1. Source and destination folder
2. Start time per daily basis – I set it to 7.00 am every morning
3. Run Background Profile every 1 minute – every minute it checks two folders and perform sync only when there’s changes.

That’s it a free and simple settings to backup and your backup copies can be as accurate as 1 minute interval. Good Stuff

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Presenting "Virtual Clone Drive". Yet another post on handy Vista, XP friendly software which allows you to mount an ISO file to a virtual drive excluding malware, rootkit stuff and adwares. Yup, just plain simple freeware that does that.

This tool will be useful for those that like to create images of the DVD/CD and stored them as ISO files (backup purposes). These ISO files are made by software like imgburn / nero burning rom and etc. Originally, ISO files are made to be used as source disk reference for DVD/CD burning software.

With Virtual Clone Drive installed all your ISO files will be somewhat executable, simply double click on em, and the software will then mount a virtual drive that emulate exactly like the original DVD. Quite useful for those whom prefer simple drive mounting to checkout contents in ISO files.

Virtual Clone drive is available free for download here.

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