I have been using Tweetie to tweet since quite sometime now. I love its interface and I do not need to wait for the user pages to load and stuff. In short am hooked on Anyway I had been using Tweet 1.3.2 all this time. So I just updated to Tweetie 2.0 and its got some updates that I wanted. Not that it was something that I was missing but what the hell I love it. Also they have tweaked the interface a little bit so all in all its awesome. Let me see if I can find anything wrong with this.

Now in my last post I showed you how to get around installing Windows 7 on your netbook. So now I will write about how to restore it in case something goes wrong.

Suppose you wanna install Windows 7 just for the heck of it but you dont wanna mess / lose the current OS of it and maybe like me ur a Symantec fanboi and you get your disk imaged. How to go about booting the SRD without a optical drive ????

Well here is the guide.. read on….

To create a USB startup disk with SRD follow this steps in a Windows Vista computer:

1. Open a Command Line window (run CMD.EXE) and then execute:

* diskpart
* list disk (to find your USB disk number)
* select disk [number of your USB disk]
* clean
* create partition primary
* select partition 1
* active
* format fs=ntfs
* assign
* exit

2. xcopy [your CD letter with SRD disk]:\*.* /s/e/f [your USB disk letter]:\

After this your USB disk will be bootable and you can use it to restore the image of the OS you had taken before.

Well my friends told me off when I said that I had a netbook and did not install Windows 7 on it yet… So I set out to install Windows 7 on my Acer Aspire One.

Its an Intel Atom N270 based netbook with 1GB of RAM and 120 GB’s of HDD space. Now the most asked Q; how to install Windows 7 on a netbook when it doesn’t have a DVD-ROM ???

Well I fished a tutorial on how to achieve it using a 4GB pen drive. Follow the instruction to the letter.

diskpart [launches diskpart]
list disk [lists the currently mounted disks, and assigns them a number]
select disk # [selects the USB drive, replace # with your disk's number]
clean [removes any MBR and partition information]
create partition primary [creates primary partition]
select partition 1 [selects the just-created partition]
active [marks the partition as active]
format fs=NTFS [formats the partition as NTFS]
assign [mounts the partition and assigns a drive letter]
exit [terminates diskpart]

After this pop in the Windows 7 DVD and then navigate to the boot folder in the DVD from a command prompt and type the following

bootsect /nt60 # [prepares the boot sector, replace # with your USB drive's drive letter]

*Note: If you are trying this out on Vista you should do it using an Administrator cmd prompt.

So after doing this I started to install Windwos 7. I noted down the time taken by Windows 7 to install on the netbook.

Installing Windows (Copying Windows Files; Expanding Windows Files; Installing Features; Installing Updates)- 8.27
Installing Windows (Completing Installation) – 6.07
Setup is preparing your computer for first use – 1.33
Desktop – 1.55

Total Time = 18.04

So its pretty decent.. So have fun and cherrio..

I have done quite some updates on my machine. Will be posting it one by one as I get time. Am starting with the monitor.

Finally I got a beauty…

The monitor dammit not the chick… but hey the chick is pretty cool too

So Microsoft release the Beta 1 of Windows 7 their upcoming OS after Vista. Its smooth looks like Vista and runs on H/W which gives sluggish performance on XP !!! I have decided if MS keeps up the speed of this OS just as it is now then I’m gonna buy it for each and every machine I own. Till then I’ll test it on my laptop having a 1.66 GHz Duo Procesor and 512 MB RAM on a 945 Chipset eek  !!!

Ok, this title is so apt because I just saw a review site that had a pic of 4 ATi gfx cards in CrossFire. I was like OMFG what the hell is that. And to top it those were ATi HD 3870 X2 ’s. Give the page a read here

So I went to this data recovery guy for some official work and I notice that he has a wide screen monitor. I instantly fell in love with it. So I decided to give my new mobile plan a ditch and buy a monitor instead. So keeping that in mind I went to my comp dealer and asked him about 19″ wide screen monitors. He showed me  a ViewSonic vw1912 and a Samsung SyncMaster 920NW. So it wasn’t difficult to make up my mind. And as per  Luigi’s words “Blackwall tires, they blend into the pavement, but these white wall tires, they say look at me, here I am, love me.” So that was it. Samsung it was! And to top it the 920NW was a plain monitor meaning no useless shapes and curves. I like simple stuff. Yeah curves do excite me but not on electronics So after getting it back home I unpacked it and plugged it in. Set the resolution to 1440×900 and viola !! Sweet space on my desktop. First I needed to scroll all the time. Now all I do is move my eyes sideways to look at the complete content. After hunting for some wallpapers got some really kewl walls and now am up and running.

Some pics of the beauty.

Now that I had some disk space lying around I thought why not dabble around with Linux. And my first choice was SuSE, because it was the best stock looking (in my personal opinion) linux.

So I went ahead by installing it in VMWare from the 5 CD’s that I had downloaded. After installing, as always, I wanted to install VMWare tools in the machine (so that I could have that option where the input was directed to the guest machine when my mouse hovered on the guest machine window), but even after installing the RPM I could still see that the VMWare tools weren’t installed. Then after googling around I found out that there was a script that was needed to be run so that the VMWare tools worked properly. The script name was ‘vmware-config-tools.pl’. Once you run this say yes first and then no and viola VMWare tools were setup.

Now I noticed that my audio wasn’t working in SuSE linux. So I issued the command lspci which showed me the below output.

See the line highlighted in red. That is the name of the soundcard that got detected by the OS. So then again I went on Google to search for sound drivers. At first I got all garbage, then I came across the ALSA page. From there I downloaded the latest pack of sound drivers and then unzipped it. Then the usual ‘./configure’, ‘make’ and ‘make install’.

After this finished I had to run a new command ‘./snddevices’. This created all the required sound devices in the /dev/snd directory. (Mind you I did not have the /dev/snd dir before running this command). After this is ran the ‘alsaconf’ utility from the utils dir and it detected my soundcard, asked me whether I wanted to load the same sound driver or a diff one, I said yes and then it ran something else and viola sound was up and running. After doing all this I gave the guest OS a reboot and everything was working like a charm. So if any of you guys get stuck somewhere, you can use this guide to help ya. Have fun.

This thread was my inspiration. There are lot of recommendations on that page. You can try what suites you. But here are the ones I like…

Menu Editor

This addon gave me the much needed power. Actually the default FF comes with a lil big rt click menu. I didn’t need much of the entries at all and hence was searching for this thing a long time from now. As you can see its just a matter of a single click and you can get rid of individual annoying menu entries.

Flashgot

This addon has been used by me for as long as I can remember. This addon directs the downloads to your fav download manager. Mine is flashget.

Download Statusbar

This addon adds a download statusbar right at the bottom line of the FF window. If you browse and download a lot of pictures like me then you need this. Sometimes we save images and then due to some or the other reason ff starts downloading the whole image from the site instead of taking it from the cache. That and also the download window doesnt open up on my FF by default if a dl is in progress. That is coz it takes up lot of taskbar space so that is why I use this.

FireFTP

This adds a FTP interface to FF. I personally dont use much of FTP’s but still I have this just in case

This is a small and nifty utility for all of us peeps who have loads of storage and kinda remember a file that we had saved up a long time back and now want it. If you have a good memory then you don’t need this at all. But if you are like me then you need this software. This software is very swift, very very light on resources and doesn’t interfere with your work at all. It minds its own business in the system tray, tho it uses 9MB of RAM, but I got 1 GB of RAM so it doesn’t matter to me. Anyways it indexed my 323 GB of data in 5 mins flat and started serving me search results in seconds. I mean you start to type a filename and it lists all the files that are on the hdd starting with that name. Give it a try its worth it.

Visit their site here.