Bag of Beans

Here are a few useful shortcuts when using the command prompt in Windows.

We look at some useful keyboard shortcuts and commands that will help you personalize the MS-DOS Command Prompt Window without using the mouse.

You will also learn about hotkeys for executing DOS commands more quickly. The keyboard shortcuts are known to work in Windows Vista and XP command prompt.

• Link (via Lifehacker)
• More function key shortcuts

One user has written a pretty funny post on their experiences with Vista, and “upgrading” to XP. Based on reports like these, I’m glad I skipped the Vista upgrade cycle altogether and went straight to XP.

In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to <gasp> Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP.

• Link (via Slashdot)

You can now rest easy, knowing that, indeed, you can install 145 operating systems on one PC.

An operating system needs to reside in a home. That is a partition to me. I used 2×300Gb Pata disk and 2×200 Sata Disk to set up 152 partitions. I always put one operating system in one partition. As an extended partition of each hard disk has no storage of its own, one data-only partition is needed for my personal data, another data-only partition to house the common boot loader and one Swap partition is needed for all the Linux I ended up losing 7 partitions leaving 145 partitions to house the 145 operating systems.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Some useful tips for making your Ubuntu experience even better.

In this article i describe some of the things to do immediately after installing ubuntu on your machine . Since most of the people reading this would be shifting from Windows to Linux with a system dual booting so i would focus more on making transition easy from Windows to Linux.

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Use VMware Converter to create a VMware image from your physical machine. They have a free version (VMware Converter Starter) as well as a licensed version.

Use the intuitive wizard-driven interface of VMware Converter to convert your physical machines to virtual machines. VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines. It also converts virtual machines between VMware platforms. Automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats with VMware Converter.

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A candid rant by a Microsoft developer on Microsoft bureaucracy.

I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006.

The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should’ve been designed, implemented and tested in a week. To my happy surprise (where “happy” is the freude in schadenfreude), Joel Spolsky wrote an article about my feature.

I would like to try to explain how this steaming turd happened.

• Link (via reddit)
• Joel Spolsky’s article is here

ThePCSpy.com has compiled some benchmarks to find out how much your system is bogged down by various software packages. Norton Internet Security 2006 tops the list with a 57.78% increase to boot times!

The aim of this article is to find out what types of application slow down a computer the most. I’m going to be measuring the“speed” as the time it takes to shutdown, restart and get back to desktop (with auto-login) and start an application in the computer’s start-up settings.

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This article teaches you how to build your own initrd image.

The Linux® initial RAM disk (initrd) is a temporary root file system that is mounted during system boot to support the two-state boot process. The initrd contains various executables and drivers that permit the real root file system to be mounted, after which the initrd RAM disk is unmounted and its memory freed. In many embedded Linux systems, the initrd is the final root file system. This article explores the initial RAM disk for Linux 2.6, including its creation and use in the Linux kernel.

• Link (via Slashdot)