Installation, updates, general problem solving and assistance.
User avatar
Steven W
VIP
Posts: 2862
Joined: 2013-08-10 22:40

2019-05-01 06:16 »

Yeah, let's start one of these threads. What software do use that you can't live without? Tell us about the little utilities that do a great job of that one thing you needed to do.

I'll get the ball rolling:

I recently found the Microsoft Excel Viewer doesn't open CSV files. That's kind of a pisser given that Excel will. Here's a good small program just for that purpose:

CSVFileView
https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/csv_file_view.html

I was delighted when I was searching for such an animal and ran across NirSoft. I have previously used another tool when attempting to slap Win 95's Explorer on 98 SE:

ShellExView
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

Now, that's something you won't need on a daily basis, but that's one of the easiest ways to figure out what the hell is going on with those shell extensions.

For Registry Cleaning, I generally recommend CCleaner:

CCleaner
https://www.ccleaner.com/

I trust this one so much that I let it delete registry entries without backing them up and the other tools in there are pretty useful too.

When I was working on my 98 project, I found this one would find a bit more, and according to my quick eyeballing, it seemed good. I didn't use it after I got everything set up to my liking though.:


Eusing Free Registry Cleaner
http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cle ... leaner.htm

While I don't entirely trust this one (I never let it go manually), I do use it to search for things that are related to junk I remove from fresh XP installs:

RegCleaner 4.3.0.780
http://m.majorgeeks.com/files/details/regcleaner.html

For general Photo/Image viewing and light editing (crops/resizing/hue, brightness, contrast adjusting), nothing will ever beat IrfanView in my eyes:

IrfanView
https://www.irfanview.com/

FYI, the paint plugin on that page (under plugins) makes drawing arrows to point out things you're wanting to bring attention to a breeze.

To close out (*just for the moment*) I'll mention VLC. When Windows Media Player just doesn't cut it and you just want to be able to play your audio/video files without a ton of plugins:

VLC
https://www.videolan.org/


User avatar
Steven W
VIP
Posts: 2862
Joined: 2013-08-10 22:40

2019-09-09 02:35 »

! wrote:
2019-05-02 02:48

GIMP
https://www.gimp.org

7-Zip
https://www.7-zip.org

LibreOffice
https://www.libreoffice.org
:thumbup:

I think you know how much I love 7-zip, not only for archive files, but extracting files from EXE files, MSI files, MSU files...

Seamonkey
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

They recently put out an update that is still compatible with XP, but it may be the last.
SeaMonkey and the future

Wow! A new release and two news items together. What is cooking?

With the SeaMonkey 2.49.5 release the 2.49.x line comes to an end. Unless a catastrophic bug is discovered 2.49.5 will be the last ESR 52 based version. Backporting security fixes and at the same time working on the next, already overdue, major release is not possible with the few remaining developers.

Plans are to do further interim 2.53 versions based on a much enhanced Gecko 56 base while working on bringing you the next ESR 60 based 2.57 version. After 2.57 we will decide about the future. The current Mozilla Gecko codebase has seen a flow of constant major changes and api removals in the last 2 years and is no longer really usable for our needs. By the end of the year the SeaMonkey project is expected to be completely independent of Mozilla. We will see how this pans out but we are doing our best and already have a new infrastructure in place where we do builds and website hosting.
It's not only a browser:
seamonkey.jpg
seamonkey.jpg (43.38 KiB) Viewed 23097 times
I hate to say it, but I'd almost like to see them split from Mozilla and go their own way. If they could maintain Win XP, Vista and 7 support, they'd probably see an increase in donations.

WinUpdatesList
https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wul.html

Another NirSoft creation that I recently found useful :wink:

MediaCoder
http://www.mediacoderhq.com/

This can be a bit flaky when trying to be really advanced with settings, but for quick and dirty video converting, I think it's easy to use.

Avidemux
http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/

This can still be a bit flaky on Windows, but it's improved immensely in the past few years. On Linux, Avidemux is simply great. If you find you need to edit, resize add overlays... to an MP4, this is the first thing I try. It has wonderful options for audio conversion too.

Audacity
https://www.audacityteam.org/

For audio editing, this is pretty close to perfection.

User avatar
Steven W
VIP
Posts: 2862
Joined: 2013-08-10 22:40

2019-09-09 03:41 »

Geez, I forgot about a minor issue with Seamonkey and Google that happens on XP, Google search, among other things, is messed:
google_search_messed.jpg
google_search_messed.jpg (112.29 KiB) Viewed 23096 times
This is something Google is doing, not a problem with Seamonkey.

There's an easy fix:

open a new tab and type 'about:config' in the URL bar, press Enter

Click the 'I accept button'

Right click somewhere in the page and choose New, then String

in the New String Value dialog box enter:

'general.useragent.override.google.com'

then in the Enter String Value dialog enter:

'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0'
google_search_fixed.jpg
google_search_fixed.jpg (113.43 KiB) Viewed 23096 times
There's people out there telling you to use a Trident (Internet Explorer rendering engine) entry for the string value. My advice is not to use that as it causes more errors. Apparently just bumping your Windows version in the string value is enough. :wave:

User avatar
Steven W
VIP
Posts: 2862
Joined: 2013-08-10 22:40

2020-08-27 05:13 »

Word 5.5 for DOS:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... 55_ben.exe

That's come in handy for a thing or two.
Wd55_ben.exe
(3.34 MiB) Downloaded 555 times

User avatar
Steven W
VIP
Posts: 2862
Joined: 2013-08-10 22:40

2020-10-08 21:39 »

I've been finding that in order to do any real work in a spreadsheet that Apache OpenOffice is beating the shit out of LibreOffice. One example that I can think of right of the top of my head, I went to sort data in a column, in Libre, and it wouldn't sort because I had the text aligned (I don't recall if it was left or right-aligned). I've also ran into some Macros that don't work in LibreOffice. There were other issues that I can't recall at the moment. I stopped torturing myself and just went with OpenOffice.

http://www.openoffice.org/

User avatar
!
30%
Posts: 3259
Joined: 2013-02-25 18:36

2020-10-09 11:10 »

But didn't they stop developing it or something? I can't remember what it was exactly but when researching which one to choose, I went with Libre Office but more I don't remember why. :think: I think maybe it was that Libre Office had better support for newer file formats and also exporting in newer formats.


User avatar
Steven W
VIP
Posts: 2862
Joined: 2013-08-10 22:40

2020-10-09 23:46 »

I wouldn't take Wikipedia as gospel, but it's good enough:
Members of the OpenOffice.org community who were not Sun Microsystems employees had wanted a more egalitarian form for the OpenOffice.org project for many years; Sun had stated in the original OpenOffice.org announcement in 2000 that the project would eventually be run by a neutral foundation[93] and put forward a more detailed proposal in 2001.[94]

Ximian and then Novell had maintained the ooo-build patch set, a project led by Michael Meeks, to make the build easier on Linux and due to the difficulty of getting contributions accepted upstream by Sun, even from corporate partners. It tracked the main line of development and was not intended to constitute a fork.[95] It was also the standard build mechanism for OpenOffice.org in most Linux distributions[96] and was contributed to by said distributions.[97]

In 2007, ooo-build was made available by Novell as a software package called Go-oo (ooo-build had used the go-oo.org domain name as early as 2005[98]), which included many features not included in upstream OpenOffice.org. Go-oo also encouraged outside contributions, with rules similar to those later adopted for LibreOffice.[99]

Sun's contributions to OpenOffice.org had been declining for some time,[100] they remained reluctant to accept contributions[101] and contributors were upset at Sun releasing OpenOffice.org code to IBM for IBM Lotus Symphony under a proprietary contract, rather than under an open source licence.[102]

Sun was purchased by Oracle Corporation in early 2010. OpenOffice.org community members were concerned by Oracle's behaviour towards open source software,[103][unreliable source?] the Java lawsuit against Google[104] and Oracle's withdrawal of developers[105] and lack of activity on or visible commitment to OpenOffice.org, as had been noted by industry observers[106] – as Meeks put it in early September 2010, "The news from the Oracle OpenOffice conference was that there was no news."[107] Discussion of a fork started soon after.[108]
https://lwn.net/Articles/443989/ (citation 102 from the article, obviously dated).
So what's left of the OpenOffice.org community now? Almost all of the people who worked on it outside of Sun/Oracle have joined together to create the Document Foundation. As far as I can tell all that's left of OO.o is the project shell, with no development work in progress because Oracle has now stood down all the staff it had working on the project, plus one or two voices trying desperately to make us believe they still have some authority to comment because they used to be involved with it.
Since being handed over to Apache, there's been some slow work being done. It seems as though work on LibreOffice went hog-wild, but that may not always be a good thing.

User avatar
Steven W
VIP
Posts: 2862
Joined: 2013-08-10 22:40

2020-10-09 23:55 »

In fairness, LibreOffice probably does have better compatibility with the newer MS Office formats, but if you use the older office 97-2003 formats to save in OpenOffice, it's generally more than good enough. For my purposes (the incidents I'm speaking of in previous post), I didn't really need MS Office compatibility, I just need to sort through a bunch of info. I was working on my little XP updater project.

Do you do much work with Spreadsheet in WPS, problemchyld?

Post Reply