Tag: microsoft

Published on by Dave

Shell Scripting on Windows

I want to write bash scripts to be emulated using cygwin. This has a problem in that XP uses spaces in its file folder hierarchies and the environment variable initialisation process isn’t good enough. This is actually a snip on writing shell script using cygwin. The virtual boix commands are just the use case which led to me doing the research. Continue reading “Shell Scripting on Windows” →

Published on by Dave

Microsoft RDP & Virtual Box

This article was written in 2010 and became defunct. I have not deleted it as I still use the product and that use is increasing. I may create an RDP page as I don’t expect to need this and the RDP integration with today’s W10 is much better. The article looks at using an ipodtouch to connect to a Windows 7 PC. Continue reading “Microsoft RDP & Virtual Box” →

Published on by Dave

Dell Dimension 5150c

This was originally entitled “Our New XP Box”. I changed the title when I copied the snip across to WordPress in July 2013. I marked the snip as deprecated in June 2019, added a picture to remind me. Here are my notes; the tags give a pretty good idea of what I needed to write about. This was an XP system and I wrote about external devices, anti-virus, fax and video capture. Continue reading “Dell Dimension 5150c” →

Published on by Dave

XML Paper System (XPS)

XML Paper System

I have a new laptop and have been configuring the additional tools and applications required to make it do a job of work. At the moment, I have no .pdf print driver yet and needed to save a web resource. I have Windows Vista 64 as my host OS and shall be running virtual box 32 bit guests. I was offered the fax driver, and the Microsoft XPS driver. I thought that PS would be some derivation of postscript, but it seems not.

I had discovered ixquick earlier in the morning, a privacy respecting search engine, and queried it using the search string “what application reads an .xps file”. XPS stands for XML Paper Specification and the Microsoft page hosting the application is fairly easy to find,

What is not clear is that this page is .net 3.0 and Vista ships with 3.5 and with the reader turned on. Attempting to install the reader again issues some odd error message about the windows feature switches. Reading the Microsoft page more clearly makes it clear that the viewer is installed in Vista, as does the association on the .xps suffix with an icon. The download should not be installed on a Vista machine.

makes clear that .xps docs can only be read using IE, although they document how to enable this for Firefox, it is an odd but interesting additional example about how IE is bound to the OS. In this particular example, I could have avoided all this ache by using the “Save Page as…” option.It seems I may need to revert to my more old fashion print solutions i.e. binding a postscript print driver to the FILE: port, or getting/buying a .pdf driver.

Published on by Dave

Norton Anti-Virus

For various reasons, I use Norton AV, now owned and distributed by Symantec. This was first written in 2008, and a year later I moved to Citihub where other anti-virus products were in use. I stopped using it about then. I have marked this page as deprecated. Continue reading “Norton Anti-Virus” →

Published on by Dave

External Disk on an XP system

This article was originally written in 2008, and was copied to this wiki in June 2013. It covers both moving XP windows directories from the internal local drive to the external disk, and some wish scripting to check the disk was on and remind people to turn it on if not already done. This article talks about the disk, filesystems, transferring the data, and writing some tcl/tk scripts including an motd to manage the remote “My Documents” folder. I changed the title from “External Disk on the Dell” since I had re-purposed the disk by 2013. This is now deprecated. Continue reading “External Disk on an XP system” →