Wednesday, January 2, 2013

The last 600 Megabytes comes hard.


I have been cleaning up the hard drive on AntiqueLaptop.  I gave this HP laptop to youngest son when he was in high school.  Since then youngest son has graduated college, and the high school laptop wasn't cool enough for him, so it came back to me.  It has plenty of punch to run all my programs, and  I can sit on the deck in summer and web surf with it.  When I got it back, the 40 Gig hard drive was full.
    Some obvious weeding of music and games, followed by passes with CCleaner, turning off System Restore freed up 10 Gigs or so, enough to install M$ Visual C, all my digital photos, all my back email, lotta stuff.
    Then I ran Windirstat.  That showed me 2.7 Gigs of  recycle bin files that the recycle bin didn't see and would not flush.  Some how a second Recycler directory had taken root in Program Files.  That's not supposed to happen, but with Windows all things are possible.  Explorer failed to delete it.  But Windirstat has a zap files feature that did 'em  just fine.   

Then I found that  hidden system C:\Windows\Installer directory had grown to 1.6 Gigabytes.  A real diskhog on a 40 Gig laptop.  I was able to recover 0.6 Gigabytes with Microsoft program MSIZAP.exe.  The Installer directory is a space waster invented to support uninstallation of Office.  It contains hundreds of fat files with random number names.  Some (but not all) files are obsolete, they belong to old products previously removed from the system, except the uninstaller leaves the fat files behind.  The MSIZAP.exe program is a DOS program that with command line switches ! and G will delete any files in the installer directory that are not referenced in the registry. 
Step 1 is to obtain MSIZAP.  This is non trivial because Microsoft has withdrawn it.  Apparently Windows 7 and 8 are less robust than XP, and MSIZAP was breaking something in the "new and improved" Windows versions..  I am still running trusty XP, so I don’t care about breaking Win 7  and 8.   Despite the M$ down check, the program is so useful that private websites still have it.     I found it at: http://majorgeeks.com/downloadget.php?id=4459&file=15&evp=fe1c76da3437592326a3d668d72bf8f5  under the name “msicuu2.exe”  Actually msicuu2 is a fancier M$ installer cleaner upper.  The fancier part calls good old msizap to get the work done.  After downloading and installing the msicuu2 package you will find msizap.exe in the newly created Program Files/ Windows Installer Clean Up directory. 
Step 2 is to run it.  Do Start -> Run and then open a dos window by typing “Cmd.com” in the run box.  Use the DOS  CD command to set the current directory to c:Program File\ Windows Installer Clean Up.  Remember to inclose directory names containing spaces in double quote marks.  Such as
CD c:\”program files”
Followed by
CD “windows installer clean up”  to avoid typing a long filestring in one fell swoop. 
Then execute msizap with the following command line
Msizap !G 
Be sure to include the !G command line switches, otherwise the program may do bad things.  On my machine the msizap issued a couple of “Error 2”  messages and then reported removing about 20 files. 
Checking afterwards showed the Windows Installer directory had shrunk from 1.6 Gig down to 1 Gig. 
  That's a lot of work for a measly 600 Meg.  BTW,  I read a lot of web chit chat to the effect that MSIZAP does bad things to Win 7 and 8, and newer versions of Office so beware.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Article 1 Section 7

"All Bills for the raising of Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives;" 

Anyone know how the Senate can originate this morning's fiscal cliff bill?  Seem like they did, and the newsies haven't said anything about Article 1 Section 7.   

Monday, December 31, 2012

You Know You are Getting Old

When you need water pump pliers to get the cork out of the champagne bottle. 

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Murder as a hate Crime?

That's what they are charging Erica Menendez with after she confessed to pushing a man to his death in front of a NYC subway train. 
   What's wrong with plain old first degree murder?  That's been a crime since Moses brought the ten commandents down from Sinai.  The punishment for murder  under the law is harsh enough for any one's taste.
Why invent a new crime with a fancy name?
Welfare for lawyers anyone?


Over the cliff?

Who knows.  Obama was on Meet the Press this morning talking about it.  He spoke all the the usual platitudes but avoided the use of numbers.  Or anything else of substance.  He did say "We all agree on what to do."  Which obviously isn't true 'cause they haven't done anything. 
   The newsies aren't giving any information.  Like who's on what side, like what the sticking points are.  Boehner must know that the Republicans and the House will look better if they pass anything.  The last attempt was Plan B which failed to gain enough votes. The newsies haven't told us why it went down, who was for it and who was against it and why. Either the issue is too complicated for the average newsie to understand or nobody trusts newsies enough to talk to them.
   All Obama talks about is the need for soak-the-rich tax hikes.  And how it is all the Republican's fault for not passing them.  He doesn't mention that going over the cliff will bring in more revenue, giving him more money to spend.  He's gotta be in favor of that. 

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

We got another 2-3 inches of nice light powder yesterday and last night.  It's below freezing, overcast, and calm. 

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Retaliation against orphans

You would think the Russki's could find some other way of getting back at the Americans.  In retaliation for an American law ostracizing Russian gangsters/security agents, (the Magnitski amendment) the Russians decided to forbid American adoption of Russian orphans.
   For an orphan,  I have to believe that adoption by Americans beats the hell out of living in a Russian orphan asylum.  Even Russians have to know this. 
   I can understand the Russians desire to retaliate for the Magnitski amendment, but surely they could have found some way to do it that did not penalize their own most vulnerable citizens.  A tariff, extra paperwork, canceling US copyrights, hiking prices on exports, there has gotta be some other thing they could do that would irritate the Americans without penalizing their own.