Long vacation, iTunes, and SonicStage
Hello to all my beloved readers (in case there is still any). It has been so long since my last post in this blog. The last post dated on 23rd June and today it is already 11th November! Well, I really did not have enough time to blog, as I was very busy preparing myself for exams. And now I am back. Because it is now winter in Germany, I really do have ample of time at night, as the sun goes down at 5 o’clock.
Ok, back to business. Today I want to write something about digital music player. For some reasons, I would like to have an iPod now and the new iPod Touch is very appealing. This thing started as I began to use iTunes as my music player instead of Winamp. For me, iTunes is a very ingenious. The main reason why I like iTunes is that it can manage podcast very well. If I were to have an iPod, the experience with iTunes will be greater because iPod and iTunes seem to have seamless integration.
Now, my digital music player is one of Sony Walkman MP3 player, which I borrow from my friend, as he has already got his iPod, the new iPod Nano 3rd Generation to be exact. And the best part of Sony MP3 player is the attrac file format, which compresses the music better, without compromises the quality of the sound. In other words, the sound is still great to many ears even at low bit rate, compared to mp3. But the best part is also the worst part. Since I do listen to lots of podcasts, it is very annoying to first download the files from website and then convert it to atrrac using SonicStage format to be stored into the player (Sony MP3 Players do not support Drag-and-Drop). If the SonicStage is a great as iTunes, the world will be better, at least for me. Or if SonicStage just supports RSS Download for podcast…
Problem to set Firefox as standard web browser in Windows Vista
Somehow I could not set up Firefox as fully standard browser. At first start up of Firefox, I was reminded that Firefox was not a standard browser and asked to make Firefox as standard web browser. I did tick the selection and Firefox icon appeared on the very above of the start menu.
But, when I clicked links from Yahoo! Messenger or Acrobat Reader, the links were opened with Internet Explorer. I do not hate Internet Explorer, but I just want to use one browser and the links should be opened in one window, so that the taskbar is not too crowded.
I thought it was a method from Microsoft so that people will tend to use Internet Explorer, but I was mistaken. The setting of the standard programs can be change. To make your Firefox as fully standard browser for your Windows Vista, just follow these simple steps:
Start button > Control Panel > Programs > Default Programs > Set program access and computer defaults
and this window will appear:
Untick the option “Enable access to this program” and then click OK. After that, the links you click from other program such as Yahoo Instant Messenger or Adobe Reader will be opened via Firefox. But, the links from Windows Live Messenger are still opened in IE7.
How to expand your primary partition in Windows Vista
Hello. Yesterday, I have installed Windows Vista on my computer. Actually, I had already done that before, but due to the lack of memory of my laptop, I reverted back to Windows XP. After upgrading the memory to 1.5GB, I decided to give Vista one more trial.
The installation was successful as before. But this time, Windows Aero can be done. Last time, even Windows Sidebar did not load automatically after the installation. Maybe 512MB is not enough to run Windows Sidebar efficiently. And I started to love Windows Vista. Microsoft was right with the “Wow” of Vista.
Back to the main topic. After the installation, I realized that my primary partition was only 15GB, which is minimum requirement for Vista. The size of the partition was enough at the time I used XP, but now I need to expand the size.
Vista can do the partition resizing without third party software (link), but for the primary partition, you can only shrink the volume. Therefore, I visited Windows Marketplace to find compatible disk manager software for Vista. And they do have solution, which will cost you $50.00.
Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 is compatible with Vista and has resized my primary partition to the size I wanted. The only problem I had by this software was, I cannot open it and the error said that I don’t have enough privileges to run the program. This can be fixed by using “Run as Administrator” optio
And for those who hasn’t try Vista yet, do try it and feel the Wow!
