Windows Software

September 24, 2014
3 min read

Previously, in my days of (possible) piracy of everything, installing all the software after reinstalling Windows was a pain. You had to download the latest version of the program from the website or torrent tracker, you had to install every program by itself, if it was from torrent tracker, you had to apply some kind of crack or jump through the goops in order to make it work. Later, came one of the greatest tools ever – Ninite, you could choose programs you want to install and get this bundle of apps (only those, that were free, of course). You still had to install cracked apps separately, but it was much lesser pain.

Today I don’t have questionable software on my computer and this time I’ve decided to download programs only as I need them. That way I won’t have cluttered laptop right away and it’s pretty easy to download and install something if I need it. So, I wanted to take time and write about all those apps that allow me to do my work, study and helped me not to lose all the data.

Microsoft Office 2013. I’ve mentioned it in previous post about reinstalling Windows. This is a great piece of software. You can start using it even before it installed on your PC, streaming apps is a very cool idea. Also it comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage space, I’ll talk about that a bit later. And for the price I paid It’s almost free – 70€ for 4 years. The greatest deal.

Microsoft OneDrive. Let’s get all the Microsoft products right out of the way. I’ve used Dropbox for a long time and love the product. They have some very interesting features, like saving Screenshots. (Windows 8 also saves screenshots if you press Win+PrintScreen). Also it offers integration with all sorts of services, but since I’ve started using Office 2013, I’ve migrated all my documents to OneDrive, integration with Office makes using it a lot easier.

Dropbox. I’m using it for the photo backup. It would make more sense to use 1TB of OneDrive for that, but Dropbox works with photos so much better, especially automatic photo uploader on Android.

Evernote. This one is interesting. Like Dropbox, I’ve been a user of Evernote for a long time, but I still have trouble managing it. I can’t find the system that works for me. Mostly I’ve tried everything tied to Notebooks, I still have to try managing everything using tags or try to use Google Keep. I dump all the articles I find interesting there, but then rarely read them.

Spotify. After Spotify came to Latvia, it became the only place I listen to the music. I’ve had couple of albums bought in iTunes, but I don’t have iTunes installed on my laptop for a long time. I cache one big playlist to my laptop, so I have something to listen to at all times.

Chrome. I’ve tried to use the newest IE for a couple of weeks and really liked it, but the lack of extensions just kills it. So still using Chrome as my main browsers. Ones in a while, I try every other of big browsers, but nothing matches Chrome, unfortunately.

That’s all the software I’ve installed after installing new OS and this is mostly stuff I do use daily. There are probably other programs I’ll install later, but I use those rarely, comparing to the main ones. 

Installing Windows is such a pain

September 23, 2014
3 min read

In the previous post I’ve wrote about hardware side of things when your hard drive fails. It’s definitely not the greatest experience in the world, as you realize you’ve lost all of your data. Fortunately, we live in the world full of clouds and the data is mostly safe. All of the photos, work documents and files for school were backed up to some kind of cloud solution. I could instantly remember couple of files I’ve lost, but not anything important.

How do you return everything back to normal? If you didn’t have some kind of hard drive clone (and I didn’t), you start by installing OS. Here Microsoft doesn’t make it easy, at least for me. In Latvia, installing Windows for most of the people is easy, you just download the copy you want with some sort of “activation” and install it, easy enough. I’ve went the legitimate rout. I’ve bought my laptop with Windows 7 and when 8 came out I’ve paid what was small amount then (about 30€) for the update. It seemed like a great deal at the time.

When you try to start from scratch, as I did, you can’t just install Windows 8 from scratch using your key, because your key is not good enough, it supports only updating from previous version of Windows. That means, I had to install Windows 7 first and then update it to Windows 8. Fortunately, I didn’t have to install all the updates for Windows 7 and could just go straight to upgrade. In addition, it’s worth mentioning, thanks to the speed of the SSD, it takes far less time than it used to, to install the OS.

Windows 8 is with us for a long time already and so it got many updates and there are some drivers updates, that means you have to download and install, in my case, 140 updates, before you can upgrade to Windows 8.1. That takes a long time. Nevertheless, tens of minutes and two or three restarts later you are ready to download Windows 8.1 upgrade. I’ve went to Windows Store app, where the big tile was waiting for me, but when I clicked “Download” it just showed an error message, which said something about not being able to download the update right now. Not very useful, considering the true reason of the message was not entering the code for the 2 factor authentication. How someone supposed to just know that is beyond my understanding. I’ve downloaded and installed Windows 8.1 and thought I could start downloading apps I use, but not too fast. There are couple more updates about 200MB in size. Why can’t they include all of the updates in to Windows 8.1 upgrade?

After you have your OS running, everything else is easy enough. Kudos to Microsoft for the new Office, all I had to do is go to the website and click Download button and in about 10-20 minutes I’ve had full Office suit running on my laptop, ready for typing this complaint. Clicking the second button, I’ve deauthorized previous install. Office 2013 is truly an outstanding product. 

Comparison videos

April 17, 2014
1 min read

Love comparison videos from thematic blogs. “Let’s see how they will handle Skype calls and the winner is Cortana!” Really? Makes sense, doesn’t it, since Microsoft owns Skype. Author could have tried making FaceTime call on all of the platforms and I think I could guess who the winner would be. 

And when asking for nearby restaurant, Google Now gave a result of one, that is 0.4 miles away, while the closest one from Cortana was 8.9 miles away, I’m not sure you can call it a tie. 

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Spotify’s biggest redesign ever brings long-awaited Collection view

April 9, 2014
1 min read

Spotify’s biggest redesign ever brings long-awaited Collection view

Unfortunately, without its famous yellow stars (and with the addition of a few prominent design cues), the app looks more than ever like a darker shade of chief competitor Rdio — but that might not be such a bad thing for Spotify.

I finally got the update and it messes up with the way I interact with an app. I’ve left Rdio because of all those features. I don’t need collections. I was syncing Starred playlist for offline listening on a phone and it was very easy to add a song to that playlist. Now I have to add it to my Collection and then to a playlist for sync? Not great at all.