Some simple command line tools

I had a client ask me how to do this the other day. If you wanted a text file, listing all the files in a directory, all you have to do is launch a command prompt (Start->Run, enter "cmd" and hit OK) go to the drive and directory in question (e.g. cd \temp) and issue a command like this:

dir /b *.* > files.txt

You can change the *.* to be anything, like if you want only JPG files, make it *.JPG. This will result in a files.txt being created, with a list of just file names.

Pretty simple stufff, I hope to post up some more advanced stuff soon.

Home PC Users, make sure you have enough power!

If you are like many home PC users, you probably have a very common problem. Many peripherals (which is basically just an old school geek word for devices) connected to your PC. Each hard drive, scanner, camera, and other USB devices as well as internal devices (newer video cards can have a HUGE power demand) are causing many home PC users who are upgrading to burn out power supplies. The old standard of 350 watts being "standard" and 450 being "overkill" are long over. Some new power supplies are 1000watts and cost over $400 for the power supply alone. So this leads to two questions. First, what is your power supply rated at? And second, how much actual power is your PC using? The first question is simple, you can usually read it on the power supply inside your computer case. The second question, the best way is to use a device like the Kill a Watt to check to see how many watts of power your PC draws. Also, based on these numbers, and adding the power draw of and other monitors and peripherals, you can estimate your maximum power draw to purchase the proper size UPS, also known as a battery backup.

Windows Update without Internet Explorer?

Is now becoming more and more possible with http://windowsupdate.62nds.com/

This site allows users of Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3, Netscape 4.0, Mozilla Firebird 0.7, Opera 5, or K-Meleon 0.9 (and all newer versions) to keep their copy of Windows up-to-date. This author tried it with two crashes of firefox (1.5 win32) but it is definitely a refreshing step in a semi-open-source (SOS?) direction!