How to force delete files in Windows 7 & Vista

Have you ever wanted to delete files from a previous windows installation, but you couldn’t because of a permission error.

Most of the times, it is purely a problem of ownership over the files you wish to delete. If you are the administrator of the computer, than there is a quick solution of taking the ownership of the files, adding the Take Ownership in your right click context menu.

How to add this option in the context menu.
You have to download this file: InstallRemoveTakeOwnership.zip

Once you did this, extract the contents in a folder. There are two registry files insinde, one that adds the Take Ownership context menu option, the other that removes it.

Double click InstallTakeOwnershipOption.reg

Now right click the folder you want to delete, then select Take Ownership.

Once the operation is completed, you have the full ownership of the folder, and you can go further deleting the file.

To remove this option from the context menu, just click on the other registry file RemoveTakeOwnershipOption.reg

What if I still cannot delete the file

If the problem still persists, then it is not related just to permissions. We could be talking about a file blocked by the system, a damaged file…

If you are sure about what you want to do, I recommend in this case a more advanced solution, a tool that serves exactly this purpose - the Unlocker.

It can handle very well a number of special cases when it comes to deleting a file such as the Access denied, sharing violations, source in use, file in use, ..and so on.

Adrian

Set active partition in Windows XP, Vista & 7 using command line

Scenario: you have installed an OS such as Mac OS X on a secondary partition, and after restart you can no longer boot-up your system.

Solution: boot using your Windows cd/dvd; get into the command prompt and type diskpart 

 

Type list disk to see the list of disks installed in your system. Type select disk 0, assuming 0 is the number of your disk containing your partitions.

Now that we have selected the disk, type  list partitions to get the list of all partitions on the disk.



To activate the desired partition type select partition n, where n is the partition number. 
Now that we have selected the desired partition, we can mark it as active by typing active

Adrian

Saving TFS (Team File System) passwords in XP, Vista and Windows 7

This is a small tutorial for those that work with Visual Studion and TFS, and are annoyed by the fact that every time you try to open a project, you have to type in your user credentials. In present there is no simple way to store the credentials in the project itself, at least not yet :)

Instead, there is another solution - to add your credentials into Windows Credential Manager.

In Windows XP

1. Go to Control Panel, click on User Accounts, Advanced, Manage Passwords, then Add
2. Enter the TFS Server address
3. Enter your credentials, username and password

In Windows Vista
1. Go to Control Panel, Click on User Accounts, Manage your Network Passwords, then click Add
2. Enter TFS Server address
3. Enter credentials

In Windows 7
1. Go to Control Panel, Click on User Accounts & Famili Safety, Click on Credential Manager
2. Add TFS Server in Windows Credential Section
3. Enter TFS Server address and your credentials

Edit: This applies also to those that are using tools like Microsoft Office Word or Excel with TFS.

That’s it!

Adrian

Dual Boot Windows 7 or Vista with Mac OS X Leopard

Since the beginning of this year I had a lot of fun challenging myself to install Leopard on one of my PCs, a Samsung NP-M55. I could say that the whole process was maybe more pain than fun, but the result worth the time spent – you’ll get a Mac without really buying one.
I don’t have to mention that since a Mac OS X is designed to work only with Apple hardware, even with the big community of people that are trying to mod drivers for PC hardware to work on Mac, there is no guarantee that your computer will ever even boot Mac :)

Anyway, I decided to write a few guides on different topics based on my experiments.
One big problem I faced was dual (triple) booting.

What is needed:

    - Windows 7 or Windows Vista DVD

    - Leopard or Snow Leopard DVD, I used the iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Universal PPF6 Final v1.1.iso which can be found on the internet, but any other image is good.(iPC)
     - EasyBCD 2 (I used beta) get it here

The steps are the following:
1) Install Windows 7, or Vista, or if you have it already installed, you can skip this step, reinstalling is not required.

2) Make sure you have a partition ready formatted or free for installing Mac OSx. Installing Leopard takes up around 8Gb, so I would recommend at least 10 Gb.

3) Boot from the Leopard DVD. When selecting where to install it, open Disk Utility from the menu. Select the empty partition and format it as a Mac OS Partition. Install Leopard on it after.

4) After reboot, you won’t be able to boot back into Windows unless the boot manager is repaired. To do this, use the Windows 7 DVD to boot and select System Recovery. Once the System Recovery Options window appears, choose the Startup Repair Option. As soon as it will finish repairing the boot, restart your computer.Remove the Windows DVD, and continue booting in windows.


4') As an extra step in case you have more than one windows partition on your computer, and the System Recovery could not repair your boot for both Windows installations. This occurs because the partition was marked as inactive. Activating it can be done from System Recovery Command Prompt using diskpart. More details here.
In case you can still boot in one of the Windows OS, execute Computer Management, select Disk Management, right click on your other windows partition, and select Mark partition as Active. Then Reboot.


5) Now to add the boot entry for Mac OS X. Boot in Windows. Run EasyBCD . Click on Add/Remove Entries. Select Mac tab on Add an Entry group, then name your Entry, and in the Mode, select MBR. The click add Entry.

That’s it. Now reboot!
There is the problem of drivers, as the installation is not very easy and you have to do a lot of manual customisation, but I will discuss this in another post. In the meantime check Hackint0sh, InsanelyMac, OX86Project

Enjoy your Mac :)

Adrian

VideoTrace

A very promising project from the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies.

“Quoting their site: VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video—models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model. Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail..”
Adrian

The song of 99 bottles of beer

Almost everyone of us has for surely ran into this song. There is nothing special about it except the number of bottles in each verse that decreases until it reaches 0 and then everything starts over - what better example of a "loop".
So why not writing the song in all possible languages we can think about :)

Check it out here

http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/

Enjoy!

Adrian

Execute XBAP in Google Chrome

This is an article for the fans of Chrome - viewing hosted WPF pages in Chrome.
By default this is not supported in Google Chrome (and apparently is not going to be supported officially too soon).
The support can be manually added by copying of libraries from an installation of Mozilla. So to be able to add this functionality, a few steps need to be followed:

Make sure you installed both last version of Chrome and Mozilla Firefox 3.0.0+.

The following libraries found in Mozilla Firefox instalation directory
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
have to be coppied to Chrome instalation directory;

Assumming Chrome is installed in the following directory, USER corresponds to your windows user.
C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application

js3250.dll
mozcrt19.dll
nspr4.dll
nss3.dll
nssutil3.dll
plc4.dll
plds4.dll
smime3.dll
sqlite3.dll
ssl3.dll
xpcom.dll
xul.dll


This is about it. Enjoy Chrome!
Adrian