Author Archives: NeoSmart Technologies

EasyBCD 1.52 Up for Download

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
5

EasyBCD 1.52 has just been made available on the public servers for download. This is the primary reason for the relative lack of post activity here on The NeoSmart Files, we’ve been really busy with this build.

  • TweakVI Integration
  • Emergency bug fix for Vista/LH non-C: Entries
  • Nifty new section – “Useful Utilities”

Anyway, check it out for yourself, the only way to actually understand what “Useful Utilities” does is to see it at work firsthand. As always, should you feel compelled to say thank you: EasyBCD is a 100% free non-profit product and donations are accepted.

Download EasyBCD

VMware 6.0 Beta & Visual Studio 2005 SP1

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
1

Just a quick warning to anyone officially beta testing VMware 6.0 Beta on a system with Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (final) installed: it doesn’t work.

VMware 6 Beta will install OK, but if, during the setup, you opted to install the (much awaited) Visual Studio IDE plugin, you will no longer be able to use Visual Studio 2005. If you haven’t installed Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005, you’ll be OK. It seems VMware Inc. didn’t test their product out on the recently released SP1 update.

Current workaround is to explicitly set VMware setup to not install the Visual Studio plugin. If you already installed it, just use Add/Remove Programs to “modify” the VMware 6 install, and de-select the IDE plugin from the list of features to be installed.

EasyBCD & TweakVI Team-up for the Win!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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The two coolest companies have a gift for everybody: NeoSmart Technologies & Totalidea Software, publishers of the two highly-popular Vista tweaking utilities EasyBCD and TweakVI respectively, are proud to announce the partnership of both our award-winning softwares! TweakVI and EasyBCD have come together to offer our users the very best and complete control over practically every aspect of your Vista. It’s your PC, you control it the way you want!

Together EasyBCD and TweakVI allow users to completely setup and customize their Vista setups, from the bootmenu to the startup screen to the shutdown window: Complete Control! If you haven’t had the chance to experience either, now is the time! Here’s what they do:

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Totally Redone Feed System

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If you ever wondered why our feed subscribers count was low despite our rankings and other indexes, don’t worry about it anymore. We’ve completely rewritten the “feed maker” for NeoSmart Technologies, and it’s solved a great number of chronic problems that had our loyal subscribers less-than-happy.

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Why is $_SERVER[] Considered a “Class?”

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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There seems to be a minor bug/glitch in our Request_URI for Windows that we can’t figure out, so if anyone has any idea, please give us a holler, or post below if you like. Under times of high load (and sometimes without), PHP completely crashes and dies until the worker process is restarted with Using $this not in object context as the “die message” that shows up for all requests. However, our script doesn’t use a class, and makes no calls to one either.

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Vista and Longhorn Wallpapers Gallery

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Just a quick update of sorts: The NeoSmart Technologies Image Gallery now has every single Longhorn and Vista wallpaper released to date,1 most in hi-res, all available for free download. They’re really beautiful and capture what Vista is all about – whatever that is. That’s over 120 high-quality wallpapers for you to enjoy!

  1. We’ve done our very best to make sure we have them all, but if we’re missing some, please, let us know. ↩

EasyBCD 1.51 Released: Dual-Boot Vista and Anything!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
21

After two months of crazy bug-hunting and hundreds of rounds of scenario testing, EasyBCD 1.51 is finally out. If you’re in a really big hurry, go and get it – if not, read on. EasyBCD 1.51 is a very major change from 1.5.

As a matter of fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that it would completely ruin our release schedule, this release would have been dubbed EasyBCD 2.0. It’s that big.

Use our Windows recovery disks to:
✓ Fix all boot errors
✓ Resolve startup BSODs
✓ Restore registry and settings
✓ Clean up virus infections
Easy Recovery Essentials is available for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8. Windows XP and Windows Server editions are also supported.
Download Easy Recovery Essentials

What makes EasyBCD 1.51 so special is the switch in purpose and technique. In the past, EasyBCD was only a bootloader modification tool that let end-users configure the Windows Vista bootloader, and EasyBCD 1.5 added support for “profiles” that could be used to boot into Linux, BSD, & OS X. Not only does EasyBCD 1.51 add support for several other operating systems, but also it goes a step further. A very big step further. Now, if there is anything that Vista’s BCD bootloader can’t boot into, EasyBCD 1.51 comes with its own additional bootloader that can boot into it. It’s called NeoGrub, and you’re going to love it.

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20 Hours of Downtime

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
1

PHP really sucks. Unbelievably so. On LAMP, it’s awesome. But if you’re on a new, shiny WIMP server, PHP is the pits. PHP stability on IIS is about 1 over a million that on a LAMP server. So we’re sorry. We’re sorry we had a 20 hour outage and couldn’t do anything about because we had no idea it happened. We’re sorry we ever thought we could trust PHP on Windows/IIS for even a minute under virtually no-load without keeping our eyes on it. We’re especially sorry that NeoSmart Technologies, the blog, the forums, the downloads, the whitepapers, and all the resources were unavailable for that long.

Ever since moving to Windows, we’ve had unbelievably great results on MySQL, JSP, and ASP. But with PHP, it’s been nightmare after nightmare to no end. PHP corporation (or whatever it is) is aware of this, though they’re not confessing to any particular bugs nor are they expressing any interest in solving this. We moved to PHP 5.2 in hopes of addressing the stability – according to PHP, that was fixed. What they neglected to mention was a bunch of other bugs that still haunt PHP’s quest for stability on a Windows Server. IIS auto-restarted per our configuration, but the entire server needed a reset to get PHP working again. Ugh!

Anyway, we’re back up now, and we’re looking at some of the alternate PHP engines out there. Nothing is like PHP of course, because “there isn’t a need” for a PHP-compatible PHP replacement (then again, just by the sound of it..) but several Windows-specific “PHP compilers” exist that would take care of the issue. Then again, we could always jump down to PHP 4 – but that’s just scary. At any rate, rest assured, we’re scouring the web and working nonstop looking for a solution to this nonsense.

Whatever Happened to MSN's “AdSense” Anyway?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Back when Yahoo! first announced their plans for a pay-per-click advertising program to compete with Google’s highly-successful AdSense program, Microsoft also expressed interest in the field, and had decided to do likewise following the successful re-launch of its MSN Ads program. MSN Ads is basically AdWords – context-based pay-per-click ad campaigns directed at advertisers, not publishers. However, the adCenter re-launch was months ago (way back in May), and we were originally promised pay-per-click ads for publishers would debut some time in the Summer of ’06.

It does seem that the idea was scrapped, as a matter of fact, MSN adCenter was “looking for guinea pigs” since over a year ago. While some sporadic blog posts on the subject, the only contextual-advertising solution coming out of Microsoft’s camp any time soon is for advertisers who want in on the MSN Live Search ads. It seems that Microsoft has finally decided to stop re-inventing the wheel, and learn from the mistakes of others. Yahoo!’s own Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) isn’t doing too hot, so perhaps that’s a wise decision in the end.

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5 Things Yahoo! Does Best & Why It's Not Enough

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Whenever someone at Yahoo! makes headlines for something or the other, people are always quick to start the Yahoo! bashing. Although we don’t think Yahoo! is the coolest company out there either, they’re certainly not another AOL as people love to imply. Yahoo!, like any other company/corporation/media-giant out there does some things right, some things wrong, and beats the hell out of the competition in other areas; but for some reason, people tend to forget.

Yahoo!’s biggest obstacle to success and popularity today is that despite all of it’s Web 2.0 efforts (like an extremely-hyped WordPress Blog, Web 2.0 AJAX toolkits, a re-designed email interface, etc., etc.), it remains associated with “old” in the minds of many geeks today. That’s not necessarily true, and as you will see from some of the points below, the only archaic thing left at Yahoo! is the Management.

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