Announcing EasyBCD 2.2: Windows 8 dual-booting and more!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
84

New EasyBCD logoQuick: what takes 5 years, two failed attempts, and thirteen contributors? Answer: EasyBCD with multilanguage support!

Who knew it would be this hard to release a version of EasyBCD that supports languages from English to Arabic and from Korean to Russian? We certainly had no idea it would take this long and this much work back in June of 2007 when we first attempted this gargantuan task! It turns out it’s not such an easy thing to organize and manage the translation of a medium-sized software project – and that no good tools existed to make it possible.

We were expecting to find (this late into the game) a plethora of .NET localization tools and resources that would make the job ridiculously easy, but it turns out all the existing solutions were terrible for one reason or another: too hard for non-developers to grasp, no versioning support, no on-the-fly deployment (i.e. requires recompilation), no unicode support, text-only interfaces, and the list goes on and on. We had to develop our own complete end-to-end translation and globalization framework and associated utilities (xml-based, text-editable, translation interface, versioning support, unicode support, on-the-fly deploy, string aliasing, derivable strings, language cleanup, outdated/missing string search, and more!), which we’ve open sourced to save others the trouble in the future.

Now that we have the excuses out of the way, let us introduce EasyBCD 2.2, complete with 13 languages from around the globe. With much thanks to the following people, we have been able to provide these languages out-of-the-box with EasyBCD 2.2:

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Windows XP Recovery and Repair Disk

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
18

This article shows you how to create a recovery disk for Windows XP, if you have the original CD (can be used as a recovery disk) or, if not, how to create a recovery diskette (floppy disk).

It also shows you how to download our recovery disk for Windows XP, if you don’t have the original CD available or can’t boot into Windows XP.

Download recovery disk for Windows XP

If you aren’t able to boot into Windows or don’t access to the recovery partition to create a system recovery disk, you can use our recovery and repair disk Easy Recovery Essentials to repair your Windows XP.

Easy Recovery Essentials Screenshot

Download Easy Recovery Essentials

Features of Easy Recovery Essentials include:

  • Automatically find and fix boot errors and blue screens
  • Works even when you can’t get into Windows
  • Recover from virus infections
  • Restore your PC to a working state
  • Access and backup your important data
  • Advanced tools for IT experts

Easy Recovery Essentials is an ISO download image ready to be burned directly to a CD, DVD or a USB flash drive.

Easy Recovery Essentials can be used as a recovery disk for computers with Windows XP installed to repair the computer, including the full list of Windows XP editions with Service Packs installed:

  • Microsoft Windows XP SP1 (Service Pack 1)
  • Microsoft Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2)
  • Microsoft Windows XP SP3 (Service Pack 3)

It’s compatible with both the Home and Professional editions of Windows XP:

  • Microsoft Windows XP Home
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional

It’s compatible with newer versions of Windows, up to Windows 8.1:

It’s also compatible with Windows Server editions:

Create a recovery disk for Windows XP

Before you continue, check if you still have the original Windows XP installation CD.

That original installation CD can act as a recovery disk that you can use to run Recovery Console (Command line utility) to repair your computer with.

From Recovery Console, you can run the bootcfg, chkdsk, and more commands.

If you have the original CD

If you have the disk, follow these steps to open Recovery Console:

  • Insert the CD in the optical drive
  • Restart your computer
  • At the Welcome to Setup screen, press R to load Recovery Console

  • You’ll need to log in as an Administrator or with any user that has administrative rights to the system. Do so and enter the password.
  • Press Enter
  • The Recovery Console should now be available

To read more about bootcfg, read the Bootcfg guide. To read more about chkdsk (check disk), read the chkdsk guide.

If you don’t have the original CD

If you don’t have the original CD with Windows XP, you can create a bootable floppy diskette.

It’s required that you can boot into Windows XP to create the bootable diskette. Otherwise, if you can’t boot into Windows XP, go to Download recovery disk for Windows XP.

You’ll need to make sure your computer’s floppy disk is working properly first. Your computer with Windows XP must have the floppy disk functioning.

To create the bootable diskette for Windows XP, follow these steps:

  • Boot into Windows XP
  • Insert the diskette in the floppy disk
  • Go to My Computer
  • Right-click on the floppy disk drive. This is usually the A:\ drive.
  • Click Format
  • Check the Create an MS-DOS startup disk option at the Format options section
  • Click Start
  • Wait for the process to finish
  • Once it’s completed, safely remove the diskette for the floppy disk

Once the recovery diskette is created, follow these instructions everytime you need to use it:

  • Check if the diskette is in write-protect mode
  • Insert the diskette in the floppy disk
  • Restart the computer
  • Follow the instructions on the screen after you’ve booted your sytem from the diskette

More Information

Linked Entries

Support Links

Applicable Systems

This article applies to the following operating systems:

  • Windows XP (all editions)

OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 finally unifies iMessage messaging

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
3

iMessage fragmentation across devices has been a common complaint ever since iMessage was first released, and although Apple has taken steps to mitigate the issue, it hasn’t yet been truly solved. The problem was exacerbated with the release of Mountain Lion which brought iMessage to the desktop (or to the laptop, depending on what you use), where users of OS X would be allowed to join in the iMessaging fun – but with a very important caveat: the iChat (now rechristened “Messages”)  messaging software would only register with the iMessage email account, so iMessages sent to your phone number would not be received.

This meant that users would have to explicitly take care to send and receive messages from their iMessage-enabled email addresses; but while you can always select where and how you initiate conversations, you can’t very well choose how and where perfectly random strangers will choose to contact you. This limitation also applied to the iPad, however iOS 6 beta seeds included a fix for that, adding the option to initiate and receive messages from the phone number associated with your iMessage account.

It pleases us to inform you that with Mountain Lion 10.8.2 (as of the latest developer seed, 12C50) this feature has been extended to Messages on OS X, and in the future, your iMessages will be synchronized across all platforms. Here is a screenshot of how your iMessage account looks in iMessage on 10.8.2:

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All Windows 8 Wallpaper and Backgrounds Now Available

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
3

Continuing the tradition started long ago, now that Windows 8 RTM has been made available, we’re excited to announce the availability of the one part of Windows 8 everyone can agree is an excellent and welcome feature, and one we’re all more than willing and eager to welcome and embrace with open arms: the new official wallpapers and backgrounds!

There are some really great additions to the previous entries from the beta builds, though in a completely different vein from what we’ve come to expect from Windows Vista and Windows 7: not as much focus on natural beauty. In many ways, the Windows 8 wallpapers feel a lot more like the ones we first saw in the Longhorn beta: focus on effects, stressing modernity, and lots of color. Not a bad thing, of course… after all, the Longhorn wallpapers were what first started the whole craze.

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What happens when you leave an iPhone in a hot car and other interesting stories

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
7

It’s Memorial Day weekend all over the nation today, but here in the midwest we’re also in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave: today’s 97º F high in Chicago shatters the historical high of 94º F set way back in 1911 (although the night’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit is actually fairly pleasant if you’re sitting outdoors enjoying the breeze). We all know better than to leave our kids in a locked car that can reach 140º F on a normal summer day, right? But what happens when you leave an iPhone in a car parked in the sun on a day like this?

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GasTomorrow: Tomorrow’s Pump Prices, Today

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
4

If you’re trying your hardest to save money but just can’t keep up with the crazy gas prices, we have a new mini-service you’ll likely love.

It’s a very simple and modest site with no frills to speak of, but GasTomorrow.com will predict the prices of gas in your neighborhood for tomorrow – so you can make a decision whether to fill up today or hold off until tomorrow. We’re estimating the prices based on a model that takes into consideration the current price of gas in your neighborhood and the day-to-day change in the price of light, sweet crude oil on the market to try and help you save money.

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Introducing Windows Recovery Essentials

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
70

There have been whispers and rumors making the rounds all over the internet for the past few months regarding the licensing of WinPE. The rumors are, in fact, true: as of January 2012, Microsoft has no longer been renewing any Windows Pre Installation Environment licensing agreements with any partner companies; all of whom are now required to find alternative means of meeting their bootable environment requirements.

As many of you are aware, NeoSmart Technologies is one of the companies licensing Windows PE from Microsoft Corp. Back in August of last year, we revealed that we’d struck a deal with Microsoft wherein we’d be licensing Windows PE for use in our system recovery CDs, making them legally available for download for our users. Unfortunately, that agreement will not be in place for much longer, and the recovery and repair CDs in their current form will soon no longer be available for purchase.

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The Case for a Git-Powered Project Gutenberg…

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
13

Project Gutenberg, for those of you that are not already familiar with it, is one of the single-most important community projects of the century: an attempt at creating a digital library of free books in a variety of formats, preserving classics and other works of literature from all ages. At the time of this post, the project boasts an impressive 38,000 works for which the copyrights have expired and have been released into the public domain.

Project Gutenberg (PG from here on out) not only indexes the text of these titles, but also original illustrations, metadata (author(s), publisher(s), date(s), illustration(s), etc., and most importantly, bookmarks/tables of contents). The process of “creating” a book comprises many steps and starts off with scanning the original books, using OCR to convert the scanned images to text, manually reviewing the scanned contents for OCR conversion errors, fixing formatting (footnotes, endnotes, spacing, etc.), marking bookmarks and jump locations, creating tables of contents, and finally, to use a software terminology, “building” the files into many different formats to cover the very much fragmented spectrum of eBook file types.

The reason for this primer on how PG works is to give a sense of how complex the entire endeavor is and all the steps and components involved in the process. There probably are more steps were not more immediately apparent and most of the steps listed above can probably be broken up into several more steps each. The point is, it’s an incredibly complicated and error prone process. And even when it’s done without errors or mistakes, there’s always room for improvement. And this is where the need for version control comes in.

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