aaron-kelley.net » Windows

Bye-bye, Windows 2000!

Aaron — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:56:27 +0000

Today, support for Windows 2000 from Microsoft ends. Windows 2000 was released over ten years ago, on February 17, 2000. Although it may have had a shaky start as far as application compatibility goes, it is renowned as one of the most stable operating systems ever to come out of Microsoft, and it paved the way for Microsoft to merge the “home” (9x) and “business” (NT) lines of Windows with Windows XP, the following year.

Windows 2000 received its last service pack, Service Pack 4, on June 26, 2003. It has been in “extended support” since June 30, 2005, and since then it has only been receiving security updates from Microsoft. Now, all support for Windows 2000 is dropped, and security updates will no longer be issued.

Another Windows release passes on to the pile of Windows versions past. But this was a great one, so I wanted to post a small tribute to it.

If you were wondering, Windows ME was released after Windows 2000, on September 14, 2000. However, Microsoft dumped support for this operating system, the last of the “9x” line, back in 2006. The next operating system, Windows XP, is already in “extended support,” but will continue to receive security updates until April 8, 2014. By this time, Windows Vista will be in extended support (which happens in April, 2012). Only Vista Business and Vista Enterprise will be supported during the “extended support” phase, which will last until 2017, so support for the other editions (including Ultimate!) will end completely, before XP’s support runs out.

Windows – Turn off your screen NOW

Aaron — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:06:18 +0000

One thing I always wished I was able to do is issue a command to turn off my laptop screen, but leave the computer running. If I’m going to leave my computer for a while, it doesn’t really make sense to leave the screen on wasting power, but the computer might be busy working on something, so I’d like to be able to leave it on.

Windows, of course, lets you specify some amount of time to wait before turning off your screen. But, here’s a utility you can use to turn off your screen right away.

Head over to Jim Chevalier’s downloads page and grab Monoff4. If you just run it, it will give you a one-time configuration to allow you to select the power-off mode. Then, running it makes the screen just power off. It wakes up when you move the mouse or bang on the keyboard.

Oh, the reason I finally got around to looking for a solution to this is that since I installed Windows 7, my screen has not been shutting off after the 1 hour I told it to wait — it just goes black, with the backlight still on. This utility properly shuts off the screen.

If you’d like to also have your Windows session lock when you turn off the screen, grab LockWS from the same page, and set up a batch file like this:

@echo off start Monoff4.exe LockWS

(It seems that if I try to launch Monoff4 without the “.exe“, it brings up the configuration screen again.)

You can create a shortcut to this batch file and pin it to your Start menu, or wherever you like, for when you would just like the screen off.

That’s all for today!

Mount an SFTP/SSH server as a drive in Windows (for $40)

Aaron — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:03:25 +0000

Working with files between two Linux machines or two Windows machines over the network is pretty easy — in either case, you can share files on one machine and easily access them from the other. In fact, in either case you can mount a remote share and make it appear as part of the local file system, so any application can use the files just as easily as if they were local. This is done via SFTP over SSH (or a number of other methods) on Linux, and via Windows’s native file sharing (SMB) on Windows.

In fact, you can even mount a Windows share on Linux pretty easily using Samba, and use Samba to create shares that the Windows machines can access.

Now, a cool thing about SFTP over SSH is that it typically works even if the machines aren’t on the same LAN. You can access files on a machine across the Internet, and still mount the share so that applications can access the files as if they were local. This doesn’t always work with SMB, as lots of ISPs block the ports required, and even if you can get a connection over the Internet, performance is usually poor.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could mount a remote SFTP server as a drive letter in Windows? That’s what I was looking for. I’ve looked around for applications that provide this functionality in the past, but never found one that worked reliably and on 64-bit Windows. However, the other day, I came across ExpanDrive, which seems to fit the bill.

Not only does this nifty app allow you to map a remote SFTP share to a drive letter, but it handles reconnecting after sleep/hibernate and changing locations very well. Couldn’t be happier. Setting it up is really easy, you just will out this form with information about the server and which drive letter you would like to use:

…and then, your files are immediately available under “My Computer.”

The only bad thing is, the application will set you back $40. There is a trial version though, to let you see if it meets your needs. Licenses are sold on a per-user basis, so you only have to buy one to use it on all of your machines.

Let me know if you know of any applications that do as good a job for less (or no) money!