Windows 7

I had the misfortune of trying to install Microsoft's "Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel" which creates, well, a virtual CD/DVD-ROM drive that allows you to mount ISO images. There are a number of other programs that do this, but seeing as to how this was a M$ product, free, Window-7 compatible, and light of weight, I decided to give it a whirl. The README.txt that accompanies the installation file provides instructions for the manual addition of the vcdrom.sys driver to the Windows directory.

New Windows 7 system: When I plugged in my headphones into the front audio jack, I immediately started hearing a buzzing and whistling noise in the earpiece. When I switched to the rear audio port, this noise went away. MP3s played clearly on both ports albeit with the buzzing noise in the background when using the front port.

I had an odd issue just now when using Gvim. Usually, backspacing when in insert mode (i:set backspace=indent,eol,start

To fix this permanently, add

set backspace=indent,eol,start

to GVim's _vimrc file (which is usually located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\_vi
mrc).

You might want to do this when running the editor as an administrator.

Running a program in "privileged" mode (i.e., as an administrator) is as simple as pressing the START button, finding the program, right-clicking its name, and choosing Run as administrator. (You can similarly also choose to Run as different user, but to get this option, you'll need to press SHIFT before the right click.) This should bring up Windows' pop-up asking you to allow the program to be run as administrator where you click Yes and Robert is your uncle.

I got a new 3TB hard disk. While it's being detected in Windows 7, initializing it has proved to be impossible as I keep running into the following error:

The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error

After testing this one a couple of different systems and in Linux, I have arrived at the conclusion that the drive is screwed. Time to get it replaced.

I accidentally unpinned my Windows 7 Firefox taskbar icon. While I was able to re-add it easily enough, clicking it to open FF resulting in a duplicate icon being spawned which was where FF was opened. I had to google a bit to find a fix and here it is:

Continuing on with my workarounds for moving system files around, today, I decided to look into moving my user profile folder to a different partition. While IIRC, it used to be possible (in earlier versions of Windows) to do this by setting the home folder to an appropriate value in the user management snapshot, that did not work for me.

My windows machine is running off a bum drive and seeing as to how HDD prices are temporarily ridiculously high at the moment, I've decided to attempt a few workarounds to see if I can continue to use this erratically faulty drive for a couple of more months. The issue with the drive is in itself unknown. It just locks up suddenly with the HDD LED continuously on. Windows continues to be active for a while, but not terribly responsive. Sometimes, the issue sorts itself out after a while. Other times, the system reboots.

Every now and then, I find the need to shutdown my PC automatically at a specified time for some reason or the other. In my most recent case, I needed to shut my Windows 7 PC down at 8am in the morning anticipating a scheduled power shutdown in my block. While there are many GUI-based applications out there that could do this for me, I chanced upon a simpler solution detailed below: