Petaling Street & surrounding (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

How to create Windows Vista recovery disk

Recently I had some problem with my Windows Vista system and needed to restore system to rectify it. While searching the internet for solutions I come to realize there are some who has their system comes pre-installed Windows Vista and not provided with a recovery media.
Here's the steps how you could create a Windows Vista recovery media, so that when you have problem booting up your system from hard disk, you could use the media to boot up and select the available recovery options.

1) Download the iso image of the Recovery Disk from the following site :

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

The above link downloads a .torrent file to start the torrent download process. You would need to make use of some kind of BitTorrent client. I used uTorrent.

2) After the download you need to burn this image to a CD/DVD media, so that you could use it later to boot up your system. There are different program for doing this, I have tried with ImgBurn.

It is available for download here:http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

3) Screens for using ImgBurn to burn image to media can be referenced here: http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/G/Burning+ISO+Images+with+ImgBurn

When you boot up from the recovery disk, after the first few screens, you will be presented with the recovery options as below:

Faststone Image Viewer

This is a very versatile small program, which I find very handy and provided many features to edit and enhance image files.

You can also just download the portable version and take the program with you in a pen drive, without installing in the computer you need to use for editing your images.



Under the 'Edit' pull down menu you can find many options to choose for enhacing the images. Although the available options are not as extensive as some other tools but I find that they are quite sufficient for normal use.



There is a 'draw board' feature, which will take you to a screen where many drawing options you can add such as callouts, lines, ellipse, rectangle or even to add watermark image.



This is a freeware program where you can download it from:
http://www.faststone.org/index.htm

Web based Instant Messaging

Rcently tried the following two web based instant messaging:
www.meebo.com
www.ebuddy.com

One of the advantage of using web based tool is that you do away with installing each of the IM clients on your computer, and you can just log on to your IM account anywhere you have access to a computer with Internet access.

You can log on to your IM account sauch as Yahoo Messenger, Windows Luve Messenger, Google Talk, etc by visiting the web site.

And if you register at either site for an account (i.e. Meebo or eBuddy account), you can then make use of the account to log on to multiple of your instant messaging accounts at the same time. So you can have your IM buddies all list in one web based page.

You could chat, conference, video chat etc etc... with your buddies as you like.

Image editing software - GIMP & paint.NET

I have been looking for and tried out image editing software for my own usage and have spent some time on GIMP 2 & paint.NET as I wanted to learn the 'layer' features.

I have tried on both for a short while, and will definately need to spend more time to learn the power of both as they provided many useful features and effects for editing and enhancing the photgraphs. I really enjoyed very much when I started to be able to make use of layers.

GIMP 2 is open source software and can be download at the following:-
1) Installers for GIMP for Windows: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
2) Documentation: http://manual.gimp.org/
3) Tutorial: http://gimp-tutorials.net/


paint.NET is provided free of charge but you are welcome to make a donation at their web site to support their further development.
http://www.getpaint.net/