Rapidshare step by step

My friends often come to me with the problem of sending email with large attachments. Some attachments can be compressed, but most of them are still heavy enough to be send through email, moreover to a lot of recipients. The best solution is using file sharing. There are so many free file hosting provider in the net, so that I have to make some search and trials. To choose the best is really depend on the purpose. Finally, up to now, I found Rapidshare.com is the most fit for this purpose.

This is some reason :

• Free – several files can be uploaded, max 200 MB/upload. For bigger, you can upload several times – unlimited.
• Fast enough to upload (at least in my computer – with my ISP)
• No registration needed, no account to be managed, but the link is secure enough. (Eventhough, of course I would not put any confidential data there)
• It will be deleted automatically 90 days after last access – user doesn’t need to delete it.
• No advertisement

Some limitations particularly for free user are tolerable for the purpose as I’ve mentioned in the beginning of this post.

This is the simple steps to share the file through rapidshare.com:

1. Go to www.rapidshare.com
2. Click the browse button, and choose your file you want to share. An upload button will come out. Click UPLOAD.
3. When it has been uploaded, a link page will come out. Make note the link, but it would be easier if you directly send it to your own email address – included the delete link. The links are the only one way for you to manage your file.
4. This is an example how you fill the page:
5. Then click “send” button.
6. Your friend will receive an email like in this image:
7. If he click the download link, he has to choose “free user” (except if he has a premium account):
8. He has to wait until a download button come out – then click it. He will soon get the file.
9. Now, open your email, you will find an email with “download link” and “delete link”
10. If needed, you can copy the download link to be send to other friends. Or, if you want, you can delete your file by clicking the “delete link”.
11. This is what you get by clicking the delete link.Click that delete button, and your file will be deleted.

Basic audio tools – freewares:

To deal with audio, you need basic tools at least for these purposes - I have choosen for you the free ones:

1. To rip the music from CD. If you have a Windows Media Player in your computer, you can easily “rip” your music from the CD to have the mp3 or wmv formats. You can’t do copy and paste of the raw music from your CD. I found a good freeware to handle the audio files. It is CDex, that you can download it in this link. Download the installer, not the archive or source code. I recommend this one because it has the facility of encapsulating.
2. To edit audio files. There is an excellent freeware for this duty, it is “Audacity”. You can trim the audio, make effects etc. Download it here.
3. To convert between audio file formats. Unfortunately Audacity supports not so many audio file formats, especially wmv. You might need an audio format converter. After searching, I found “Any Audio Converter”. Download it here.

Simple explanation of Audio File Formats

Any digital file always has a file format. Similar with graphic files, basically, audio files have the raw audio data format, the lossless compression and the lossy compression. Since every producer tried to develop their own, we can find so many audio file formats.

This is only very few of the most popular:

PCM = Pulse-code modulation, is a technique of digitalizing analog audio. The first generation is PCM-F10 can be said the first format of digital audio – developed by Sonny in 1978; This is a raw/actual audio data format.

.wav (=WAVE, waveform audio format) is the most popular uncompressed audio file format for PC – one format used to store PCM audio – sometimes called “lossless compressed format”. It was so popular since this uncompressed format is excellent in quality – and supported by almost all audio/video software, but always has big size. It preserves all audio information/ frequencies.

.wma = Windows Media Audio Format, is a compressed audio format developed by Microsoft.

MP3 (1989) = Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG-1) Audio layer 3 is a lossy compression format. It becomes so popular because the size is so small. The common bitrate is 128 kbit/s (can be as small as 32 kbit/s), compared with CD music track 1,411.2 kbit/s. To solve the quality problem, there is a newly developed one called MP3 Pro.

.ogg/ Vorbis, is similar with MP3 but it is an open source format.

.aac/ .mp4 : AAC = Advanced Audio Coding is designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3. It is used in MPEG4 and many new multimedia products (such as iPod, iTune, etc) support this format.

AC3 (Audio Code number 3) is a dolby digital audio – it is compressed but supports not only stereo but also surround. This is good for high quality Video (DVD/VCD), but now it is being replaced by AAC.

Could not set the application to open a type of file

This happened for swishmax2 file (.swi), but you can experience with other types of file. I don’t know how it was happening. The .swi files had no icon and was not associated with any application. If I right click and click properties, it written “Open with” Unknown Application.

This is the common solution, I clicked “Change” and choose “SwishMax2 Application” with check in the box of “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file”. -> hit OK. This solution didn’t work. It back again to “unknown Application”. Had tried to uninstall and reinstall the SwishMax2 Application with no luck.

After searching and no luck with so many ways, finally I went to Registry Edit. (Start ->Run -> Regedit) and found this key has problem. If I selected this key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/.swi, an error message box came out : “Can not open .swi – Error while opening key”. I am sure this is the problem.

This was my solution : Ignore the error message, right click key .swi, choose permission. There was another error reminder that I don’t have permission, just ignore it. Go to advance and give “owner authority” to the administrator of the computer. Click OK. Back to the add tab, click “add” – add the administrator with full control authority. Click OK and close the box.

Close the Regedit – choose one file .swi and right click -> properties. Click “change” for “Open With” application. Choose the application, in my case I chose Swishmax2, and close the box. Now it works, all .swi have it’s icon and if I click it would open in swishmax2 application.

Can’t remove folder: the directory is not empty

That error message came out when I tried to delete one “mysterious folder” in the desktop. I myself doesn’t know how that folder came in the computer. I was using my  administrator account to clean up the computer and set a new user account/ profile, when it came out and couldn’t be deleted. That folder has another folder inside, and the subfolder has another one folder with same name, and so on. Finally it ended with one folder that I could not open – could not delete, and when I right click, it has only the options of Open, Explore, Search and Sent to – and the options could not be used also – nothing come out if I clicked any of the options. I believe it came from a kind of virus, since the computer was “very dirty”.

Following some forum in internet, I tried to delete through Command Prompt. No luck. Also after kill the process of explorer.exe, deleting through Command Prompt didn’t work. It seemed work, but not. When I do userfprofile\Desktop\del xx, a confirmation to go on would come out. I type “Y” and click OK; and when I browse the “Desktop”, it is still there.

Maybe my mistake was I “looked down” the capability of “Unlocker”, despise I love this small software very much. Finally I installed “Unlocker”; Right click the folder and click “unlocker” in the menu. A dialog box came out said that the object is not locked – then in option “action to do”,  I choose “delete” by scrolling down. click OK and the miracle came, the folder gone. Such easy!!

My friend says, she didn’t send anything ……

This is the complain that too often comes to me, so finally I feel it’s good to post it here instead of repeating explaining :

“I receive an “invitation email”. I suspect it is a virus. It came with my friend email address as the sender, but I am sure she is not the one send. Then I asked her, and really she said that she didn’t send anything …”

Mostly that invitation email comes from a social network site, like MySpace, Fenster, Go Green etc. I tried to explain that it is not a virus – and “your friend is responsible” with that email. But many – many don’t believe me. They are so suspicious with that emails.

If you with any reason (can be for fun – or just try out – or unintentionally responding other’s invitation) create or join a social network, you would always have to fill such kind of form :

Many are so “innocent” or “careless” then put their email address and password. By giving their password, they allowed other to enter their mailbox and send invitation to all address in that mailbox.

Some site are fair enough and mention clearly that this would be used to invite all the name in the address book or give a possibility to choose from the list it downloads from your mailbox, but some site doesn’t mention it clearly.

What I want to say to all of you (and please announce to the world)  is … “BE AWARE OF WHAT YOU ARE TYPING AND GIVING YOUR DATA” … in any case in our life.

AVG removal

I had AVG 7.5 in my laptop, paid one. I was about to upgrade it to AVG 8; but I wanted to try the free one first.

I let AVG did the job of uninstalling AVG 7.5 and installing AVG 8 by following the wizard.

Unfortunately, it stacked. I don’t remember anymore how it happened. But finally I could not get AVG 8 but the AVG 7 would not work when I uninstalled the AVG 8. So, I had to have both to run AVG 7.5 (I reinstalled AVG 7.5 since the AVG 8 could not be installed completely).

I felt this is not a good installation. I had to clean it up. What I did is:

1. uninstalled AVG8 using Windows Add/Remove Programs. Then go to C:Program File and delete folder AVG where the AVG7 subfolder stayed.
2. Uninstalled AVG 7.5 using Windows Add/Remove Programs and delete folder Grisoft where the AVG8 subfolder stayed.
3. There was a .dll file that would not like to be deleted. It always said :”file is still in use or access denied”. After being sure that no problem with authority, I use the “unlocker”. It didn’t give luck by doing “unlock”, since that dll folder is “attached” by a process. So I do “kill process”. Then I could delete this file.
4. After that, I run CCleaner to clean up the registry.

What I suggest you is, clean up the AVG 7 manually before installing AVG 8; Best you delete the folder (named AVG or Grisoft) in C:Program File as well as clean the registry.

You can have the small program unlocker here. It is a simple but great free software.

hotkeys doesn’t work in vaio

I was really nervous when my vaio couldn’t give signal for LCD projector.  Then I realized that all hot keys didn’t work. Of course Fn+F7 didn’t work. Then I remembered that last week I had just cleaned up my laptop from some not used software. I remember I uninstall Vaio Shared Library.

I found the software in Sonny website here, but I prefered doing System Restore.

And everything goes well now.

New software eat my memory

In the beginning of this year, after doing some trial with the free edition, I bought the paid edition of AVG7.5. Almost all of other computers in our office were using Symantec. I was happy with AVG. It was accurate enough and … light.

But now, after several months, I have not even finished my first year subscription, I get trouble with AVG.

1. The AVG7.5 become so heavy. In idle it eats almost 100 MB!! My computer become slow, yet, I have 2GB RAM.
2. When I tried to upgrade to AVG8, I got stuck. The AVG8 downloader didn’t work. So, I went back to my AVG7.5

I think I will just use it up to the end of my subscription date.

Another software I want to highlight is “Firefox”. It was my favorite browser. Then Firefox 3 came. It is good, but it eats 10-20% more memory than the Firefox 2. If your computer has enough memory, Firefox 3 is okay. Otherwise, it’s good to stay with Firefox2. Anyhow, we in my office, don’t need too much features.

Windows Messenger

Windows Messenger often annoys us. After deleting the “start up” registry, it still back with the icon in your desktop’s corner.

Once I stopped it from the program itself. Double click the icon to open the program and go to “Tool” -> tab “Preferences -> “General”. Uncheck “Run Windows Messenger when Windows starts” and “Allow Windows Messenger to run in the background”. After reboot, the Windows Messenger will not come again.

click

If it is still working, it might be triggered by Outlook Express. So, open Outlook Express -> Option -> tab “General”, untick the box of “Automatically log on to Windows Messenger”.

options tool

Last step you might need to do is unactivate the Windows Messenger from Control Panel -> Add/Remove program -> “Add/Remove Windows component” -> untick the box of Windows Messenger.

Hopefully you will be able to get rid from this annoying small Windows Messenger.