But recently I hit on a weird issue. I installed about 100 fonts not really paying attention (it was late ) and I ended up overwriting something. No idea what, but it was important. Everything was messed up nad italicized and bolded in what had to be one of the most illegible fonts I have ever seen. I went through with word and photoshop looking at various fonts that I thought could have been over-written and no dice. I couldn’t figure it out. I even complained on twitter about it, but no luck.

In the end I ended up finding an application called FontFrenzy. What FontFrenzy really is, is a font management tool. It lets you install fonts, preview them and uninstall them. I guess that’s all a font manager really needs to do, I don’t know I’ve never used one. Why I DID end up installing Font Frenzy was because of a feature called Defrenzy. It uninstalls every single font except for the default font set included with your version of windows. It even creates a snapshot before it does, incase you want to revert.

I would post a screenshot or something, but it’s not necessary. There’s a button that says Defrenzy. And you just need to click it.

Voila, you have now restored the default font-set included with any version of windows from XP to 7.

http://sdsoftware.org/default.asp?id=5936

And days is simply too long. Often when a customer comes to me with computer problems it goes a little like this:

1. Sit down and get the customer to explain what happened
2. Keep pressing for more details. More often than not the customers description is very high level. “I clicked ok and it just showed up” isn’t very accurate. I need to know every detail leading up to the error. Most times that alone can identify a potential set of problems, or at least rule some things out.
3. Research. Contrary to popular belief, IT professionals don’t know every problem that could occur. We know the common ones and we know ones that we’ve experienced before, and we know some of the stranger ones. ¹ We need to look into other cases of your problem, we need to find patterns between occurrences and then apply them back to your case. We are not just Googling hoping to stumble across an answer. Although, we do use Google.
4. Come up with a solution

Sadly, a lot of times the solution we come up with is simple: Reformat.

Yes I could spend 8 or 9 hours for the next 3 days removing all traces of the virus from your computer. Yes I could find the exact file that is corrupted on both your CD and your computer. Yes I could bake a pizza from scratch. But it’s not worth it. Not when there’s a solution that is fairly easy to follow and can get you back and computing faster than ever. Not to mention reformatting not only saves you time, it also saves you money, because I don’t charge you for solutions, I just charge for implementation.

That being said, every so often one of those really strange problems pop up and you can’t help but spend countless hours fixing it – but hey, we’re geeks.

By now there is enough stuff on Wave posted to confuse anybody, so for for those who have access to preview version or not either – let’s carefully go over established facts and look at what is defined for sure.

However, picking the right ram is a hassle. The first step is pop open your computer and find the RAM you have, making sure that the power is off and the machine is completely unplugged from external power sources. You can also flip the power switch on the back of the power supply unit to ensure that the power really is off.

Your RAM will most likely be DDR2. This is currently the most common RAM out there. Prices for it are relatively cheap and you can find any speed you want (more on speeds further down) pretty much anywhere. If you have DDR1 RAM you’re a bit out of luck. DDR1 is quite old now and upgrading or replacing faulty RAM sticks is a bit of a hassle. A lot of stores won’t carry it since it doesn’t sell very easily and if they do carry it you’ll find it is often double the price of the DDR2 sticks. Sadly you can’t just swap different types of RAM so if you have a certain type of DDR1 RAM you either have to find that exact RAM elsewhere or just upgrade your system.

Generally when you call or show up at a computer store looking for RAM the sales person will just ask you what speed your RAM is. This tends to be a confusing question for people who don’t really open up their computer. The easiest way around this is to just remove the RAM from your machine and take it in to the store, but if you want to know what the sales person is actually checking, it’s below.

Just remember that DDR1 and DDR2 RAM looks physically different, so there is no way to switch the two. Also, your motherboard will dictate the maximum speed of RAM that you can use, so be sure to consult your motherboard manual before upgrading or changing your RAM.

The 32 and 64 bit numbers actually refer to the maximum accessible address space that the OS and CPU can handle. In laymen terms, with a 32bit processor/Operating System you are limited to about 4294967296 bytes of space (2³²). If you convert that to Gigabytes you’re left with about 4gb (in reality that number is bit less). So in a 32 bit system the maximum amount of memory that your computer can successfully utilize is about 3.75GB. This means that even if you have 8GB of RAM in your machine, it will only be able to utilize 3.75GB. This is definitely something to keep in mind when you are picking up your next computer or looking to upgrade your current machine.

In a 64bit world (CPU/OS) you’re looking at significantly more address space. Since our number is actually growing exponentially instead of linearly (this isn’t really a math blog, but exponents grow exponentially whereas basic math modifiers (+ – / *) all grow linearly in repetitively applied) we are given about 17179869184GB of space. That is not a typo, it actually is 17 Billion Gigabytes. This means that your computer will read the full 8GB of RAM that you have in your machine.

The key when upgrading is to ensure that both your OS, CPU and Motherboard support 64bit processing. That isn’t really a problem now, but if you are dealing with a slightly older computer, it helps to look.

After some research into the best profiling tools that work cross-browser I stumbled across a forum post talking about Fiddler. Fiddler is a complete network profiler, allowing to to monitor all network traffic. But it also gives you the ability to limit it to just browser traffic, which was idea in this case. Simply starting up Fiddler and hitting F12 started the capture process (alternatively, File -> Capture Traffic) and reloading the page captured all traffic. It lists all the items that were loaded on the page and lets you select any number or combination of them to get the total load time for those elements. This feature alone is great because it gives you an overview of all Javascript, or all image files. It even breaks down the distinction between .gif, .jpg and.png files so can see how they rate individually.

As an added bonus, Fiddler even generates charts to compare loading times based on the elements that you selected. This is a great way to provide a quick overview to prospective clients on where their website is slowing down and gives you a leg up in figuring out how to improve this. As a freelance consultant, tools like this really make things a lot easier and provide you with at-a-glance data freeing up your time to look at solutions instead of focusing on the problems.

One thing to note, I thought the Fiddler website looked a little shady, but it is completely legitimate and under active development.

http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/

Ping It!
DNS servers work like a giant table. On one side is the URL and on the other side is hte IP address. When you type in a URL it basically goes through the table, finds the URL, and then redirects you to the IP address associated to it. This is all a very high-level explanation, but basically DNS servers take the URL and make it an IP. If you think your DNS servers may be down, simply pop open your command prompt or terminal and ping this address: 74.125.127.100

That address is the default address for Google’s servers, which respond to ping (unlike the Mircosoft ones).

To ping it, just type: ping 74.125.127.100

On windows it will send out 4 packets by default and in Linux, it will keep sending them until you force stop with CTRL+C

If everything goes well (you’ll receive a little report at the end on windows) you’ll know it’s your DNS. This is because if we bypass the DNS and use the IP directly, we can see that it works fine.

Fix It!
This is a little more complicated. In order to fix it you’ll need the help of something else. Since the only problem is your DNS server, it stands to reason that changing it will solve the problem. However, picking a good DNS is a little harder, since you are trusting them to always direct you to the same place. If, for example, it was a malicious user running their own DNS setup, then they could redirect you anywhere they wanted, regardless of what address you typed into your browser. I’d suggest OpenDNS. They’re great, they’re fast, and they’re probably the most reliable (short of connecting directly to the web’s DNS system – where every DNS server connects to)

If you are behind a router, then you can keep reading, however, if you have a direct connection to the internet, then I suggest you head over to OpenDNS and get started there. They’ll walk you through setting it up regardless of your connection type.

Configure Your Router
When you’re going through the website at OpenDNS, they will give you IP addresses of their two DNS servers that you can connect to. Note these down. And keep going. You may as well make an account because OpenDNS allows for web-stats to be monitored by you. Once you’re done you’ll want to connect to your routers web interface. Depending on your router, the default address for this will change. For me it was 192.168.1.1 and it will be the same for almost every Linysys router. Since I’m running DD-WRT, my interface will look quite a bit different from yours, but the setup is still essentially the same.

The section you are looking for is this:

You’ll want to change it to the ip address of the DNS server that OpenDNS gave you.

Then just hit the save button and you’re all done. From now on any outages you get either won’t be DNS related or OpenDNS will let you know as soon as it happens, so you’re not sitting around wondering why you can’t Google.

Then a friend mentioned Feedly to me a few days ago. It was my first real exposure to the River-of-News style of updates that many people tout as superior. Sure I’ve read the posts and understood the concept, but I never saw any need to switch to that style. Ignorance is bliss they say.

In the 5 minutes it took to get everything installed and configured how I liked it I realized that Feedly actually looks quite good. As a designer and developer, something like that is important to me (although you wouldn’t know it if you looked at this blog ). I find if something is visually appealing, I’m more likely to keep using it. But what I liked even better was that Feedly worked.

One of the best things about Feedly is that you can get an at-a-glance view of your entire feed repository and it’s tight integration with everything. A “Dashboard” link allows you to easily see everything you subscribe to, mark things as Favourites (or things you can’t miss!) and lets you drag/drop to re-order them. As a bonus, if you’re signed into your google reader account, it even syncs things up there for you. If you ever stumble across as website that you want to follow, simply click the  +F button in the feedly bar and it will be added to your feedly + google reader accounts.

As a personal testimony- I was 2 days behind on my feeds (Weekends tend to do that to me) and Feedly completely caught me up. Sure it has a “Mark as Read” option, but I never felt the need to do use it. Does Digg have 200+ posts? Change the view to Title Only and scan through 10 posts in the time it would take you to do one. Feedly not only sped up the rate at which I can consume news but it also offers its own integration into things like Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg and many others. So when I find a post I like, I can retweet it, or toss it on Friendfeed. You can also see if other people have already posted it and if they have you can join in the conversation about something.

I’ve never been happier with a feed reader. I’m sure problems with Feedly will arise sooner or later, but, single-handed, it brought me back to Firefox in full force.

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Add or Remove Programs

Now, click on Add and Remove Windows Components. For some reason, most people never seem to take a look at this section, only really paying attention to the default window that is displayed.

After a few seconds of waiting, you should see the Windows Component Wizard. Simply uncheck whatever you don’t need (make sure you know what you’re doing.. or at least google an option before you disable it) and then click next. Windows will remove the components that you selected. Keep in mind, however, that you will still be able to re-enable them all, so it doesn’t actually uninstall them and free up any room. It just disables them.

Windows Component Wizard

Hopefully the little tip was helpful for those of you trying to get rid of the default Windows apps that show up!