Tag Archive for Microsoft

Manually adding an entry for Windows 7 to an Ubuntu GRUB2 menu

November 21, 2010 No comments

A recent endeavour of mine has been to set up a dual-booting arrangement on my Toshiba Equium laptop with Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7 on there side by side. However, unlike the same attempt with my Asus Eee PC where Windows XP coexists with Ubuntu, there was no menu entry on the GRUB (I understand that Ubuntu has had version 2 of this since 9.04 though the internal version is something like 1.9x; you can issue grub-install -v at the command line to find out what version you have on your system) menu afterwards. Thankfully, I eventually figured out how to do this and the process is shared here in a more coherent order than the one in which I discovered all of the steps.

The first step is to edit /etc/grub.d/40_custom (using SUDO) and add the following lines to the bottom of the file:

menuentry ‘Windows 7′ {
set root=’(hd0,msdos2)’
chainloader +1
}

Since the location of the Windows installation can differ widely, I need to explain the “set root” line because (hd0,msdos2) refers to /dev/sda2 on my machine. More generally, hd0 (or /dev/sda elsewhere) refers to the first hard disk installed in any PC with hd1 (or /dev/sdb elsewhere) being the second and so on. While I was expecting to see entries like (hd0,6) in /boot/grub/grub.cfg, what I saw were ones like (hd0,msdos6) instead with the number in the text after the comma being the partition identifier; 1 is the first (sda1), 2 (sda2) is the second and so on. The next line (chainloader) tells GRUB to load the first sector of the Windows drive so that it can boot. After all that decoding, my final comment on what’s above is a simple one: the text “Windows 7″ is what will appear in the GRUB menu so you can change this as you see fit.

After saving 40_custom, the next step is to issue the following command to update grub.cfg:

sudo update-grub2

Once that has done its business,  then you can look into /boot/grub/grub.cfg to check that the text added into 40_custom has found its way into there. That is important because this is the file read by GRUB2 when it builds the menu that appears at start-up time. A system reboot will prove conclusively that the new entry has been added successfully. Then, there’s the matter of selectively to see if Windows loads properly like it did for me, once I chose the correct disk partition for the menu entry, that is!

Linux, Software, Windows

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A cautionary tale regarding Excel spreadsheet sharing

November 10, 2010 No comments

Recently, I encountered a reason to be wary about create shared Excel spreadsheets when one ballooned in size. It ended up growing to around 130 megabytes before I tried turning off sharing to see what happened and the size shrunk to under 200 kilobytes. From this, it would appear that the version control information was the cause of the explosion in file size. With that in mind, I set about to looking through the settings to see if there were any that might need optimisation. The default action is to keep thirty days of change tracking but I have this reduced to a single day in order not to be keeping too much. Quite how much, you need to retain is up to you but I will keeping an eye on things now that I have done this.

Software, Windows

, , , , , , ,

One reason why you cannot merge cells in Excel

October 23, 2010 No comments

One handy thing that I didn’t realise that you could do with Excel until the last few months was the ability to share an open workbook between users and collate any changes that are made (it seems that a form of version control is behind this). From what I have seen, Excel seems to manage changes to shared spreadsheets rather well. When you save yours, it adds updates from other users and warns if any edits collide with one another. To activate it in Excel 2003, all that needs doing is for you to go to the Share Workbook entry on the Tools and tick the appropriate checkbox in the resulting dialogue box. In 2007 and 2010, look for the Share Workbook icon in the Review tab on the ribbon to get the same dialogue box popping up.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its restrictions though and I have found that the merging of cells is made unavailable but that can be sorted by unsharing and resharing the workbook when no one else is using it. As to why cell merger is switched off by sharing, I have a few ideas. Maybe, they couldn’t make it work reliably (can happen with large software development projects like the creation of a new version of Excel) or decided that it would have consequences for other users that are too inconvenient. Either way, we cannot merge cells in shared workbooks and that’s the way that things are for now. Some may not worry about this though since they reckon that cell merging is undesirable anyway; well, don’t go doing it in any spreadsheet that is likely to be read in by another program or you could cause trouble.

Software, Windows

, , , , , , , , ,

Changing Outlook usage habits

August 2, 2010 No comments

Given that I have been using it for so long, I shouldn’t be discovering new things with Outlook. However, there is one thing that I have been doing for years: leaving messages set as unread until I have dealt with them. Now that I look at it it seems a very bad habit compared with an alternative that I recently found. Quite why I haven’t been flagging messages for follow-up instead is beyond me. Is it because I worked with Outlook 2000 at a place of work so long and the arrival of Outlook 2007 into my life wasn’t sufficient to force a change of habits? In fact, it has taken a downgrade to Outlook 2003 to make it dawn on me and the sight of search folder for messages marked for follow-up was what triggered the realisation.Speaking of old habits, there is one that I’ll be dropping: setting up loads of rules allegedly for organising messages. Given that they were the cause of my missing emails quite a few times, it’s one more nuisance that needed to be left behind me.

Software, Web, Windows

, , , , , , , ,

Sometimes it’s a small change that matters…

January 24, 2010 No comments

Firefox 3.6 is now available and others are going on about more striking features but it’s small change that I have noticed and it happens to be a good one too. Middle clicking on a link in tab used to open a new one at the right hand of the tab bar. Now, the new tab opens next to the one where the click was clicked and that’s a good thing if you are previewing blog posts. It was something that Internet Explorer already did so it’s good to see cross-fertilisation of useful features; yes, Microsoft can come up with good ones too from time to time. Though not likely to make major headlines, this is the type of thing that makes for better user experience and a few of them together can be more beneficial than some big shiny new feature. In life, it’s often the little things that make all the difference.

Software, Web, Web Tools

, , , ,

Outlook rule size limitation

January 12, 2010 No comments

A move from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2007 at work before Christmas resulted in deactivated Outlook rules and messages like the following when I tried reactivating them:

One or more rules could not be uploaded to Exchange server and have been deactivated. This could be because some of the parameters are not supported or there is insufficient space to store all your rules.

The cause is a 32 KB size limitation for all rules associated with your Exchange server account prior to Exchange 2007. With the latter, the default size increases to 64 KB and can be increased further to 256 KB by manual intervention. This wouldn’t be a big issue if you had the option to store rules locally on your own PC but that was removed after Outlook 2000, therefore explaining why I first encountered it when I did. Microsoft has a useful article on their support website containing suggested remedies and they aren’t all as extreme as deleting some rules either. Consolidation and shortening of rule names are other suggestions and you should never discount how much space the “run on this machine only” parameter takes up either. Still, it’s an odd design decision that caused this but I suppose that it wouldn’t the first made by Microsoft and it may not be the last either.

Software, Web, Windows

, , , , , , ,
« Older Entries   Recent Entries »

  • As is commonly the case with places like these, all the views that you find expressed on here in postings and articles are mine alone and not those of any organisation with which I have any association, through work or otherwise. With regards to any comments left on the site, I reserve the right to reject any that are inappropriate. Otherwise, whatever is said is the sole responsibility of whoever is leaving the comment.

Private