prupert

Fix the Dell Mini 10v Touchpad

So, my lovely Wife recently got a rather cute Dell Mini 10v.

It comes with a horribly stripped down version of Ubuntu 8.04 from Dell pre-installed. Luckily, however, that can be ripped out and a nice new install of 9.04 can take its place and it all works wonderfully….except the touchpad. To save space, Dell has used a horrible touchpad that integrates the two left and right mouse buttons into the touchpad itself, so when you go to click on something, you actualy end up moving the mouse at the same time. I was amazed that no one mentioned this in any of the reviews about the mini 10v, I guess everyone was embarrassed since they thought it was just them and they had fat fingers! Luckily, the Open Source Ubuntu community being what it is, there is a fix out there.

If you follow this post there is a clear step-by-step guide telling you how to download some specialised drivers for the touchpad that disable the lower portion of the touchpad, so that it works just as a left and right mouse button and not as part of the touchpad. THANK YOU. My Wife was getting ready to throw her netbook out the window until I found that fix. Be warned though, it only works on the 9.04 (and hopefully later) versions of Ubuntu and not on the version of Ubuntu that comes pre-installed, so you will have to install a new normal version of Ubuntu from their website first (though this is a simple process). I hope this helps some one else and allows them to love their Mini 10v, not hate it!

Tags: Dell, Hacks, mini10v

Windows Session Save and Restore

So, I do a lot of work from home and often have a large number of different programs and files open at the same time. I use two different computers, with the mouse and keyboard shared between the two using the excellent Synergy+. Often I am working on a particular project that last a number of days, each day I need to open the same files and folders. I was wondering if there was an app out there that allowed me to save my Windows “session” i.e. all the programs and files that I had open so I could quickly restore them the next day.

Now, after doing a lot of searching, sadly it seems there isn’t The best solution seems to be to use Windows Standby/Hibernate. But this is kinda impracitcal, since I want to use the computer after I have saved the session. Another option seemed to be TwinsPlay which has a Session Save feature, but this seemed to crash my computer and kill Windows Explorer so that was out. Another option was SmartClose however, this only managed to save the running programs, but not the actual files those programs had open (so it would save and restore OpenOffice, but not the XLS file that OpenOffice actually had open). So once again, this was no real use. My final option was Microsoft Research’s own GroupBar. Sadly though, this also only saved and restored the running program, not the file that that had open.

So, I am kinda stuck My only alternative is to create a batch file to do this, so I would create a new text file, put in the following commands, as an example:

start /d C:\Windows\System32\ calc.exe
start /d "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox" firefox.exe https://www.bankofamerica.com
start /d C:\finance\spreadsheets budget.xls

And then save it as start.bat (thanks to watchingthenet). But this is hardly the best solution. I am sure there is a better solution out there and if anyone knows it, hit me up in the comments (I recon Autohotkey can do this, but I don’t know where to start).

Tags: Hacks, Shortcuts