Got one of my daily Microsoft email newsletters today and it detailed a couple new tools from Sysinternals (the guys that bring up such great tools as filemon and procmon)

BgInfo v4.11 Released.

There’s a new version of BgInfo. BgInfo creates a background image with various information about the machine you’re working on at the moment. This is useful when you work with a large number of machines.

More info on BgInfo can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/bginfo.mspx

ZoomIt v1.71

Recently we attended the Microsoft Hosting Roadshow and some of the demonstrations on the screen were rather small. ZoomIt is a screen zoom and annotation tool for presentations allowing you to zoom in on the screen and move around while zoomed and even draw on the zoomed image.

More info on Zoomit can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/zoomit.mspx

I upgraded my home PC to Vista today from XP Mediacenter edition and earlier this week I had an email that the new OneCare 1.5 beta was released and “NOW WORKS WITH VISTA”. So I figured I’d install the new version of OneCare.

First, you have to uninstall OneCare before installing a new version, the problem is trying to uninstall OneCare I kept getting an error ‘0×2′. DOH!

So here’s the trick to uninstalling OneCare (courtesy of this link).

1. Download the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility: msicuu2.exe
2. Run this program. If it doesn’t run/install right click on it and select “Run as Administrator”. That solved this step for me.
3. After installed, run this utility by going to: Start -> All Programs -> Windows Installer Cleanup. 
4. ‘Cleanup’ all of these apps. If you don’t see them all don’t work, I only had 3 or 4 of them:
   

   Dr Watson for Microsoft Windows OneCare Live
   Microsoft Windows OneCare Live
   Microsoft Protection Service
   PX Engine
   Microsoft Malware Protection Engine Files
   Microsoft Malware Protection On Access Scanner

5. Try to uninstall onecare and if it fails then proceed to step 6.

6. Download the Windows Live OneCare uninstall program: 48034

7. Run the uninstall program you just downloaded, rightclicking and running it as admin if it fails. Now the first time I ran this my box bluescreened (yeah they still exist go figure!) but when it rebooted and I ran it again, it ran without a problem and uninstalled the app without a problem.

That’s it that’s how I managed to uninstall OneCare from within Vista RC2 (Build 5744)

My version of Windows Live Writer wasn’t pinging all of the sites on my blog ping list. Turns out Windows Live Writer has an extensive logging capability. To access the WLW logs enter the following at a command prompt and it will open the Windows Live Writer Log in notepad:

%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\Windows Live Writer.log

Turns out some of the ping servers just weren’t responding:

WindowsLiveWriter,1076,Fail,00073,19-Sep-2006 22:01:47.531,”Failure while pinging http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php: System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.

I’ve been looking at Text to Speech Flash applications trying to find that something that would allow me to dynamically generate a TTS based flash animation and have had zero luck.  However, during my search I came across crazytalk from www.reallusion.com. This thing is hilarious. Unfortunately, it wants you to use it’s own ActiveX plugin to get the full effect of the animation and I’m hesitant to install a plug-in or require others to use my plug-in. It would be ideal if they supported direct to Flash animations. However, I did come up with a reasonable substitute. 

I used CrazyTalk to create a Video and saved it in MPEG-4 format. Then I used  the Riva FLV Encoder (free tool from www.rivavx.com) to convert my AVI to a FLV file and am displaying it below using the FLV plugin tool mentioned earlier in my blog.

The video is a picture of myself and my wife and the audio, is well you’ll figure out who it is. Pay attention the blinking and the mouth movements, this program is really pretty nicely done.

[gv data="http://www.jesscoburn.com/jessclinton.flv"][/gv]

Now that I'm a firefox user, I figured it would be worthwhile to post a list of useful firefox links and plugins so here they are:

1. The firefox cheat sheet: http://lesliefranke.com/2006/06/22/mozilla-firefox-cheat-sheet-update/
2. SearchStatus - provides a PageRank & Alexa Rank notice for all sites at the bottom of your browser. May not be all that fancy or useful you'd think but it's pretty nice to see the pagerank for various websites while you['re browsing them. 
3. TabMixPlus - This is really handy. It tracks your tabs and should your browser crash, your computer reboot, etc, it will restore your tabs for you to how they were.