Get rid of “Install Windows 10” message

This is very annoying and confusing, I know several people that installed Windows 10 by mistake on old hardware and are now having trouble using their PCs. The following information is based on Windows 7, in previous versions of Windows the screens are different but its the same principle.

The Install Windows 10 app comes in as an Optional Windows update. If you are like me and prefer to chose whats installed in your PC you should still have it pending, open up the Windows update app (Control Panel / Windows Update), click on the Optional tab and look for KB3035583, click on it, its description at the right pane wrongly says: Install this update to resolve issues in Windows.

Build openCONFIGURATOR on Windows 7

I’m experimenting with RPi2 and openPOWERLINK and after having an issue and posting on the openPOWERLINK discussion forum, the openPOWERLINK team replied suggesting that I try to increase the cycle time and poll response time using openCONFIGURATOR. So I downloaded the openCONFIGURATOR Windows build from their SourceForge site. But I wasn’t able to use it, my AVG Anti Virus found a virus in it. Probably a false positive but that stimulated me to get the source code and compile it on my Windows 7.

Anyway I ended up installing just the Eclipse (Mars 4.5.1) openCONFIGURATOR plugin that comes with a pre-compiled library, so in fact I didn’t need to compile it, but I leave here the necessary information, in case someone needs it.

Go to previous tab on Firefox

I used to have a Firefox plugin that enabled me to get back to the previous tab if I clicked again over the selected tab and this was very practical, as I always have lots of tabs and often go back and forth between two tabs. For example, I have the WordPress and the Yahoo mail tabs pinned and while writing a new post I go to my emails tab and back again to my WordPress tab a few times. If you press <ctrl> TAB you can switch to the next (in GUI sequence) tab, and a <ctrl> <shift> TAB does the opposite. This is the default behavior.

But if you change the browser.ctrlTab.previews config parameter to true then the behavior changes and its a new whole world! You get a tab preview while pressing <ctrl> TAB and the order is no longer the GUI sequence order but the history order! So now I have what I want. And this is really a time saver for anybody who likes to open tabs around with things to read and they tend to accumulate over time.

To do this you need to type in the address bar:

about:config

At least the first time you do this you’ll have the warning that you can break your Firefox, go ahead and say you’ll be careful :-)

After clicking the “I’ll be careful” button you get the list of config parameters, to quickly find the browser.ctrlTab.previews parameter just type ctrlTab in the Search text box on top of the page. Then double click on the parameters value to make it toggle to true.

And start a new life using your favorite browser!

Using boost library on Windows

From this stackoverflow question:
MSVC has very poor support for the C language, they do not support anything past C90. Herb Sutter has already publicly stated this in his blog.
cstdint is supported from MSVC2012.
There is a msinttypes project that fills the absence of stdint.h and inttypes.h in Microsoft Visual Studio.
Boost also provides boost/cstdint.hpp if you do not have it.

Boost library can be very useful but it is also very big so in this post I’m going to show how to compile it from source code and then how to extract one of its modules and include it in your projects source code.

I also have another post where I compiled Boost.

SyncToy

This one is for Windows 7. Yes, I have to use Windows, everyone else is doing it…! – )

I bought a new 2Tb external hard drive and I was looking for a simple way to keep a copy of my files automatically. I was doing it manually but it takes to long to think about it and actually do it every couple of days.

I just found SyncToy that looks nice so I decided to give it a try.

Virtualbox on Asus MAXIMUS VI EXTREME mobo

I had some trouble making Oracle Virtualbox work on my Windows 7 PC. The motherboard is an Asus MAXIMUS VI EXTREME and for some reason the hardware virtualization is disabled on the BIOS settings. What this does is, when creating a new VM, in the versions combo box we only have the 32 bit versions of the proposed OS’s.

After going to the BIOS settings and changing “Intel Virtualization Technology” to “Enabled” we have both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions available.