Archive for November 20th, 2012

Running System Restore from command prompt on Windows 7 / Fixing broken Windows 7 laptops

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

doing system restore on windows 7 from command prompt / windows7 systemrestore logo
On Windows, mostly anyone who has a little idea about computing should know of existence of the famous System Restore.

I'm currently fixing a messed up m$ Windows 7 Acer Aspire 7750, laptop whose Desktop icons has disappeared and it seems it is full of Viruses and Spyware.
ACER notebooks does not have the nice feature of IBM / Lenovo notebooks which has a separate Hidden Partition with Windows 7 Install on it, and besides this the Windows 7 with notebook is licensed to the notebook. So simply downloading any cracked version of Win 7 is not an option.

After consulting with a friend I've figured out the only option I have to fix the "barely working" Windows 7 PC is to use Windows System Restore

windows system restore screenshot choose hard drive / Confirm system restore
 
Usually the traditional way to run System menu is by Navigating to menus:

Start | Programs | Accessories | System Tools | Restore

However as the notebook, I'm fixing is in Dutch as well as it is missing Accessories? Start-up menu, I thought of alternative and did a quick search on how it is possible to run System Restore from command line.

So here is how:

From Windows Command Prompt run command:

%systemroot%\system32\rstrui.exe

Also for me on this Windows 7 Home with Service Pack1, system restore is possible to run by typing in cmd.exe:

rstrui.exe

System Restore choose restore point

Following, few pop-up menus appears which allows choice of the date of last system restore.

I just choose the one made auto few days earlier and proceeded with the System Restore. There is a warning appearing before the system restore warning to make backups before proceeding a step further. Then few clicks a Restart the PC Worked 🙂 It is as quick and easy.

Well of course, though Restoration to a previous working state of the Windows worked like a charm. Still the restored version, was having the usual bunch of Spyware / Malware. So I had to clean up also the Spyware with MalwareBytes and Little Registry Cleaner to solveissues within registry caused by malware.
 

How to: Ripping Audio CDs to Mp3 on Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7 – CDEx Audio CD Rip free software

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

 

cdex free software burning audio music cd to mp3 program logo

Recently, I had to fix few Windows XP computers – Windows XP and Windows 7. The person for which I have to fix them a Dutch guy wanted to install him some kind of software capable of ripping his large collection of old CDs so he can later store a copies of the audio CDs in MP3 Format on his 2GB external hard drive. There is plenty of software out there that can RIP Audio CDs and CD Ripping has a long history line so it is rather easily for one to find a number of non-free software programs capable of doing Audio Music CD to Mp3 Ripping. However as a great Free Software Enthusiast and Supporter, I didn't wanted to install him a piece of non-free cracked software. Therefore I did a quick research to find out if there is an Open Source / Free Software program capable of  "downloading" the  AudioCDs to Mp3. I've ended up on  CDEx – Open Source Digital Audio CD Extractor website. Besides being Open Source it is even free software licensed under GPLv3!

CDEx Audio CD Burner Windows XP and Windows 7 install dialog

CDEX rip and convert audio CDs to mp3 windows XP Vista and 7 OS

 

Install is pretty straight forward, here I've noticed the program installed some Windows .DLLs (ASPI – Advanced SCSI Programming Interface), it seems developers used this to be as a program backend. Here I should say I had some problems on 64 bit Windows 7 install with the program, though officially on the website it is stated the program installs and works fine with m$ Windows 7.

cdex ripping audio cds to mp3 windows xp

The program is comparatively quick in RIP-ing songs, one song is being ripped and converted saved in mp3 for about 30 secs or less, meaning a normal music CD of 10 – 12 songs is burned just for 5 minutes or so, though this might vary depending on CD-Rom Speed, CPU and HDD (you know many laptops are running HDDs with 5200 RPMs p/s).cdex configuration options screeshot windows xp

CDEx is also equipped with some Format Converting capabilities. It supports:

Convertion of WAV files to Compressed Audio
Compressed Audio files to WAV
Adding /Removal of (RIFF) wav header to mp3s

As well as suport for recording of Audio streams from Analog Input devices (I guess this is old tapes and stuff).
Interesting soft feature is it support for CDDB (Compat Disk Database) – allowing it to get information about Audio CD performer from the Internet – It uses freedb.org's music info database. By the way using freedb is very simple, all you need is to configure email address with it.

It also supports an extensive list of Encoders including even convertion to the nowdays so popular FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), in below screenshot are supported ones:

CDexconfiguration list of supported encodings convertion

Also it is translated to a number of languages including my own country's language Bulgarian 🙂

Configuration about where the program is supposed to store RIP-ped songs is done via:

Options -> Settings -> Directories & Files

I haven't tested it thoroughfully, but it seemed to work fine, my only remark was sometimes it makes problems if you configure as a Store Device external hard disk in program Options and later remove external Hard Disk (forget) and try extracting an Audio CD and converting to MP3, trying this will do nothing and it will stop and start without even saying a word to give you an idea that something is wrong with the Storage location, but still probably in future versions developers will solve that out.

cdex ripping audio cdrom in action / cdex burning audio CD rom to mp3

Another great news is CDEx works even on Linux, though not all options works fine and it crashes sometimes, simple Audio CD Ripping worked pretty well on my Debian Squeeze Stable via WINE (Windows Emulator). The extracted sound quality is great as well and the program deals fine with CD Audio normalization, sound sync and stuff. As most older Audio Music CDs, does not have embedded Track information, the only option to get a good name (Instead of the standard Track1, Track2 … etc.) is to  manually rename each of song names or hopefully fetch the info via FreeDB's database .