Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Melbourne Brisbane Computer Repairs, Website design & SEO

Melbourne Brisbane Computer Repairs, Website design & SEO

Link to Computer Help

Computer Operating system stats April 2013

Posted: 23 Apr 2013 07:16 PM PDT

I recently looked at the stats for my website, as its interesting to see who/what views computer-aid.com.au.

os stats

Now whats interesting is that 81.5% of all my traffic comes from Microsoft windows computers, but then, thats not all that surprising, considering that most of my blogs are about MS Windows.

But what is interesting, is that Windows 7 & XP represent 72% of all my traffic, and that XP is still 10 times more popular than Vista.

I don’t seem to have any stats on windows 8, so I suspect AWStats is not logging it correctly yet, so I can only assume its either ignored, or its appearing under an incorrect category (ie Windows 7, longhorn, or “unknown”).

Whats interesting is that linux is more popular than macOS.

Whats also worth noting, is that android represents 2.4%. I can see Android increasing market share in the future.

The name you specified is not valid or too long

Posted: 23 Apr 2013 05:52 PM PDT

I recently did some data recovery for someone who “accidentally” re-installed Windows 7.

I managed to recover about 80% of the data.

But the data recovery program that I used got caught in a loop, so some recovered folders ended up about 30 or 40 sub-folders deep

This type of scenario often shows what shortcuts Microsoft take when designing their OS…

In this case, I was using Windows XP.

When I tried to copy a whole recovered folder tree, I would get the error:

The name you specified is not valid or too long

It was soon obvious that XP has a short internal buffer for storing a folder path.

The filesystem (NTFS) could easily create virtually unlimited folder depths, but windows explorer (and possibly the underlying OS itself, could not cope with something like:

C:\recovery\Documents and Settings\user\Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries\Office\Outlook\Local\Temporary Internet Files\IE5.6\Windows\Microsoft\Appdata\Office\Outlook\Local\IE1.2\Temporary Internet Files\windows\user\AppData\Microsoft\Roaming\..

Anyway, you get the message.

Since I couldn’t copy these files and folders, I should just delete them, right?

But deleting them gave the error: The name you specified is not valid or too long.

error-deleting-file

So what do I do now?

I had a hunch that the buffer was just used to store the full path name (ie the long string of folders above), so if I renamed the folders to a shorter name, it might fit into the XP buffer, and I can finally delete them.

It turns out I was right.

I had about 50 folder paths to rename, but I eventually got them all to be shorter. Using the above as an example, I just renamed each folder using the first character in its name ie:

c:\r\d\u\a\r\m\w\l\o\o\l\t\i\w\m\a\o\o\l\i\t\w\u\a\m\r

Sure, it looks crazy, but the overall length means I could finally delete the offending files and folders.

I’m sure that if I looked hard enough, I would have found a windows explorer equivalent that didn’t have the same restrictions… but given the time constraints, it was just easier to just spend 30 minutes renaming the folders (its really fast if you use keyboard shortcuts like: F2=rename folder, and arrow keys,  spacebar, enter key, all at the correct time.

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