Short file names

Recently I made a personal consulting visit to a member's house of the church I am attending. The person had SEVERAL gigs of pictures on her computer (for those that don't know what a "gig" is it's basically 100,000 empty word documents).

This user had organized her pictures in a way in which several folders were inside other folders. So for example in her "My Pictures" folder, she had a 2008 folder, and in that folder was an "October" folder, and inside that folder was another folder, say "Dad's birthday party". However instead of these folders being short folder names like in my example, they were basically sentences detailing what was in the folder. And instead of just going three folders deep, she went 5 to 6 (or more) folders deep. Now I personally like this type of file management b/c it allows easy understanding to what that folder is about and what the files contained within this folder is about.

However, where this person was having problems is in some of the folders she could not open the pictures up. You could also not rename the files of the pictures.

So what was her problem? Well as you might have guessed it, the long names of her folders and files were causing Windows to have issues with properly dealing with the files. You see Windows has a certain length that a file path can be. And if the file path exceeds this amount then you run into problems with normal operation of the file (opening, saving, editing, etc). So in order to fix this problem all I had to do was rename one of the folders and give it a much shorter name. One thing is that if you are REALLY over the limit you might have to rename two of the folders in order to get below this maximum limit that Windows has.

So for today's post I just wanted to encourage everyone to practice good file organizational habits, however in doing so remember to keep those file and folder names short. If you need to know what the contents of a folder is all about, throw in a text document within that folder giving a more detailed explanation of what the folder contents were all about. Btw, if you put a "!_" at the front of the file name it will show up as the first file within that folder.

Oh and one more thing. BACK UP YOUR PICTURES!

Audio won't install on Gateway E-4300

Hello everyone,

More of a self note today, but still something interesting that my supervisor and I came across over the last few days....

We have a Gateway E-4300 that we installed Windows XP SP3 on the computer (SP3 was slipstreamed into the CD) and after installing most of the drivers we had problems getting the audio driver to install. The audio driver was suppose to be a Realtek High Definition Audio driver (knew this from other E-4300's that we had) however the PC would never recognize the sound card even though the installation seemed to go fine. After trying several different versions we finally figured out that the problem was with SP3. For some reason the installation did not like having to install onto a XP SP3 box, however if we installed Windows SP2 first, installed the audio driver, then updated to SP3 it worked fine.

I love technology! :S

Is your time correct?

Yesterday we changed our clocks back to normal time from daylight savings time. This is a change from the way it use to be because of the Energy Policy Act (EPAct) of 2005 a few weeks were added onto the length of how long most of the United States observes daylight savings time (aka DST). Because of this act being passed a lot of the existing equipment needed to be updated to coincide with the longer DST period.

Some of you may be thinking.....SO? What's that got to do with the price of eggs in China? (no offense to any Chinese reading this blog).

Well, the thing is, was your time on your computer, PDA, blackberry, iPhone, or any other electronic device correct this morning? I know mine wasn't. For some reason my computer didn't know about the changes to the rules about DST. So I had to update my computer. Even though according to Windows Update it was up-to-date on all of the security patches. So I had to do some research and find the patch and manually install it. I found the patch through Windows Knowledge Base (KB) article. The article (KB951072) is the August 2008 cumulative time zone update for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

So if your time wasn’t right today (November 3, 2008) maybe you also need to update your computer with this time zone update from Windows. The article should give you quality instructions on how to install the patch onto your computer.