richl.com » Computing

Wampserver for Windows

Rich — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:25:09 +0000

If you have found yourself going through vast amounts of PHP applications, trying to find the right one, you may have used their online demo’s and other similar resources. Unfortunately a lot of these have their limitations, and one thing you can’t do is the installation itself or test how it runs on different systems. One thing i have found recently to help hugely with this is Wampserver. It is essentially a completely bundled installation of Apache, MySQL, and PHP and after installation it will run right out of the box. As with many things i assumed i would configuring it for a while to get various things working but this was not at all necessary – i was up and testing PHP apps within 10 minutes of downloading the Wampserver install.

But what happens if you’ve finished testing your PHP applications, no longer need it running, but don’t want to remove it? As with many aspects of it, that has already been thought of and they provide you with a handy batch file that will stop all services and prevent them from starting so the install lays dormant until it needs to be used again.

At the time of writing it comes bundled with Apache 2.2.11, MySQL 5.1.36, and PHP 5.3.0 so is kept well updated – but you can even upgrade/downgrade any of the individual components if needed to enable you to run older applications or have a specific environment for testing. Obviously it hasn’t been produced with a live environment in mind, but should you wish to host your own small website from home this is a perfect solution and means that even if your PC blows up you can quickly re-install and restore your data to it’s previous glory with very little configuration!

This app is definately worth a look, and well worth writing about.

http://www.wampserver.com/en/

Free defrag utility for Windows

Play Xvid/DivX/MKV files in Vista Media Center

Rich — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:52:24 +0000

Firstly, i’ll apologise for spelling it “er”…but i’ve been Googling so hard today using that phrase i’ve gone a bit American. Anyway, if anyone is using or looking to use Vista’s Media Center for their HTPC solution (like myself), and you want to view xVid or DivX files etc, the only way i could get it to work was to install:

This,
and then this.

In that order, and all is working perfectly. No tweaking or messing around necessary. On a side note, if you are having problems with the “Guide” not showing listings for certain channels (ITV seemed the main problem for me), go to the “Add channel listings” option and simply re-add it. I re-selected “ITV Meridian” and all worked a treat for me.

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Free defrag utility for Windows

Rich — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 07:50:51 +0000

A friend pointed out this to me the other day and i have been using it all over the place ever since, an awesome defragmentation utility for all Windows versions post 2000 (there’s even an X64 version, woo!), read up and download from here.

In addition to a GUI based one-click-and-its-done defrag util, the downloadable zip also includes a command line app for running in a batch file, etc…well worth a look.

Free (released under the GNU General Public License) disk defragment and optimize utility for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/X64. Completely automatic and very easy to use, fast, low overhead, with several optimization strategies, and can handle floppies and USB disks/sticks. Included are a Windows version, a commandline version (for scheduling by the task scheduler or for use from administrator scripts), a screensaver version, a DLL library (for use from programming languages), and versions for Windows X64.

Wampserver for Windows