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NirSoft Freeware (2008)

nirsoft.net

141–150 of 241 posts

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost as good as Mike Rowe .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft

It's strange to me that people still remember this. It's been 14 years, but I guess it's nice to be known for something :)

Come on now, you were near the top of fark.com for a moment. That kind of infamy can never leave you.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 2000, I had a laptop with 5g of harddisk and 64mb of ram, now I'm at ~1tb and 16gb ram. Roughly a 200x increase in raw numbers, though lots of other things since then make the actual increase larger, so it sounds like we're using net-smaller apps :)

The last time I noticed a real performance increase was going from HDD to SSD. I mean, I do also ask a lot more of my machine than 10 or 15 years ago so it probably balances out.

What is the biggest current bottleneck? Going from HDD to SSD makes even a 5 year old laptop feel close to current. Is there something that would do the same now?

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I noticed a real performance increase was going from HDD to SSD. I mean, I do also ask a lot more of my machine than 10 or 15 years ago so it probably balances out.

What is the biggest current bottleneck? Going from HDD to SSD makes even a 5 year old laptop feel close to current. Is there something that would do the same now?

Sadly, no. Clock speed and multi-thread aware apps haven't gone far enough to give that feel of 'snap' we all got. I remember my Intel x25m so fondly. Even dual nvme drives in raid0 don't make thing hugely faster. I'm interested in what one of the 18-core i9s would be like clocked at 5ghz with our optane storage. Probably 1/3 of a second faster to load Firefox....

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I noticed a real performance increase was going from HDD to SSD. I mean, I do also ask a lot more of my machine than 10 or 15 years ago so it probably balances out.

What is the biggest current bottleneck? Going from HDD to SSD makes even a 5 year old laptop feel close to current. Is there something that would do the same now?

Depending on the CPU, RAM speed can be a big one. Laptop vs desktop still carries a performance cost due to the power requirements. NVMe SSDs are to regular SSDs what they were to hard drives, but there are limits, especially gigabit internet and slower CPUs. Honestly though, the biggest gains are generally in making software more efficient — like choosing Safari instead of Chrome, or removing unnecessary drivers and bloat from your system. Run a startup log or check your system’s logs for errors that might slow down your computer. Oh, and install browser-native adblockers on every device. :)

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#146
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this basically what PWAs will hopefully solve? Rather than Spotify, Slack, Discord, ... all coming with their own Electron bundle they can be packaged up as a PWA and use the browser as the runtime environment along with all the nice offline stuff, safe OS integration for notifications, sandboxed file system access, ability to still do some work in S0i3 (aka Modern Standy on Windows), etc. Or am I totally wrong…

All good questions and some things will probably be well addressed by PWA or whatever we decide to call JavaScript rich webpages by then. But some UI issues, like the lack of a proper menu, browser's chrome and address bar will still be a turn off. Besides, having unrestriced access to the user's drive is not something a web page should be able to do and is a must for something like a text editor.

There's no reason a text editor, or most applications really, need unrestricted access to a user's disk. They have to prompt the user with a file open dialog anyway, so you may as well let the OS handle that and pass an fd/handle across the boundary for you.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#147
post #99
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still hard to understand that they haven't touched Notepad in such a long time. The effort to get a good editor must be tiny compared to a lot of other stuff they are doing. I am pretty sure I could improve Notepad substantially with just a few days of work.

I'm sorry for going off topic, but I keep seeing this kind of comment and I want to get an answer - how is Notepad not a good editor? It can take any ASCII/ANSI/UTF file and output it in plaintext. It has line-wrap as an option. It loads fast and can handle files of decent size without lag. Users can set display and print fonts, etc. I'm really lost as to why anyone says Notepad is not a good text editor for basic te…

> how is Notepad not a good editor?

1. Only understands Windows line endings.

2. Always saves UTF-8 with a BOM.

Only the first one is really a significant issue, but the second one can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Granted, yes, it's a pain in the ass primarily because *nix applications often treat a BOM as data, but it's still a pain in the ass.

> Heck, if I need a DOS batch file, I turn to either Notepad or Edit.

Edit? You've been gone awhile. Edit has never been released on any x64 platform of Windows, AFAIK. Why? Because it's a 16-bit application! NTVDM, the 16/32-bit DOS and 16 bit Windows emulator only runs on 32-bit Windows. WoW64, the 32-bit Windows emulator for x64 Windows, does not run 16 bit applications.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#148
post #136
post #79

We should have a sub-thread of these comments devoted just to the silly things people use NirSoft stuff to do. I'll start. ----- I have a HTPC hooked up to a projector that I use to play movies, and the projector has native support for 24 FPS, so I use this: http://nircmd.nirsoft.net/setdisplay.html to quickly set framerate. Make batch files for 24 Hz, 60 Hz, etc. bind them to keys, and then you don't have to bother…

I'd love to have a utility that quickly toggles between two audio outputs in windows.

I could have sworn that's a feature in Windows 10.

Edit: nope, but https://soundswitch.aaflalo.me/ will do it - never used it though.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#149
post #136
post #79

We should have a sub-thread of these comments devoted just to the silly things people use NirSoft stuff to do. I'll start. ----- I have a HTPC hooked up to a projector that I use to play movies, and the projector has native support for 24 FPS, so I use this: http://nircmd.nirsoft.net/setdisplay.html to quickly set framerate. Make batch files for 24 Hz, 60 Hz, etc. bind them to keys, and then you don't have to bother…

I'd love to have a utility that quickly toggles between two audio outputs in windows.

There are several, but I haven't used any of them in a while (probably around Win8/8.1. Here are a couple I've used...

https://audioswit.ch/er

https://github.com/sirWest/AudioSwitch

I think there was another that was some variation on "audio" and "switch"/"switcher".

You can also create a shortcut to nircmd with the setdefaultsounddevice value set and assign a hotkey for the shortcut.

Now I use EarTrumpet, which lists devices in the right click menu.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#150
post #44
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Sysinternals was acquired by Microsoft?

I really hope they someday integrate the tools into Windows considering how few megabytes they take up

I really hope they don't, because then their releases would be intertwined. Instead of getting the latest and greatest sysinternals tools all the time, I'd probably have to wait until the next Windows release.
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