Technology Errors

My Dell Downloads Using Chrome – Application Cannot Be Started, Contact The Application Vendor

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After a had a conflict with Windows 7 Service Pack 1 that really slowed my PC down I decided to scrap my current Windows 7 install and reinstall. So far it is the best decision regarding this laptop that I have made in a long time. Not only are things  running much better but I was able to organize a lot better from the start. I needed to install some third party applications that came with my laptop including Roxio Creator Premier 10.3 which I use for burning ISO images and Dell makes these tasks very easy with the My Dell Downloads site. Initially I attempted to download these applications using my preferred browser which is Google Chrome however I received an error which I explain in detail below as well as how to use Chrome to download items from My Dell Downloads web site.

Technology Insights

How to Boot the Recovery Partition on a Acer Aspire when Alt – F10 Does Not Work

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I had a Acer aspire one in the shop today and it had a variety of critical Windows issues. While doing some tests one of the things I did was rebuild the windows boot loader using the /FIXBOOT & /FIXMBR commands from a recovery disk. What I did not realize is it seems Acer has a custom boot loader which allows for the keys Alt & F10 to be pressed on boot in order to reinstall from the recovery partition so when I reinstalled the boot loader I overwrote the Acer one. This prevented the Alt – F10 combination from being used to access the recovery partition. Now, normally if you can boot into Windows there is a icon in the start menu to execute the recovery program but in my case Windows was so messed up due to a bad chkdsk I was not able to do that.

Technology Insights

Convert a .daa File to a .iso in Linux using Poweriso

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Often times I still come across .daa files. Although we can burn these to disc as a image I prefer the .iso format. Anytime I get a .daa file I normally convert it to .iso for storage. .iso files seem easier to work with and more burning programs supChange into the newly port its format. I decided to make a quick post on converting these in Linux. As with every thing in Linux I am sure there are lots more ways to do this however my way is all via command line so it can be easily done via ssh on servers which, for me is very useful.

Technology Insights

Basic Linux Part 1: Command-line CD Fu

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Alex and I are going to start a series on basic Linux shell commands and all the neat things you can do from the terminal. In my opinion there is a shortage of these type of articles on the internet. We are going to try to cover most every basic task and show how it can be done in the shell with no GUI or Desktop at all.  I am going to start out with this article on cd recording, but we will cover such topics as watching movies in the framebuffer, connecting to wireless via the shell, shell based irc chat clients, mysql commands and many more things. I have no idea how many articles there will be in the series but if anyone has a specific request or question you can always post in our engage question and answer section for a more personalized response.