Saturday, 9 July 2022

FakeFlashTest v1.1.4 updated (now much faster!)

I wrote FakeFlashTest many years ago when a 16GB Flash drive was considered top of the range and very expensive. Time has moved on since then and Flash memory chips are now cheaper and larger.

So FFT v1.1.4 is now much faster and will dynamically adjust it's algorithm to cater for larger drives. Most drives should take less than 5 minutes to test now (and some a lot less).

You can find the latest version here.



Wednesday, 6 July 2022

Easy2Boot v2.14i Beta available

The developer yaya2007 has fixed the UDF ISO bug in grub4dos, so DLC Boot ISOs that are in UDF format (and maybe other ISOs that had problems booting under E2B) are now fixed in E2B v2.14i.

2.14i also has a new menu entry in the UTILITIES menu to display CPU information. Thanks to a1ive for writing the cpuid utility for grub4dos..
2.14h can now boot Tails ISO files (without persistence) even if your E2B USB drive is a fixed disk.

Note 2022-07-13: 2.14i and later uses the latest version of grub4dos which has a BUG! You will get problems with some operations (e.g. Windows Install ISOs give  unattend error). Awaiting fix from the developer (grub4efi has same bug!). Late news: Fixed in latest release 2.15.
    
New CPU Info menu entry
 

Monday, 4 July 2022

Don't miss the bargains on Amazon (12th July)

Amazon Prime Day is 12-13th July this year. There will be loads of special offers but only for Amazon Prime Members.

Membership costs $14.99 a month (£7.99 in UK) and you get free delivery and free Amazon Prime Video too.

Prices will be different in USA.

However, you get a free 30-day trial (#Ad), so sign up now and watch some movies, grab the bargains on July 12th/13th and then (if you really want to), cancel before the end of the month and it won't cost you a penny.

Sunday, 3 July 2022

You must check these four things on your computer at least once a year

If you have purchased a new computer, perhaps have built your own PC or have a PC/notebook which is over a year old, you should check these things now and at least once a year.

Introduction

Modern computers are able to monitor various temperatures, fan speeds and voltages throughout the system. You can easily download software to display these values (often the BIOS setup/configuration menu system will display them too). Using SMART, we can also find out about the health of our internal disk drives too.

If you have received a new or second-hand system recently, a typical problem is that during transportation, the CPU heatsink may have come loose. This would mean that your CPU will get too hot and when this happens, modern PCs will usually 'throttle back' and go slow to avoid permanent damage to the CPU. 

If you have a computer that is a few years old, the thermal paste between the CPU and the CPU heatsink may have dried out. Again, your CPU may be getting too hot.

Also, if your PC\Notebook is older than a year or so, it may have accumulated dust and cobwebs! This can seriously affect the air flow through the system and can thus cause the hard drives and CPU to overheat.

If you have overclocked your system, you will need to be particularly careful, because you are probably running it at its maximum performance capabilities - any overheating may cause damage or a system crash!

Some monitoring programs which I recommend you to try are:

Saturday, 2 July 2022

How to fix Windows Startup program errors (e.g. HP printer drivers/programs)

 After uninstalling some programs from your Windows system, you may find that as soon as you log in to your Windows account, you see some Windows dialog boxes which are reporting missing programs or DLL files, etc.



This is usually because the Uninstaller has forgotten to remove all of the programs or services that it had originally installed and configured to run on startup. There are two types of mechanisms which could be causing this:

Thursday, 30 June 2022

agFM v1.81 released plus E2B Beta v2.14h (with DLC Boot 2022 v4.0/4.1 ISO support)

agFM v1.81 is now released and supports the latest DLC Boot 2022 ISO.

E2B v2.14i Beta and v2.15 is also available which also supports the June 2022 DLC ISO and has UDF ISO bugfix in grub4dos.

For DLCBoot 2022 ISO UEFI64 booting from agFM please use agFM v1.88 or later.



Monday, 27 June 2022

easy2boot.com now redirects to easy2boot.xyz

I have set up a redirect from the old .com site to the new WordPress easy2boot.xyz home page now and some of the old .com URLs will even redirect to the equivalent page on the xyz site!

Please let me know if you find any bad links!


Sunday, 26 June 2022

How to make $$$ for zero cost while you sleep!

Do you have some knowledge, information, know some 'secrets', hints and tips, great gluten-free recipes, good websites/blogs/social media sites/forums, etc. which may be valuable to others, then why not write some eBooks. Although I sell an eBook called 'How to make $1000 a month from the internet' for just $3 in my eBook store, I am going to show you how easy it is to sell eBooks world-wide for absolutely no cost and very little effort once it has been written and is set up for sale.

The great thing about eBooks is that it is passive selling. Once it is available for sale you just sit back - everything (sales, delivery, payment) is automatic and it is very simple to set up too!

If eBooks aren't your thing, musicians can sell their own music files, photographers can sell their photos and artists can sell their graphics downloads. You can make and sell courses and coaching products on a subscription basis too (typically using Zoom, setting milestones, etc.).

Wednesday, 22 June 2022

Legacy-booting the RedHat Trial Beta RHEL 9 ISO (registration issue)

 A user reported that the trial version of RedHat RHEL 9 did not seem to work correctly when booted from an ISO file using E2B, agFM or Ventoy.

All seemed OK, except that the installer GUI did not seem to pick up the trial licence information and it required the user to register online using their RedHat login credentials before it would allow you to proceed...


To work around this issue, it was necessary to ensure that the legacy MBR Partition 4 Type number was not set to 0 so that the Linux OS would mount the ISO mapped to Partition 4 and would see the licence files.

E2B 2.14e Beta thus supports a new .iso83 file extension which works around this issue.

For more details see here and the Forum thread here.