Friday, 22 July 2022

Free newspapers and magazines for 3 months!



Why not cancel your daily newspaper and magazine subscriptions, save money and also help to save trees at the same time?

Sign up before the end of this month and Readly will give you 3 months for free. After that they will charge you the reduced rate of £8.99 a month for the next 12 months (£9.99 thereafter). You can cancel any time (even in month #3 of the free trial period).

Thursday, 21 July 2022

agFM v1.83 released

 The new version has a few changes

v1.83 2022-07-21

  • Add \e2b\update agFM\GetLatestVentoyPluginFiles.cmd.
  • Improve download speeds. Fix problem of .imgPTN switch-in operation sometimes detecting difference in MBR and offering to restore instead of switching in new imgptn.

GetLatestVentoyPluginFiles.cmd – this downloads the latest plugins required by Ventoy for some functions (Windows vhd plugin, Windows wim plugin, Linux persistence .dat files in a .zip file, bootable ISO to remove Ventoy Secure Boot whitelist key from UEFI BIOS NVRAM).

The files are copied to the \ventoy folder on Partition 1 of the E2B USB drive.

To update your E2B drive, run Make_E2B.exe and click the Update E2B button or run "\e2b\Update agFM\Download and update agFM_v2.cmd".

Note: E2B v2.14 will be also available soon and then I hope to produce a new 'Ventoy for Easy2Boot' version.

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!