Three Wise Men

If you are like me, Windows accident prone, then you already had problems with booting your Windows, right? Probably. I manage to break even the non breakable things. So, the last time I was playing around with partitions on my hard drives Windows rendered themselves un-bootable. No, it really wasn’t me. The whole boot procedure is actually so weird that repairing often fails. When your boot fails and instead of Windows boot menu or a splash animation, you get a weird error message which you never saw before, you usually try to recover with Windows installation DVD. In some situations this might not be enough…

Did you ever have any problems with Eclipse? With initial versions of Galileo and in previously released Gynamed there was a problem with preassigned keyboard shortcuts on some locale’s. The problem that Eclipse created when using Slovene keyboard layout was that while programmer wanted to type the ] key, Eclipse run File Search action.

Slovenian users are not to blame that their keyboard has ] key mapped to AltGr+G key combination. And Eclipse developers could browse through Wikipedia to discover what obscure keyboard layouts exist.

Any competent programmer will notice that with the default key mapping Eclipse guards programmers from using too many arrays since typically array is marked with [] key combination. They are advancing object oriented design and programming. But in some cases arrays actually make your code faster and optimize memory usage and fragmentation.

To discover how to remedy the problem read on.

In my previous post I was describing a method how to enable and use the AuthenTec ASE2810 fingerprint scanner beta Windows 7 driver. There was some positive feedback and the method worked on some HP notebook devices. For some with different versions of fingerprint scanner the method did not work. Hopefully times have changed for all of us.

On the October 23, 2009 AuthenTec released information about update to Windows 7 driver infrastructure. About 2 weeks ago I noticed an optional update in Windows 7 update section. It read AuthenTec Inc. driver update for AuthenTec Inc. AES2810. I was pleased to finally get the final version of the driver.

Immediately checked it and started the 32Mb download procedure. Smooth download, smooth install. Went to Control Panel->Hardware and Sound->Biometric Devices and the  AES2810 was still available. I decided for clean setup so I removed my existing fingerprint data by clicking and confirming the Remove your fingerprint data dialog. Then I clicked on Manage your fingerprint data and waited for my password dialog. None appeared. Frustrated and angry about the stupid update I started to minimize the windows and was presently surprised by the TrueSuite login screen. Typed and retyped in password of my account and voila I was ready to enroll my fingers.

TrueSuite Application has changed a bit. Must say that it is simple and intuitive to use. You have 2 options. Enroll finger by selecting a finger to enroll and repeating finger swipe 3 times and delete an enrolled finger. Additional nifty feature is available when you enroll a finger.  When TrueSuite application is run through manage your fingerprint data call you are presented by the password login screen. But now you can use your enrolled finger to authenticate your self. No more password typing.

I repeated the update on both HP notebooks that I own. So I can confirm that the driver works for HP EliteBook 8530p and HP Compaq 2230s. Bravo AuthenTec. Now if you could only release data which would help to create or create a Linux driver then I would be in heaven.

A word of caution. After I managed to install Windows 7 64bit my machine started to freeze. Completely freezing, not the blue screen of death, not the black screen of death, not the ‘this program has stopped responding’ kind of freeze. It was the ‘if I had a CRT monitor the picture would be burned in by now’ kind of freeze. Why? Because of the µTorrent. After running it for 15 minutes or so machine was freezing constantly. This only happens on 64bit version of Windows 7, 32bit version is ok.

I am not sure if this is related to the fact that µTorrent is downloading on TrueCrypted drive, but I am not going to test this theory. The impostor was already removed from my disks and I was just copying a load of stuff to and from the encrypted drive for two hours now and no freezing.

Past few couple of days I had some problems with buying Windows 7 and getting it installed. Long story short: they sold me 32bit OEM Home Premium version and I wanted 64bit version. They refused to replace it since I already opened the package. Let’s not get into details that they shouldn’t even sell me the OEM version and that Microsoft won’t be too happy to hear about this but I had a problem and it needed fixing.

Microsoft support was VERY helpful and they told me that I can use my existing serial number to install 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium OEM, not the retail version, but OEM. Great! Unfortunately they told me to get the installation DVD somewhere else.

Read on if you want to know how I solved my problem …