There is a better way.

Just right-click on the desktop, select “View” and then “Show desktop icons”. So simple.

Should have found this years ago. Works on Windows Vista and Windows 7 as far as I know.

What I ended up doing to keep using my scanner (whose hardware is still very much intact and solid) is fairly obvious: I installed my old Windows XP license on a VMWare virtual machine (I had the good luck to have a full license with physical media), and then install the Canon LIDE30 driver on that virtualized XP.

VMWare Player is sufficient to let me attach the physical scanner to the virtual machine’s USB interface, and drive it without the host Vista 64 machine being any the wiser. To get the scanned pictures out, I have to resort to drag-and-drop, as I have failed to get shared folders to work with Player for some unknown reason.

The end result can be pretty complex… To send some emails from my work computer including scans with this scanner, I had to:

• Scan on the virtual XP machine
• Drag-and-drop to the Pictures folder on my Vista 64 machine
• Use file-sharing in Windows to move to my work laptop
• Attach in Outlook

Workable. It is also a pretty good demo of the power afforded by modern consumer operating systems. Imagine trying to do that in 1995… would not have been quite as fun.

However, moving to Vista has made the printing bit harder.

In Windows XP, there were drivers available for the printer, since it was fairly recent when XP was released. In Vista, no such luck. So you have to resort to using “LPR” printing (optional install), and using the generic “Microsoft Imagesetter” as the printer profile. This, somewhat surprisingly, works pretty well.

With one exception: Acrobat.

It seems that Acrobat is trying so hard to be smart about printing that it gets confused by the Imagesetter bit, and decides that the thing on the other end is not a Postscript printer. And thus, it needs to have a 600 dpi bitmap of the page being printed sent to it. Needless to say, my old printer with its upgraded 12 MB of RAM (it came with 4, and I scavenged 8 more MB from some old dead PC that passed through my hands in the late 1990′s) usually chokes on this.

When my last XP machine was retired, this did indeed create a problem, since all official online forms tend to be Acrobat-based.

However, by accident and luck I decided to try the Foxit Reader as an Acrobat Reader alternative. This has turned out to be the perfect to solution to my printing woes. With Foxit, a PDF file prints as a small nice regular vector graphics file that my LaserWriter has little problem printing. It makes printing PDFs feasible and reliable again, and means that I do not have to go out and figure out which new printer to buy. It is kind of cool to have such a decade-old technology icon at home, and still in working order.

A final note: 12 MB in my printer. My first hard drive back in 1990 had 20 MB on it. My new desktop Core i7 machine just got upped to 9 GB of RAM. Back in 1991, I had my high school’s most powerful home computer: a Macintosh SE/30 with all of 5 MB of RAM (which cost a fortune at the time).

To get it installed, I found good instructions in the WinhelpOnline Blog. The only annoyance was that it was put on the top level of accessories folder, and not under Tablet PC… despite being a part of that toolset. It is here on my machine:

Still note that for professional heavy-duty screen dumping and capturing, nothing beats SnagIt!

In the end, it turned out it was really dead easy!

The steps are the following (please refer to this guide at iLounge for more background and details):

• On the new machine, start iTunes and authorize it using user iTunes store account.
• Make sure the folder you use as your iTunes library folder is within the Windows standard user data places, like the default location inside “Documents\Music” on XP and “C:\User\username\Music” on  Vista. It needs not be in your user’s hierarchy, I had mine in the shared hierarchy and that worked fine.
• Consolidate your iTunes library, using the iTunes 8 File-Library-Consolidate Library option.
• Copy everything in that iTunes library folder to the corresponding location on the new machine. In my case, this was the folder called “Shared Music” in the “Public” part of the file system.
• The iTunes database is separate from the storage of files. On Vista, it was located in User\Username\Music\iTunes. This is easy to find, as it is created when iTunes is started. After locating it, simply replace the iTunes folder on the new machine with the one from the old machine (without iTunes running!).
• Start iTunes on the new machine, and all your data and music should be there!

For me, this worked on the first try. The key thing that I had to do was the consolidation phase… there were some files outside of the managed iTunes folder that needed to be copied into it in order to make this work completely.

I have been doing both of these modes to some extent, and the main problem with them at least on a PC is that while the processors might be good at multitasking and sharing the CPU load, my IO system is annoyingly non-parallel.

At least on my laptop running Windows Vista, any task that accesses the hard drive intensely (compiling, updating source tree, indexing files) blocks any other task that would also be hard drive intense. For some reason, that includes Microsoft Powerpoint and Outlook. So being productive while my machine churns in the background is pretty hard.

In general, this means that any multicore device intended to do many different things at once will have to have IO that is similarly parallelizable. And that means working hard to avoid any choke points where one stream of data can disturb another. The typical PC of today is not that system, with lots of bottlenecks where “all” data have to pass. Most embedded multicore SoCs appear at least to have more direct connections from IO to cores, but I have not seen how well it works in practice.

This small rant was written while everything else was locked-up competing for my hard drive. I want a parallel fast disk system in my laptop! Pain!