Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 December 12

= December 12 =

Turbo C and memory
I AM HAVING PROBLEM IN RUNNING TURBO C LANGUAGE IN MY PC AS I M HAVING QUAD 2.66GHZ PROCESSOR. AFTER INSTALLING C, WHEN I TRY TO OPEN EXE FILE IT SHOWS ERROR OF PROCESSOR. AND OTHER ONE IS I M HAVING 4 GB OF RAM AND COMPUTER SHOW ME ONLY 2.99 GB OF RAM. PLZ HELP ME THROUGH.

THANKING YOU!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.236.197.173 (talk) 00:23, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * The 3 GB limitation is probably because your operating system (presumably, a 32-bit version of Windows XP, for example) does not support more RAM than 3GB. See Memory Support and Windows Operating Systems.  The other trouble you're having would be more easily diagnosed if you can tell us the exact error message you are receiving.  Nimur (talk) 00:56, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * ..... and use lowercase to do so. -- Hoary (talk) 00:59, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
 * In any case, as far as I know, Borland Turbo C hasn't had a new release in years. Is there some reason why you specifically want to use this compiler?  It's outdated and will have a variety of technical problems, and few people still use it, so it will be hard to find community support.  If you need a C compiler for Windows, you might consider either Microsoft Visual Studio Express, which is available free of charge, or MinGW GCC, which is totally free software.  These more modern compilers will have better support on today's operating systems.  Nimur (talk) 01:03, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * And if you have trouble instaling MinGW, then you can try some free IDE such as Dev-C++ or Code::Blocks. They are easier to install. Lukipuk (talk) 09:55, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * For clarification, this will occur with 32-bit versions of most versions of Windows including Windows 7 and Windows Vista . The server 32-bit versions do support PAE but as it creates driver and other issues it's not usually used on desktop versions. See also . Nil Einne (talk) 04:31, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * and DON'T SHOUT!!! :-D Civic Cat (talk) 19:49, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

PG Degree in IT
Respected sir/madam

I am doing PGDBA (HRM) from symbiosis university university. I am left with 4 papers and project part.

I want to apply for M.Sc.(IT) from Punjab Technical university through distance course.

I need to know that whether it is permissible to apply for same while continuing with PGDBA.

please guide me. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.254.229.158 (talk) 07:11, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Simply ask both universities if it is OK. -- Hoary (talk) 11:58, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Here is a contact form for questions related to admissions at Punjab Technical University. Nimur (talk) 16:44, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

MS Virtual PC for Windows 7
I'd like to check some websites I've been working on using older versions of Internet Explorer. To that end I'd like to install one of the compatability VPC images that Microsoft make available for that purpose. To run them I'd need Windows Virtual PC to run on my Windows 7 Home Premium machine. Now the Wikipedia VPC article says w7hp is a supported host OS, and Microsoft's own page for VPC says that w7hp is a supported host OS. But I can't find how to actually download the thing. When I visit the VPC download page it only offers me W7's XP mode (which is essentially VPC plus an XP install and an XP licence). I don't need (and because I'm running a home version can't run) XP mode; those compatability VPC images have their own licences. Fearing that this is a MS browser-sniffing snafu I've tried with IE and FF on Windows 7, and Chrome and FF on a Linux machine, but the results remain the same. So either MS no longer offers a vanilla VPC install (in which case the Wikipedia article is wrong) or they've hidden the option to download it somewhere obscure. Can anyone clarify the situation? 87.115.47.74 (talk) 13:36, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * They hide it behind the dropdowns on that page, but XP mode is actually two separate downloads - Windows Virtual PC and the XP image. Once you've selected a version of Windows 7 and a language, it'll show the download buttons. Here's a direct link to the Virtual PC installer.


 * FWIW, I prefer IETester for testing on old versions - it's a lot more convenient than firing up a virtual machine every time. — Matt Eason (Talk &#149; Contribs) 17:17, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually, as long as you pause, rather than shutting down, the IE6 VPC seems to run pretty snappily, and unlike any of the "multiple IEs" environments will guarantee you exactly the experience of someone using IE6. And since IE8 has a built-in IE7 emulation mode, that's all you need (with apologies to any poor sods still running IE5.5!). - IMSoP (talk) 00:43, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Folder text search with wildcards.
I have a folder (with sub-folders) with a whole bunch of GPS tracklogs in text files.

An excerpt from a typical file looks like this:

...

$PMGNTRK,3443.946,N,07638.245,W,00000,M,003413.78,A,,310107*6E

$PMGNTRK,3443.933,N,07638.256,W,00000,M,003415.76,A,,310107*66

$PMGNTRK,3443.919,N,07638.268,W,00000,M,003417.77,A,,310107*60

$PMGNTRK,3443.906,N,07638.281,W,00000,M,003419.77,A,,310107*67

...

I would like to search these files to find particular sets of numbers (to find out when I visited a certain place), but since locations are a bit fuzzy, some of these numbers need to be wildcards.

I'm running XP, so I tried the following search using the included search function:

3443.9??,N,07638.2

where the "?" takes the place of any character.

But apparently, the wildcard "?" only works on file names, not the contents of the file.

I downloaded Google desktop, and tried the search function. I didn't have any luck, maybe because I've got over 100,000 files on my computer, and can't find any way of restricting the search to a single folder (and sub-folders).

Any suggestions on a good downloadable search program with wildcard ability?

Or maybe you can correct my technique.

Thanks. Bunthorne (talk) 17:59, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * They may be nothing like as powerful as you'd find on a *nix box, but I've recently been finding that Windows XP actually has a fairly decent set of command-line / scripting utilities. In this case, a quick look at the list given by help showed up FINDSTR, which with the right arguments will let you search an entire directory, based on a regular expression, printing either the matches or just the filenames matched.
 * Fire up a command prompt (Start->Run... cmd) and type help findstr for the full set of options. - IMSoP (talk) 19:08, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you IMSoP, I never knew that existed. I'll give it a try.  In the meantime, if there are any other ideas, I would love to hear them. Bunthorne (talk) 19:31, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
 * One text editor I use on Windows, UltraEdit, has a regular expression processor and a recursive folder/file text search utility. Unfortunately UltraEdit is not free software, but there is a trial version and I think there's also a reduced functionality freeware version.  These reduced versions still contain most of the regular expression processing (I think); it has the added benefit of graphic user interface, if you're not one for command-line scripting.  Nimur (talk) 19:37, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah yes, for some reason text editors didn't come into my mind - I use jEdit a lot, which can also do a regex search in a directory, including filtering which files you're interested in. It will return the results as a list of clickable matches for editing the occurrences, which may not be as suitable as a standalone "grep" utility, but it would find the information you asked for. - IMSoP (talk) 19:49, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

IMSoP, it works like a charm. I just needed about an hour to figure out how it worked, and it's great!. Thanks to you, and also to Nimur for the suggestion. Bunthorne (talk) 20:31, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Meanwhile, a couple of hours too late, I happen upon a program called grepWin while downloading an updated version of TortoiseSVN! - IMSoP (talk) 21:52, 12 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Not too late at all. Now I know two ways of solving the problem.  Thanks again. Bunthorne (talk) 17:10, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Noise cleaning programs for Linux?
Are there any programs for Linux to remove noise from JPEG images? J I P | Talk 21:56, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
 * GIMP? --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 22:36, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
 * ImageMagick? --Ouro (blah blah) 08:11, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Noise_reduction mentions a few programs —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.41.11.134 (talk) 19:35, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Of the programs listed, only GREYCstroration and pnmnlfilt were available for Linux, the others are Billware only. I downloaded GREYCstroration, and it turns out I already have pnmnlfilt. I'll have to try if I can set them up and use them. J I P  | Talk 19:42, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Both GIMP and ImageMagick are totally free software - they are distributed free of charge and have very free licenses for you to exercise your liberties with those software, including modifying them for any purpose. They are both available for linux.  Neither GIMP nor imagemagick are "bill-ware"; they are generally considered the two single most important tools for image manipulation on Linux/GNU systems (and are also very popular in their incarnations for Windows and Mac).  I would actually be surprised if your linux distribution is not pre-installed with imagemagick (often aliased as convert).  It can be used to blur, described here in the user manual; this is the simplest way to "denoise" an image.  GIMP will give you many more sophisticated options in the form of filters and plugins, as well as the capacity to manually edit specific regions of the image, or pixel by pixel editing, if you choose to do so.  Image noise takes many form, ranging from "white noise" to codec-induced blocky compression artifacts to other sorts of noise; image noise removal processes are therefore case-by-case.  Nimur (talk) 21:38, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I meant of the programs listed at Noise reduction, not here. Sorry for the confusion. J I P  | Talk 04:08, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Noise Ninja is also available for Linux, though it's not free. The trial version is gratis, though.  --Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:23, 15 December 2009 (UTC)