Defenestration

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"I bought some batteries but they weren't included."
- Steven Wright

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Odd how one thing leads to another. For example:

Kapitano wants to make some music. He's got the software, but only a rather run down and obsolete laptop to run it on. However, he knows lots of tricks for speeding up Windows - probably the most important of which is to cut out all the unnecessary junk.

The problem with cutting out junk is, sometimes you're not sure whether something's really junk. You might need it later, or it might look useless but be vital in some oblique way for some task.

For instance, although everything needed for USB devices seemed to be left in, any USB storage device caused a crash whenever it was plugged in. A rather frustrating mystery.

Now, one way to neaten up and streamline Windows is to have largely self-contained programs - or self-contained versions of programs which usually aren't. In other words, portable applications.

Some you can download, but there's also software for taking an ordinary application and making it portable. It does this by taking a snapshot of your system before installation, and one after, then finding the differences and bundling them all into one file.

Sounds good. Unfortunately it only works reliably when installing onto a clean operating system. So you can either reinstall Windows every time you want to make a portable application...

...or you can use a virtual machine. This is a simulation of one computer, running on another computer. And yes, you can run a simulation on the simulation if you really want to.

You set up your virtual machine, install Windows and the portablising software on it, and install your application with it running. Then copy the resulting program onto your real computer and reset the virtual one to convert another program.

However, this is done in a slightly clunky and one-size-fits-all way. The better way to do it is to compare the two snapshots, work out for yourself the best method, and design an installer program to do it - for which you need to learn the scripting language.

This is the point I'd got to before discovering why USB devices crashed the laptop. It wasn't anything I'd cut out, it was the driver for the USB camera. It messed up all the others. Gah.

However I reckon there is a way to make it work. I just need to set up a virtual machine and make a self contained version - so it'll only mess everything else up when I'm running it.

And then I can make some music.

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