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The 2011 Guide to Choosing a College Laptop

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:08:54 -0700

A year ago, I wrote a blog post about choosing a computer for college. Technology changes fast, and things are different now. Read my series on choosing a college computer on the Super User Blog:

Windows 7 Login Packs

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 20:35:48 -0700

One of the new features introduced in Windows 7 is the easy ability to change the background image on the login screen. I have created several login image packs using photographs I have taken. These images are already resized and optimized for common resolutions. All you have to do is run an install script, and everything is set up for you. To download them, go to the Windows 7 Login Packs section under Photographs.

HP Pavillion dm4t Review

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:51:06 -0800

I've been using an HP Pavillion dm4t laptop since fall, and have come to really like this computer. I would recommend it for people looking for a portable but powerful laptop.

Disregard this. HP computers aren't worth your time and money. My dm4 - which I loved at first - failed after less than two years. I had to sent it in for repairs, and HP didn't have the parts to fix it. After 3 months of waiting, they finally sent me a replacement laptop... with lower specifications. I know at least a dozen other individuals who have similar HP laptops, and every single one has had some sort of problem with it. Dead screens, broken hinges, failed fans, dead batteries, etc. Don't buy HP.

Specifications

Processor: Intel Core-i5 430M (2.26 GHz, turbo 2.53 GHz, 3MB cache)
Memory: 4 GB DDR3 667
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450 / Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD (switchable)
Hard drive: 500 GB 7200 RPM
Wireless: Broadcom 4313 802.11b/g/n with Bluetooth
OS: Windows 7 Professional (MSDNAA)

Overall Impressions

This is a very versatile laptop - I've used it for web surfing, writing reports and essays in Microsoft Office and LaTeX, processing large spreadsheets, watching movies, programming in various IDEs, running virtual machines, the occasional game, graphics editing, and more. The computer has been fast enough to keep up with all of this, even when I have dozens of windows open at once.

The best aspect of this laptop is its portability: it weighs only 4.4 lbs and is only 1.27" thick at its thickest part. This makes carrying it around between classes easy. The battery life is decent, though nowhere near as good as advertised. I get at most 3 hours out of the 6-cell battery, and at most 6.5 hours when I switch to the 9-cell battery. This is still always plenty of time, and I rarely find myself searching for a plug.

The dm4t suffered from one terrible - but fortunately easy to fix - flaw, which I will discuss in detail below. HPs are famous for bloatware, but the HP Wireless Assistant installed on this computer was worse than usual bloatware. I discovered that it was consistently consuming 25% CPU or higher, draining the battery and overheating the laptop.

Aesthetics

The dm4t look nice. The base is plastic, but the rest of the exterior has an aluminum finish. While the plastic on the bottom makes it slightly less aesthetically pleasing than the fully metal-encased HP Envy 14 or Apple's Macbook Pro series, the plastic does lower the weight and still looks fine. The screen is decent, though the 1366x768 resolution is a bit paltry. Some online reviewers have complained that their dm4t's have a pink tint, but have noticed no such coloring. The etching on the top of the lid is perhaps unnecessary, though it doesn't detract from the looks.

Touchpad and Keyboard

The "chiclet" keyboard on this laptop is very nice to type on. Many reviewers have complained at length about the touchpads in HP's latest laptops, but I have had no problems with mine, and like it more than any other PC touchpad I've ever used before. I like it so much that I went out of my way to figure out how to enable extra multitouch gestures on it. It took some time to configure things to my liking, but now that I have, it's been great.

Ports and Features

The optical drive is one feature this laptop has which is being phased out on lighter laptops. It has been useful on a couple of occasions, though I may eventually replace it with an HDD caddy so I can have both an SSD and an HDD in my laptop at once.

Another feature the dm4t has is a fingerprint reader. It works well most of the time, though is a bit of a gimmick. It was easy enough to set up, but frankly, I would have rather had the option not to have a fingerprint reader and saved a few bucks.

One glaring feature omission on the dm4t is a backlit keyboard. The dv5t has this option, and according to HP's service manuals, the non-backlit keyboard for the dv5t has the exact same part number as that for the dm4t, so it would have been trivial for HP to include it as an option in the dm4t. The decision not to was likely an effort to drive customers toward the more expensive Envy 14, which has the dm4t's dedicated graphics and the dv5t's keyboard.

Switchable graphics are a great feature, though ATI's implementation is not nearly so smooth as Nvidia's Optimus. Still, the ability to go between the battery-sipping Intel HD graphics and the ATI Radeon HD dedicated card is welcome.

One of the dm4t's three USB 2.0 ports doubles as eSATA. As somebody who believes in making frequent backups, this was one of the deciding factors in choosing this laptop over competitors such as the ASUS u45jc. A full backup of the 500 GB HDD is quick and easy.

This laptop has both an HDMI port and a VGA port. Oddly, the HDMI port can only be used when the dedicated GPU is enabled, though the VGA port works all the time. Combined with an HDMI-DVI converter, it works quite well with my external display.

Software

The dm4t is no exception to HP's tradition of bundling ridiculous quantities of bloatware on their laptops. When I first got my laptop, I performed a full reinstall of Windows, only to find that despite having installed all of the provided drivers, I was getting an hour less battery life than I had been with the default install. I did a restore from HP's restore partition (a ridiculous experience in and of itself), and promptly got back my hour. I am still stumped as to why this happens, but am disappointed in HP for this. Regardless, it was quick and easy to use Windows Anytime Upgrade to go from the included Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional with my school's MSDNAA license, and the battery life remained the same after the upgrade.

Wireless

This is my one big complaint about the dm4t: the default wireless card is terrible. HP offers four options for the WiFi card on this unit: "Wireless-N card", "Intel Wireless-N card", and each aforementioned card with bluetooth. The Wireless-N card (which I ordered) turns out to be a broadcom card which, though it is technically a Wireless-N card, is incapable of operating at full N speeds. In fact, the wireless card doesn't even see mixed-mode (b/g/n) networks as supporting N at all, and simply connects with wireless-g at 58 Mbps. It will connect to pure-N networks, but at a mere 75 Mbps. I've confirmed this on three other dm4ts belonging to friends of mine, and the case is the same for all of them. Calling it a wireless-N card is essentially false advertising, because it is incapable of connecting at N speeds to most networks.

HP CPU Assassin

As mentioned above, the HP Wireless Assistant was taking up ridiculous amounts of CPU. HP has since confirmed that this is a flaw with some versions of HPWA, and it has allegedly since been fixed.

I first noticed the frequent CPU jumps only a few days after I started using the computer. The full tale of how I figured out what was causing it is documented on Super User. If you are considering getting one of these laptops, definitely make sure to uninstall the HPWA!

Final Thoughts

Overall, I am happy with this laptop. With HP's academic discounts and the frequent coupon codes, it can be specced out pretty well and still come out to an afordable price. With Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors coming out, faster options will start to appear, but for now, this is still an excellent laptop at a decent price. If HP would clean up their act on software, particularly by not including buggy software like the HPWA, and would put a little more thought into useful features like a backlight, this could be the perfect laptop.

New Website: OSU SEI

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:39:35 -0800

I recently finished designing a new website for the Oregon State University Sustainable Energy Initiative. We will be using this site for group news, pictures of events we participate in, and information about projects we are working on. This was my first time using Wordpress for a site I've developed. OSU Marketing provides a Wordpress template for use on University websites, but it was not designed for a Wordpress installation not being used primarily as a blog. I heavily modified the template, and using other OSU branding resources, developed a unique custom theme for SEI.

It's always a pain to have to remember so many online usernames and passwords, so rather than create new accounts for everybody on the SEI site, I tried to figure out a way to authenticate against the College of Engineering's existing LDAP accounts database. COE has a generic web authentication page already, so I wrote a custom plugin - also a first for me - to hook into Wordpress's login process and log users in with the COE Auth page. It is now working smoothly, and automatically adds members of the SEI LDAP group as Wordpress admins when they log in.

Transit Text: ODOT Road Conditions from your Cell Phone

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:25:57 -0800

Traffic on Mt. Hood can be terrible sometimes, especially when you're driving back from skiing right when everybody else is getting off the mountain. There's a particular bend on US-26, a few miles from the OR-35 interchange, where traffic almost always slows to a standstill. Every time, we wonder - is the road closed from a crash, or is it just slow traffic as usual?

There are often times when it's useful to know whether the road is just congested, or if there is a real problem ahead. ODOT's Trip Check service is great for this, and even has a mobile version, but not everybody has a smartphone with a browser. Fortunately, ODOT has Twitter feeds for all its roads, which you can subscribe to via SMS. This becomes annoying though if you don't already have a Twitter account, or don't want to receive a text every time something happens on your favorite highway. So, I made my own solution.

TransitText is a text message-based service. All you have to do is send a text requesting a particular route, and you will receive the most recent official post from ODOT's Twitter feed for that road. For a full list of roads, see ODOT's Twitter info page. The service uses Zeep Mobile API. Please note that occasionally Zeep is a bit buggy and won't send you a text back. This is a problem inherent to their service, and there is nothing I can do about it. If anybody can recommend a more reliable, and most importantly, free SMS API, please let me know in the comments.

All you need to do to get started is text orroads to 88147. For more details, visit transit.nathanhinkle.com.

Please remember that texting while driving is dangerous, and illegal in Oregon. Always have a passenger in the car operate the phone when you are on the road.

Results from College Survey and Research Project

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:36:00 -0800

I recently finished my first term of college. My honors writing for engineers course was culminated with a group research project on a topic of our choice. Lane Porth and I wrote a paper analyzing whether the additional cost of private higher education is worthwhile compared to the (usually) cheaper cost of public higher education. As part of our research, we conducted an online survey, and promised to put the results of the survey online once our project was completed. You can now download a spreadsheet with the results of the survey, and participants' comments (disassociated from their answers). All answers in the survey are anonymous. We do not officially endorse or support any of the opinions represented in the contents of this survey. These data are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. If you wish to use our data for any purposes not covered by this license, or have any other questions, please contact us.

The data are available for download in Microsoft Excel 2010 format (xlsx).

Download

Automatically Put Your Computer to Sleep After Backups

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:09:00 -0700

Keeping regular backups is important - even famous computer bloggers sometimes lose their data. Backing up my computer used to be an unfriendly experience. The built-in software in older versions of Windows was terrible, and third party software was expensive, bad, or both. Apple got it right with Time Machine (a rare OS X feature of which I am actually jealous), but Microsoft has finally gotten their act together, too. Windows 7 introduced a very effective, user-friendly backup system, and it's already saved me once when I had a catastrophic hard drive failure. It backs up all user data, and lets you go back and find previous version, and most importantly, keeps a system image to let you restore everything to exactly how it was, even if you get a completely new HDD.

Really, there's no excuse not to use it. The only downside is that it does take a while. With most users keeping hundreds of gigs of data, it can take hours using a USB 2.0 drive, and is still time consuming even with a fast eSATA or USB 3.0 drive. I run backups every night, but wanted to be able to set the backup to go, then leave my computer and not have it running all night. Since no good solutions were built in, I wrote a small program to do just that. A scheduled task runs whenever a backup completes (whether or not it was successful), triggering the program. The program warns the user that the computer is going to shut down, and counts down for however many minutes have been specified. The user can cancel the shut down if they are present, and if they're away, it will go ahead and turn it off. The user can also specify whether it should hibernate or suspend when turning off.

I still haven't decided on a good name for this, but for now it's called Sleep Counter. It may still have bugs, so please let me know if you find any problems. This is only designed to work on Windows 7, though it may work on Vista; I'm not sure. It requires the .NET Framework 4.0, which is not included in the installer. Eventually I'll have the installer automatically download .NET 4.0 if it isn't installed, but that takes more work than I can put in at the moment.

Download Sleep Counter v. 1.0

Enable Synaptics Multitouch Gestures in Google Chrome

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 23:17:00 -0700

To download the files necessary to enable multitouch gestures in Google Chrome on your Synaptics touchpad, head straight to the downloads page.

Synaptics is one of the primary manufacturers of touch pads for laptops, and in recent years, Synaptics has included multitouch gestures with their touch pads. One of the handy gestures, which oddly is not always enabled by default, is the three-finger swipe. By swiping three fingers left or right across the touchpad, you can go forward or backward in a browser, photo viewer, PDF reader, PowerPoint presentation, and other applications. The gesture works fine in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, but doesn't do anything in Google Chrome. After some quick googling, I found the solution to enabling the forward and backward gestures for Google Chrome. Surprisingly, it's not Chrome's fault, but Synaptics': all you need to do is add a couple registry keys.

All you need to do is export all of the keys for Mozilla Firefox in the Synaptics key at HKLM\Software\Synaptics, replace all instances of "Mozilla Firefox" with "Google Chrome", change "firefox.exe" to "chrome.exe", and reimport the keys. If you're not experienced with editing the registry or that sounds daunting, or if you're just lazy, you can download the handy Synaptics Multitouch Gestures for Chrome registry file which I have created and just import that, or you can download the batch file I created which adds the registry values needed and then automatically restarts the touchpad drivers. In some cases, you may need to restart the computer for changes to take effect.

Download registry file
Download batch file

If you're unsure whether your touchpad is a Synaptics or not, look in your taskbar notification area (the icons near the clock by the lower right-hand side of the screen) for an icon that looks like this: . Double-click on it to change your touchpad settings and to enable multitouch gestures such as 3-finger swipe.

Thanks again to the Google Groups user whose post helped me figure this out!

Dissecting Google's September 7th Logo

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:20:00 -0700

There's been a lot of buzz in the short few hours since Google's latest Doodle showed up on their home page on September 7th, 2010. One key buzzword which has been mentioned a lot is "HTML5", the internet's favorite New Thing™. While Google has yet to release an official statement regarding what the significance of this doodle is, one thing seems evident: it's not about HTML5.

Curious as to what the engineers at Google had done to come up with this, I opened up the home page in Firefox and started poking around at the doodle in Firebug, an extension which lets you inspect the generated HTML of a page and view changes produced by JavaScript on the page as they happen. Sure, the google homepage has an HTML5 doctype set, but this doodle is not using anything from HTML5 that wasn't there in HTML4 or XHTML. There's no canvas tag involved, no HTML5 video, etc. The balls flying around the screen are simply DIVs with no content, a static size, a background color, and CSS3 rounded corners to make them look like circles. These DIVs are being positioned using CSS absolute position, manipulated by JavaScript which must be incredibly complex and which I was not brave enough to venture into. The end result though, while very fun to play with, was achieved without using any HTML5-specific features, from what I can tell.

Click to view full-size, or inspect it yourself! Chrome's built-in HTML inspector works, too.

It does appear that Google is loading different scripts for different browsers. The doodle still works fine in IE8, which supports neither HTML5 nor CSS3 rounded corners. It would appear that in IE8, the DIVs have a background image of a circle set, rather than using rounded corners, which leads to a slightly choppier, less pretty, but still fun to play with experience. And as for IE6 users? They'll never even know this was happening — all they get is the standard logo.

So, does this answer the question of what Google's intent is with this doodle? Nope. Does it make it any less awesome to play with? Nope! I'm sure millions of users all over the world will happily waste many hours today waving their mice around the Google home page, and most of them won't care whether it uses HTML5 or not. But just for the record: this isn't an HTML5 demo, or if it is, they're not using it in such a way that meets the eye.

Note to any Google engineers who happen upon this and disagree: if you did use some magnificent HTML5 feature and I just was too dense to realize, I apologize. It would be wonderful to hear from you about what I missed. It's entirely possible that I'm wrong; after all, who am I to argue with Google?

Update: It has been suggested that this may be a birthday celebration for Google. This seems like a reasonable hypothesis, given that Google was incorporated on September 4th, which was just a few days ago.

Computer Advice for College-Bound Students

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 23:37:00 -0700

I wrote this as a facebook note for some friends of mine, but people of the internet may find it handy, so here you go:

Quite a few people have been asking around about what kind of computer they should get for college, what it should have, etc. So here are my recommendations as of now. Feel free to ask questions, and offer any suggestions you might have as well.

(look too long? scroll to the bottom, then go back and read the details relevant to you)

Mac vs. PC

The first big question is whether to get a mac or a PC. If you already know what you want, skip this section.

While I vastly prefer PCs personally, I recognize that many people are much more comfortable with a Mac, either because that's what they're used to or they've been brainwashed or they're superior or whatever. First, check if your college requires one kind or the other. If they don't, then either should be fine, so choose based on which you personally prefer better, and which is within your price zone. Macs are expensive, but some people claim it's worthwhile. If you do decide to waste your money buy a mac, you can still install Windows 7 in a virtual machine (virtualbox works well and is free) and run windows apps that way if your classes require them. Some schools (like OSU engineering) mandate that you do this if you have a mac. If you prefer OS X to windows, that's the best of both worlds. And if you prefer Windows, then you don't have to worry about it in the first place.

What to actually get

Generally speaking...

Cost: Keep in mind academic discounts. Apple will cut off about $200 from the price of their laptops for students, and throw in a free iPod touch. Dell has an education store partnered with most large universities. I've been told HP does too, but haven't checked it out personally.

Form factor: Get a laptop. While desktops are easier to upgrade and more powerful per dollar, you will want portability in college. Netbooks are nice and light, and some are tempted to get a powerful desktop and light netbook. While this can work, it is actively discouraged by the college I'm attending due to powerful software which must be used in class. Also, keeping things synced can be a pain.

In terms of size, I wouldn't get anything larger than 15". I find that a lot of people (myself included) like the 14" size - it's a nice balance of screen real estate and portability. Thickness is also a consideration - try looking for laptops under an inch thick if possible.

Keep in mind that you can get an external monitor for as little as $100, and a rather nice external monitor for under $200. Dell outlet has awesome deals on nice refurbished monitors (that's where I got mine). An external keyboard and mouse are dirt cheap (check out freegeek). If you get a small laptop but want space to work, I highly recommend getting an external monitor, mouse and keyboard, and setting yourself up with dual displays and a sort of desktop replacement station. Then when it's time to go to class, you grab your nice light laptop, disconnect it, and off you go. Best of both worlds.

Processor: Most any laptop on the market today will have a good enough processor for most stuff. If possible though, get a Core ix processor - an i3 or i5 should be enough for most people, very few need the power of an i7. The older Core 2 Duo series works fine, but is previous generation technology. Look for a processor with at least a 2.0 GHz clock speed, and at least 2 MB of cache. More is better.

A note regarding processors: a lot of people have been asking me about a Core i3 vs a Core i5; specifically, the i3-370m vs the i5-450m. Don't waste your money on the i5 - the only difference between these two is that the i5 has turbo-boost and a slightly higher integrated graphics speed. The performance gain would be minimal, especially if you have dedicated graphics. See Intel's specfinder comparison if you don't believe me.

Memory: You will need at least 2 GB of RAM. I would recommend 3 or 4 if you want this computer to last you through college. More than 4 is really overkill for now, and memory can be easily upgraded later. One thing to consider is that it's sometimes cheaper to buy memory aftermarket and install it yourself than to buy an upgrade when you get your laptop.

Hard drive: I'm a power user, with multiple virtual machines, lots of disk images and other large files. I also have a lot of music and video. My 320 GB HDD is more than enough for all that. You don't need any more. Do try to get a faster hard drive though - I would choose a 7200RPM 320GB drive over a 5400RPM 500GB drive.

Graphics: There are two types of graphics - integrated and dedicated. Integrated take less power, leading to longer battery life, but they're also weaker for 3D applications like CAD modeling, games, etc. They might be good enough if you don't intend to do any intensive 3D stuff. Dedicated graphics take much more power, but can handle much more. If you're doing engineering, you'll likely want dedicated graphics. Nvidia has an awesome new technology called Nvidia Optimus, which switches dynamically between integrated and dedicated graphics. That optimizes battery life while giving graphics power when you need it. I highly recommend laptops with optimus. Asus has lots of them right now, other manufacturers are still catching on.

Other stuff: Most laptops have a webcam these days, but check just in case. If you have a choice between 2 different battery sizes, I'd advocate for the larger/longer-lasting option. Get an external hard drive to back up your data. They're usually cheaper if you buy them separately from the laptop. You shouldn't need to spend more than $100 on an external drive; less, really. Screen resolution is another consideration - higher resolutions have smaller text, but you can fit way more on the screen. I'd recommend upgrading the resolution if you can. Sadly, most manufacturers stick you with 1366x768 these days, which sucks. Your computer will almost certainly have wireless. If your college has a Wireless-N network, it may be worth upgrading to an N card, but it won't make a huge difference for most people.

Specific recommendations

Macs
If you insist...
The cheapest mac laptop is the 13" MacBook at $950. It's not as nice as the MacBook Pro, and is only available in the 13" size, but the specs are sufficient. It does have an older generation Core 2 Duo processor though.
The MacBook Pros are more expensive, from $1100. The 13 inch models are a bit faster than the 13" MacBook, but still are stuck with a Core 2 Duo. The 15" and 17" have Core i5's and above. There's little need to upgrade to one of the faster processor editions for most people. I would recommend getting the high res screen on the MBP 15" though.

PCs
The PC environment is much more dynamic and varied than the Apple environment. At the time of this writing, I'm a bit of a fan of ASUS. They don't sell directly through their website, but you can find their laptops in stores, and online retailers like Newegg and Amazon. I would highly recommend the Asus U45JC at $879. It's fast, light, small and has optimus, and the battery lasts as long as 8 hours (in real life, advertised 10 hours).

The HP Envy 14 is also a nice looking laptop, starting from $999 ($899 for students). Its battery life isn't as good as some others, but it's high quality, and most importantly, has a high-resolution (1600x900) display. It uses ATI's switchable graphics, which aren't as smooth as Optimus, but just as powerful. This is also a very configurable model with lots of options. Make sure to get the education discount if you get this laptop. Unfortunately they've jacked the price up (screen upgrade is $200 now), so I would no longer say that this laptop is really worth it unless you have a pretty generous budget.

If you have a ton of money to blow and aren't a mac fan, the Sony Vaio Z is an amazing laptop which I wish I could afford. If you get one, let me know so I can play with it, pretty please. Fast processor, switchable graphics, backlit keyboard, high resolution 13" screen, thin, light, awesome.

For more middle of the road, cheaper laptops, Dell isn't a bad choice. These links are for their regular prices, check for an education discount for sure. The dell Studio series is nice - perhaps check out the Studio 14 (starting at $700). On the less expensive side of dell, the Inspiron 14 starts at $500 (although sometimes is discounted lower) and is a solid computer, although without a processor upgrade, won't have spectacular performance. Dells are very customizable, so keep in mind your needs, and just add the things you need - if you need dedicated graphics, you can add that, but you may not need to.

A note on software

DO NOT buy Microsoft Office or an upgrade to a better version of Windows when you get your computer! Students can get massive discounts on software through their university. Many offer the MSDNAA program to students in Comp Sci or Engineering classes, giving you free access to a lot of MS software. And, ANY student can get office really cheap through the Office Ultimate Steal, as well as Windows 7 Pro.

Overview/recap

Check if your school has computer requirements
Processor: Intel Core ix, 2.0GHz or higher
Memory: 2GB, preferably more
Hard drive: 250GB 7200RPM or more
Get a dedicated graphics card (ATI or Nvidia graphics, not Intel) if you will be doing games, 3D modeling, CAD, etc.
14" is a good size
Don't buy software upgrades with your computer
PCs are usually cheaper. Macs are preferred by some. Use what works for you
Ask questions, esp. if you want a specific recommendation for your situation

New Site Ready!

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:32:01 -0800

My new site is finally ready to go! Please let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement. Now, back to those college apps...

Allowing Specific Dynamic IPs

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:01:00 -0800

While working on this site, I was faced with an interesting problem. There are certain management-related parts of this site which I want to only be accessible from my computer. Usually, a web developer would use an apache .htaccess file to achieve this, by allowing traffic only from a certain IP. The problem is that I have a dynamically assigned IP address from my ISP. It doesn't change often, but it does change sometimes. It would be a pain to have to update the .htaccess file any time my IP address changed. Then I remembered that my router is configured to update to a dynamicDNS address. Using PHP's gethostbyname function, I did a reverse look-up on my dyndns address, and checked to see if it matched the IP address of the visitor. If it did, I would allow access, otherwise I would deny it. For other people with dynamic IP addresses, you might want to try this out if you ever need to control access to your site.

Firefox Custom Installation

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:34:00 -0800

(This blog post is transferred from my old WordPress installation, which this blog replaces.) I do a lot of customized silent installations for various things, ranging from use on my own personal computers to helping out with updating school computers. The one and only thing which I like about IE is that you can force some options via group policy. Firefox being third party software, group policy doesn't apply, but I've still always wanted some way to automatically and silently configure a Firefox installation. Fortunately, I found a very useful post online outlining exactly how to do this. It was written for Firefox 3.0, but everything still works as of Firefox 3.5. On its own, the article is quite useful. However, after having to manually go through its steps a few times, and noticing that I was using the command line pretty much every step of the way, I thought to myself, "why not do this with a batch file?" So, I created a batch file to build a custom firefox installation. All you need to do is customize your firefox.cfg file as desired, then drag-'n-drop the latest Firefox installer onto the build script. The script downloads the latest versions of the files required to build the installer, inserts your changes, then builds it all to a custom installation exe which you can then deploy silently (or normally). Instructions are included in the download. If you have questions, let me know in the comments!