Showing posts with label Windows. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Windows. Show all posts

Sunday, 20 May 2012

Watch ASCII Star Wars in Windows XP, Vista and 7


There is a complete copy of Star Wars done entirely in ASCII characters that you can watch in theWindows operating system (or any OS that supports telnet). The only thing required to watch it is an internet connection; speed does not matter.

A Picture showing Star Wars in command prompt

To watch it on Windows XP,
  1. Go to Start, Run.
  2. Now type "telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.

On Windows 7 and Windows Vista

Telnet is turned off by default in the latest versions of Windows. So, in order to watch star wars, you must first enable telnet by going to Control Panel › Programs › Turn Windows Feature On or Off and ticking both the telnet check boxes. After doing that, follow the steps given below:-
  1. Go to Start, Search.
  2. Type telnet and press Enter.
  3. In the following command prompt window, type "o" without quotes and press Enter.
  4. Now type "towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.
If you do not need telnet anymore, you can turn it off.

A command prompt window like the one in the image will open with the movie being played in it. See the movie yourself. Did you enjoy watching this new version of Star Wars? Well, I did and know it for sure that you would have too.

How to Convert FAT32 to NTFS Without Formatting or Losing Data

You have a flash drive or probably an external hard drive that currently has FAT32 file system and you want to change it to NTFS, because FAT32 does not support handling large files (over 4GB) or it is just simply old for your taste but there is just one problem, you don't want to lose your saved data. This article is for you then as it explains exactly how you can achieve seamless transition from FAT to NTFS without involving any data loss.

FAT32 to NTFS

While it is generally recommended to use the NTFS file system because of its stability, security and lesser defragmentation time, most of us end up using FAT32 because that is what most disks are preformatted with. Unless, we notice the “Not enough disk space error” despite disk space being available, we don't bother to change the file system. Moreover, most of us don't change it because of the risk of losing important data and lack of time (read laziness). As Microsoft was aware of this scenario, they added a capability in the command prompt to overcome this by executing a simple command. There are many software that support this too but the Convert command is one of the easiest ways to do so. Follow the steps below to know how:-

Important: While this method works perfectly, I would still advise you to backup your data in case anything goes wrong.

FAT 32 to NTFS Conversion Steps

1) Go to Computer, and note the name of the drive whose file system you wish to convert.
2) Click on Start.
3) Type cmd in the search bar if you use Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you use Windows XP, click on Run and then execute cmd. 
4) Execute "chkdsk h: /f " (without quotes) where H is the letter of the drive to undergo conversion. This checks the drive for errors and fixes them automatically.
5) Execute "Convert H: /FS:NTFS" (without quotes). H is again the letter of the drive to be converted.
6) The command prompt will start the conversion process and after a few minutes, CMD will say that conversion was successful.
7) You can check it in the properties of the drive through right click<Properties.

Convert FAT to NTFS

This works on Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows 8 and Windows Vista. I converted my flash drive's file system using these steps and it worked flawlessly. It is interesting to note that this method cannot be used to reconvert NTFS file system back to FAT32. To reconvert back to FAT32, you will need to format the entire drive which will definitely cause data loss.