I came across a great article today from Cnet about a hidden feature in Windows 7 to enable a single access place for all the control panels in Windows 7. It appearently works in Vista as well, but I use 7 so I haven’t tested it in Vista. In order to enable this GodMode, create a new folder. Once you create it, rename it to GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
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I was watching something rather funny today, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUawhjxLS2I&feature=player_embedded I will admit, it’s pretty geeky, but I am a geek, so I liked it. Today I was working on a clients computer with a strange problem. It had a 80GB hard disk, and very few applications installed on it but the disk was almost full. What was even stranger, was the data was being stored on the server. As this was a very old Windows XP machine, I thought it could be anything. first I verified it had the proper service packs installed, and that looked fine. Then I looked at directories trying to find what was using up so much space. I found that the C:\Windows\Installer folder had over 50GB of space. Doing a little googling, I came across some articles that talked about the same issue. One I found, was http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqltools/thread/07db294a-79e5-4a5a-916c-6a51e44a5aa4 . This article pointed to using the MSIZAP.EXE application. On this perticular computer, I downloaded the MSICleanup tool, and then dropped to the command prompt. I executed the command “MSIZAP.EXE G!” which removed all of the orphaned .msp patch files. This cleared the disk space back to almost 80%, which was a lot better then 1% Another tool I used to help figure this out was VisDir, which shows all the directories and how much space they are taking. Please visit http://www.sb-software.com/visdir/ During this Thanksgiving week, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine on the future of software and pricing. Somehow, during the conversation, a website came up I had not seen before, called Giveaway of the Day, at http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/ . It is rather interesting, as it allows you to download full versions of software during a limited time. The trick is, you have to check it often as the software keeps changing on the site. Not bad for a little work to visit the site to get free software! The latest hotfix package from Microsoft of Office 2007 set of core packages. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976730 Today I installed an application on my HTC phone which is running Windows Mobile 6.1; in order to use the application correctly, I needed to use Internet Explorer as my broswer. My phone comes default with Internet Explorer and Oprah browser installed, however Oprah is the default browser. After searching all over the phone to change my default to Internet Explorer, I came to the conclusion that you can’t do it! I did some BINGing and found a solution at http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-mobile/reset-internet-explorer-as-default-browser-in-windows-mobile/ I had to do an upgrade of Windows Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Enterprise today. While I made the attempt to upgrade this OS, I got an error message that you can’t do this type of upgrade. I am not saying that the Microsoft license legally allows this, but in this perticular case the original installation was done incorrectly and should have been Windows Vista Enterprise. Here’s how to get past this message: Go to, Start, Run: and type: regedit.exe Now restart the Windows 7 upgrade. You should now be able to upgrade! Today I was working on a really nasty virus that got onto a Windows XP machine, bypassing the Symantec Anti-Virus program and installing a root kit as well. Once installed, it owned the machine, blocking any removal tools from running in safe mode or regular mode. What a nightmare. My thought was to use a rescue CD to scan it and hopefully remove it. I downloaded Kaspersky rescue CD and began scanning it in a Linux Kernel. I had to leave the client because it was going to take a long time and I didn’t want to charge them to sit and watch a screen, but I wanted to document a good source of these CD’s at askvg.com Today we had a client that had files that were stored on the CSC cache because of sync issues, and they needed to be recovered. I had previously used the CSC tool, but as the last time I used it, you had to call Microsoft to get an updated version. After doing some searching, I found another great site that had it listed, along with some great documentation. Please check out http://www.jacksontechnical.com/article.htm?id=34 if you need this tool. I was reading about the new feature in Windows 7 called Easy Connect, which is part of remote assistance. A good way to test your home router, is by using this tool from Microsoft, at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/using/tools/igd/default.mspx Pretty cool! |
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