One of the frist things that I do whenever I install a new version of Windows is to replace Notepad with Notepad2 as I find this to be a much more powerful editor.

There are some articles on how to do it with Windows XP and Windows 2003 but I could not find any info on how to do it for Windows Vista and this is what you need to do.

1. Rename Notepad2.exe to notepad.exe.
2. Find c:\windows\notepad.exe and c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe and set the owner to ‘Administrators’, and grant Administrators full control.
3. Using Windows Explorer, drag and drop the renamed notepad2.exe to c:\windows and c:\windows\system32.
4. Optional replace the permissions on the new notepad.exe to Read & Execute and Read.  

Since I am on the road quite often I need to VPN into the internal network while I am out and I have noticed that if I start the Virtual PC host software on my machine prior to establishing the VPN connection my guest PC can't connect to the internal network via VPN. But if I wait until the VPN connection is established and then I fire up the Virtual PC host then everything works like a charm.

A friend of mine told me how frustrated he was that sometimes he was not able to get the Virtual PC connected to the internal network he had open many support cases and had gone through many hoops like having his VPC removed and rejoin it from the domain installing some hotfixes etc. and once I told him what I had found he is now a happy camper and has been able to connect properly since then.

This is a very cool feature, you can add encarta@conversagent.com to your MSN IM contacts list, you can ask it questions, e.g.

• What is the size of Mexico?
• What is the population of Canada?
• When was Leonardo da Vinci born?
• I want to see the map of Italy.
• Solve 2x^2+7x=5

I especial love the solve feature

When moving a Virtual PC from my tablet to my desktop pc sometimes I get a blue screen stating that an error in the intelppm.sys and/or the processr.sys driver has occurred (usually when attemting to shutdown the virtual machine for the first time). 

If you are seeing this problem repeatedly you can manually disable the drivers that cause this problem (with no negative side effect) by going to the following location in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Processor

Or

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm

And changing the 'Start' value to '4'.

For more information on this problem refer to the following post from Ben Armstrong

 

I have been using a PocketPC phone edition for the last couple of months and after testing many different add-ons and software for the PocketPC it got to a point where my device was not very useful as it was taking a lot of time to boot and became very irresponsive. So I decided to do a hard reset and clear all memory contents and then restore it using a backup that I had created earlier but when I tried to restore it Activesync came up with the following message

"Restore cannot be completed successfully. The selected backup file was created from a different type of mobile device."

At this point I was getting worried since I did not want to go through the hassle of reconfiguring my PocketPC. Then I found that you will get this message under a couple of circumstances: either you've recently done a software upgrade (a new release of the operating system / ROM upgrade) and are trying to restore a backup that applies to the older software operating system or more commonly, you'll see this after having reset your machine, and the device is set to a different region to the region in use when it was backed up (it defaults to US English). Go to 'Settings | System | Regional settings', and switch to the appropriate language.

This last reason was the one that prevented me from restoring my backup.

Charie Owen gives a great tip on how to test your MCE extensibility application for widescreen compatibility without a widescreen monitor?

1. Click Start --> Run.
2. Type 'C:\windows\eHome\ehshell.exe /widescreen'.
3. Click the OK button.
4. Using the mouse, click the 'Restore Down' button to run Media Center in a window rather than full screen.

I have been traveling for the last couple of weeks and one if the thinks that I have noticed is that when I am watching TV in the hotel I am always looking to do things that I can do with my MCE such as rewinding live TV or trying to skip through commercials and find it very frustrating to not to be able to do this.