Jonathan Hardwick

This is a catch-all post for user comments and questions about offline files, aka client-side caching. I’m turning off comments on all my previous posts in the Offline Files category , and redirecting readers here instead. Hopefully this will cut down...

As promised , I'm returning to the topic of offline files. My previous article resulted in a lot of comments, so the client-side caching team have kindly pointed me at their internal FAQ. It's not yet in a customer-ready form, but I'll try to use it to...

Yesterday I finally diagnosed a problem that a friend’s laptop has had for a while: whenever she tried to install Office 2003 Service Pack 1 , it would throw up an error about not finding a file called SKU111.CAB . A week ago I’d confidently tried...

I might bitch about eating our own dogfood, but a lot of the time it's actually pretty damn tasty. For example, I can't remember how I ever used a laptop without the combination of folder redirection and offline files. Microsoft's technical support...

Like most other techies, whenever I install Adobe’s Acrobat Reader I also uninstall most of the pointless plugins, to speed up its dog-slow startup process. If you want to learn more about speeding up Adobe Reader 6.0, just ask Tim or Chris or Greg or...

Answering your individual emails about offline files is a thankless task, since (a) I’m not tech support, so you’re not going to get any kind of “official” response, (b) I don’t scale out, so other readers of this blog won’t benefit from any pearls of...

I referred to these two processes tangentially in Microsoft laptop gripes , but based on referrer hits and email they deserve a post of their own. Systems Management Server pushes out patches and keeps your software updated via an agent that's installed...

The comments on " Debugging Problems with Offline Files " were auto-closed after 30 days, but based on email traffic it's worth resurrecting the topic. And yes, the next release of .Text should give me more control over that whole pesky auto-closure thing...

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” Gertrude Stein. One of my resolutions this year was to get some help in sipping from the information firehose that is a typical Microsoft inbox, so back in January...

…is that once you've used it you can never go back. For those who missed my earlier review, MaxiVista is a networked virtual display driver that lets you extend your Windows desktop onto the screen of a second computer. What this means is that every...

Update : autoruns has gotten even better — check out my latest post about it. The first time I ran task manager on my Tablet PC, I was faintly horrified at the long list of Windows background processes. What were they doing? And how could I make them...

I've always hated reading documents formatted for paper on-screen. Until we get 200 dpi LCD screens, there aren't enough pixels to make small print-ready fonts legible without a lot of zooming, at which point navigation becomes a pain. And printing out...

Or, in plain English, “ Windows XP Service Pack 2 has been Released To Manufacturing ”. Expect the bits to show up in your auto-update soon - and if you haven't already turned on auto-update, now is a great time to do so! Note that I don't think...

Or, remapping keys for fun and profit. I subscribe to a fair number of email lists, and use Exchange rules to filter them to individual folders. Since I read just a fraction of the new emails that arrive each day, I find myself doing “Mark All as Read...

Many Windows client applications can iconify themselves to the system tray instead of taking up an entry on your taskbar. I love this feature for apps that I keep around all day, because it means that I always know where to find them — they're in the...

Adam Field asked for an RSS feed of the “Management Update Notification Service” that I blogged about previously . The service is currently just an email list that gets one or two emails a month with news from the Microsoft management space: MOM, SMS...

Scoble's interview with Bill Hill reminded me that font choices are another weapon in the ongoing battle against information overload. Of course, any conversation about fonts is almost as likely to escalate into an all-out religious war as is a conversation...

Advertisers, Wall Street traders, and anyone who's ever fought for a share of the Windows desktop knows that the most important real estate on the planet is the screen you're looking at right now. And like all real estate, while some is good, more is...

Charlie Kindel kicked off an interesting discussion today amongst Microsoft bloggers about the relationship between blogs, search engines, and more formal support channels such as MSDN. As a side-effect, Raymond Chen kindly pointed me at his .Text referrer...

After my two previous posts on debugging offline files, I’ve had four requests via comments and email, all saying pretty much the same thing: “why do offline files stop working after I restart my computer?” The most visible symptom is that the “Enable...

[Update for people finding this post through web searches: the anti-virus tool has been released as the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (KB890830). You can use that link to download it directly, but really you should be using Windows...

As I promised a month ago , I’m going to start blogging about the new Microsoft product that I’m working on. What’s prompted me to start today is that Hugh McLeod—of the excellent gapingvoid —and Robert Scoble —of, well, scobleizer —are engaged in a bit...

The new MSN Desktop Search tool represents the combined efforts of several different search teams within Microsoft, some of which have shown their tools externally (e.g. MSR’s Stuff I’ve Seen ), and all of which have had their own internal beta programs...

For the huge positive impact that it's going to have on developers and administrators everywhere, the release of Virtual Server 2005 seemed to go by with barely a whisper from Microsoft blogs. One of the coolest aspects of Virtual Server is that it plays...

If you've got a Tablet PC and you're running SP2 (and you should be!) you might have noticed a couple of processes hanging around called TabTip.exe and TCServer.exe. And right after noticing them, you probably wondered why they seemed to be taking up...