Punish your Microsoft developer Okay, so submitting bug reports isn't quite this gratifying, but I know from a lot of first-hand experience that these reports are amazingly helpful. We feel your pain...if not literally.

I downloaded the March CTP off of MS.com to make sure I was running exactly what our customers got. I was surprised to see that the package was an ISO. Instead of burning the ISO to CD, I remembered a little tool that I used in college: Daemon Tools . It lets your mount ISOs as drives without the wasted...

I love that Office (particularly Word) allows me to paste content in many formats. However, accessing the associated smart tag with the mouse after Ctrl-V breaks my keyboard flow. After a bit of searching I found Alt+Shift+F10 opens up the smart tag menu, letting you choose to “Keep text only” or do...

Kidding... Adobe makes some amazing Windows applications, but am I the only one who would like web-hosted PDFs to open outside the browser? After a quick search, I found the simple solution (for v6.0 at least) Open Adobe (Acrobat) Reader from the start menu Edit > Preferences Select "Internet" Un...

I found a great walk-through on how to enable file sharing on Windows XP. http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/xp_filesharing/index.htm Besides this article, there are a number of other great resources for Internet Connection Sharing, among others. Take a look: http://www.practicallynetworked...

Microsoft is serious about spam, but one can always use more help. I’ve been using Sneakemail since my senior year of college. It works great. Create an account on sneakemail. When a web site asks for your email address instead of giving them your actual ISP account, go to sneakemail and create...

I love running the highest performance, most stable OS Microsoft has ever produced on my desktop. The problem: a lot of the features that make a sense for a server OS, make little sense for a desktop. An example is the Display Shutdown Event Tracker. This feature is pretty self explanatory--a great...

Our friends in Media Player have done a fine job with Media Player 9. One slight problem: I think they got their first use experience a little wrong. Usually when I launch Media Player, I want to listen to my music, not watch a trailer for Scooby Doo 2 . You can go to Tools > Options > Player and...

Since I work in the OS division, I image my work machines quite often. (Not as often as a lot of our test team, but more than most people.) Besides putting my task bar at the top of the Window and switching my keyboard to Dvorak , there are also a set of utilities I download and install. Process Explorer...

First, a simple one: you can drag a file or folder from Explorer to the CMD window. The path to that file/folder will appear as text which you can use in a command. Pretty spiffy. Second, short-cuts to the Run command in the start menu. 1) You can drag-drop the run command straight to...

I use IE at work. It has a nasty habit of forwarding searchs to MSN search, which also pops up ads on my screen. What I want: if it's going to do autosearch, at least use Google . The solution: customize IE with some registry hacks provided by our friends at Google: http://www.google.com/google...

Another little CMD window utility that I learned recently: start . I just typed start /? and I learned way more than what I was expecting. I usually just use it when I want to open a Explorer window at my current location. c:\foobar\> start . This will open Explorer in the...

This has to be one of the most useful features I never new about (until about 4 weeks ago). C:\Documents and Settings\kmoore\Desktop> pushd \\server\userfiles\kmoore Z:\kmoore> copy myfile.txt d: 1 file(s) copied. Z:\kmoore> popd C:\Documents and Settings\kmoore...