Okoboji: a lake, a mythical university, Kevin Moore's blog : Windows Tips and Tricks

Reasons to submit error reports

okoboji — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 01:26:00 GMT

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.

Use the March CTP ISO without burning it

okoboji — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 22:20:00 GMT

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 plastic. Pretty cool.

While I’m talking about 3rd party tools, I’m still amazed when I meet people (in software) that haven’t heard of Process Explorer. Amazing tool. A bunch of cool new features that support .NET diagnostics and network usage.

Do you ever want to delete a file and you can’t figure out which process has the handle? Here’s your solution.

As with all non-MS software, you’re mileage may vary, restrictions may apply, void where prohibited, yadda yadda yadda.

Keyboard access to Office smart tags

okoboji — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 02:20:00 GMT

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 whatever you want. (Shift+F10 opens the regular context menu.)

Now if I can just remember what I was working on...

Get great deals on Rolex watches!

okoboji — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 05:45:00 GMT

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-check "Display PDF in browser"

While you're at it, you may want to set auto-update to manual (under Updates) and disable the splash screen (under Startup).

Doesn't that feel better?

FYI: This works great for IE. I couldn't figure out how to get the setting to stick for Mozilla.

I hope to figure out how this works for Office documents next.

File sharing on XP

okoboji — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 03:04:00 GMT

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.com/sharing/

I've found file sharing on Windows to be feast or famine: either it works great right off the bat or you run into any number of un-explainable errors with no obvious way forward.

Thankfully there is a whole team in Windows (of which I’m a part) working to improve the file sharing experience for Longhorn. To quote another PM on my team, “our goal for LH should be that it doesn’t take a 10 page technical discussion to get sharing to work.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Tired of Spam? Get sneaky…

okoboji — Sat, 15 May 2004 01:16:00 GMT

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 a forwarding address. They do some clever tricks to handle replies from your favorite email application while still protecting your address.

The best advice to avoid spam: don’t create obvious email addresses. BobJ@anything will get nailed. You’re better off using a mix of letters and numbers. Avoid common words and names all together. Think strong password: easy to remember, hard to guess.

To my knowledge, Microsoft does not recommend any email spam solutions (besides our own). This is my own experience, your mileage may vary, etc.

Running Server 2003 on your desktop? Disable Shutdown Event Tracking

okoboji — Fri, 07 May 2004 10:21:00 GMT

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 way to track what is causing reductions in uptime. For my desktop, which I reboot often into Longhorn, it can be a bit of a nuisance.

Group Policy to the rescue.

Start > Run > gpedit.msc
Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System
Double-click on “Display Shutdown Event Tracker”
Set the option to “Disabled”

This should only be done on systems where tracking up time is not necessary.

Play your favorite music when you launch Windows Media Player

okoboji — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 02:01:00 GMT

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 un-check “Start Player in Media Guide”, but you actually have a few other options, too.

Our friends at MSDN have got documentation on the few command line parameters available from Media Player.

You can specify which mode you want it to launch in, which device to play, even which playlist to start.

1) I created a playlist called “Best Music” which is actually an auto playlist with all of my 4- and 5-star music.

2) I created a shortcut in my quick launch bar and pointed it to:

"C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /Playlist "Best Music" /Task MediaLibrary

3) I changed the default icon to the green arrow in %SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll which distinguishes it from the plain, old Media Player.

Now I'm one click away from my favorite tunes.

A note: I thought it would be cool to launch this shortcut as minimized so that Media Player would just live in the tray. It turns out that Media Player launches and disappears when you do this! You either have to launch Media Player again without the “launch minimized” option set or kill the process. I’m sure they’ll get that fixed for Longhorn.

Must have Windows Utility -- Process Explorer

okoboji — Sun, 28 Mar 2004 19:46:00 GMT

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 is always at the top of the list. Think of it like Task Manager on steroids. You can see the process hierarchy, processor and memory usage per process (with graphs), and the set of handles and libraries in use by each process. My favorite feature is the ability to search for a file and see processes with handles to it. This is essential when you want to delete a file, but some unknown process is holding on to it.

Check it out.

Be thankful for cool Windows tricks...

okoboji — Fri, 28 Nov 2003 00:04:00 GMT

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 your quick-launch bar or desktop.
2) You can just press Window Button-R.

Both of these were shamelessly stolen from Raymond Chen's Blog.

Google for autosearch in IE

okoboji — Tue, 04 Nov 2003 00:56:00 GMT

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.reg

Just save the reg file locally. Double click to import into the registry. You're set.

The 'start' command from CMD

okoboji — Mon, 20 Oct 2003 10:49:00 GMT

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 "c:\foobar\" folder.

Using UNC paths from CMD: PushD & PopD

okoboji — Sun, 19 Oct 2003 22:28:00 GMT

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\Desktop>dir /b
        

        myfile.text

This works with local drives, too. So if you working in My Documents and you want to check something in %windir% you can just pushd %windr%, check things out, then popd. Pretty cool.