Do you find yourself constantly drilling down through Windows Explorer to the same folder? Let’s say that your company’s accounting software creates reports in Excel spreadsheets, and part of your job is to open the reports and add information or “pretty them up”. The accounting software creates the reports in some hideously long path, like C:\Program Files\CompanyName\Accounting\Reports\2007\June. This is hard-wired in to the software and you cannot change it. So you constantly have to open Excel and go to File > Open and click 19 different folders to get to what you need. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was an easier way to get there?
USB Drive Letter Manager
I don’t know how many of you would need something like this, but it’s pretty cool anyway: USB Drive Letter Manager is a free download for Windows that lets you perform all kinds of neat tricks with USB devices in Windows. The primary feature of USBDLM is that it can assign a given range of letters to your USB mass-storage devices. You can also have USBDLM not assign a drive letter to a multi-format card reader until a card is actually inserted into the drive (most of these types of drives assign 4 drive letters when installed in Windows; USBDLM can assign a specific range of drive letters, plus only assign a letter when a CF or SD card is inserted, for example). And one of USBDLM’s coolest features allows you to assign drive letters to specific USB ports – so you can set it up to always give devices attached to the top USB port on the front of your computer the letter R:, for instance.
USB Drive Letter Manager is freeware and works with Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista. You will probably need to read up on the instructions a bit, as everything is controlled through a single INI file. I’ve used it for some time now, and I just think it’s great!
Read more about it here.
Delaying Vista Activation
Windows Vista comes with the same annoying “product activation” that Windows XP does… but with one crucial difference. Vista has the hidden ability to reset the activation countdown timer up to four times. So instead of the 30 days of activation-free use that Windows XP offers, you can get as much as 120 days with Windows Vista. This was especially welcome news to me, as I needed to add an extra gig of RAM to my system to make Vista run a bit more smoothly. I’d had Vista installed for 28 days now, and so had only 2 days left before activation was required. Because local RAM prices were completely insane, I had to order the memory online. And since I would have had to activate Vista in 2 days, I would have had to pay insane amounts of money for overnight shipping. But with this trick, I just reset the countdown timer and had an extra 30 days to worry about it.
To reset the activation counter in Windows Vista:
1. Click on the Start button and and type “Cmd” (without quotes) in Start Search box. DO NOT press enter yet!
2. Press on Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open Command Prompt (this is crucial, as it allows the following commands to run as the local Administrator).
3. At the command prompt, type slmgr -rearm and then press the ENTER key.
4. Type EXIT and press the ENTER key to exit the command prompt, then reboot your computer.
When you come back from the reboot, you should now have 30 full days to use Vista again before you have to activate. You can run the rearm command up to 4 times, giving you a total of 120 days of Vista use before you are required to activate the OS. It’s important to understand that this command will reset the counter back to 30 days only; if you currently have 15 days left and run this command, you’ll have 30 days left before activation\rearming is required – not 45 days.
Secure Printing
We’ve all needed to print something “sensitive” at one point in our careers. Perhaps it was a list of dirty jokes, a job offer from another company, or maybe even a gossipy email that you want to use against a coworker later on. Maybe it was sensitive work-related material, like a list of employee salaries or heath insurance information. Whatever the document may be, we’ve all done the exact same thing when we needed to print it: gotten the print dialogue box up on the screen, stood up at our desks and extended our arms as far as possible, clicked “print”, then ran a mad dash to the copy room in hopes that someone else wasn’t in there already. Some folks skip this by waiting until late in the day to print sensitive documents. Others are lucky and can requisition a “personal printer” for their office or cubicle. The rest of us are stuck with the mad dash.
Or maybe not. Many of the beefier Xerox and HP printers have a “secure print” feature that allows you to send a document to a printer and hold it there until you get to the copy\printer room. You then enter your “secret code” and the document will begin printing. It’s a pretty cool feature, so you might want to muck about the printer dialog boxes and see if any printers you use have this feature enabled. Here are some instructions for Xerox and HP printers:
Setting Default Browser From The Command-Line
I use Firefox as my primary web browser. I really like tab browsing and usually have 20+ tabs open at any one time. Thanks to the Session Saver extension (or, nowadays, Firefox’s built-in session manager), I usually just close Firefox when I’m done for the day and resume surfing those 20+ pages at a later time.
However, this can be a big pain for the occasional “I just need to check one thing” moments. With 20+ tabs open, it can take Firefox thirty seconds to a minute to open all those web pages and become responsive on my system. Many times I’ve clicked on a link in an email or IM conversation, only to forget that Firefox was closed. Firefox will then open and my system will grind to a halt whilst the browser tries to open 27 different web pages at once. I’m not opposed to using Internet Explorer in such moments, but you’d need to either a) cut and paste the link (not easily done in most versions of Outlook if it’s an embedded link), or b) open IE and drill through the options menu to set IE as default, then go back to Outlook\IM app and click on the link.
Continue reading “Setting Default Browser From The Command-Line”
More Virtualization Stuff
By now you’ve probably heard of software like VMWare and Virtual PC – two programs that let you install “virtual computers” on your system. If you have some old program that only works in Windows 98 or NT 4.0, you can install either VMWare or Virtual PC and boot into a “virtual machine” to do what you need. Likewise, many people that want to learn Linux but need a working computer for day-to-day work have used virtual machine technology to get their learn on without the fear of screwing something up their machines.
But while virtual machines are nice and all, they’re not perfect. No matter how fast your computer is or how much RAM you have, you still have to wait for the virtual machine to boot up before you can use it. And moving data between a virtual and physical machine can sometimes be problematic. And let’s face it, virtual machines are simply overkill for a lot of applications. After all, needing Windows 98 for one particular program is one thing, but why install a virtual copy of Windows XP on top of a real version of XP?
An Ancient Notepad Feature
OK, so the other day I was surfing around and came across this old chestnut at Download Squad: if you open Notepad and type .LOG at the very beginning of a new text document, then save the file, Notepad will automatically append the time and date to the file every time you open it. How is this useful? Well, I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps you’re a contractor and need to keep track of the time spent at a client’s site. Just open the file and type “Began work” underneath Notepad’s time stamp and you can use it as a log. Maybe you’ve got a noisy neighbor and you need to keep track of the racket they make. I dunno. The only thing you need to remember is that the .LOG bit is case-sensitive, so .Log or .log won’t work.
If you’d like to add the time and date to a Notepad file manually, just press the F5 key.
Killing WU Reboot Reminders
One of the most annoying “features” of Service Pack 2 for Windows XP is the seemingly endless stream of pop-up reminders to reboot your computer after installing patches from Windows Update. It’s a well-intentioned feature, and casual users should take Microsoft’s advice and reboot their computers when asked, since many patches cannot be applied while system files are in use and thus cannot be updated until the system restarts. However, for power users that are aware of the consequences of not rebooting immediately, the pop-ups can be incredibly annoying. Yes, we know we need to reboot our computers, but we’ll get around to it when we can – we have other things to do in the meantime. For instance, you might be troubleshooting a server or some code and want to wait until lunch to reboot your computer. If it’s 8AM when the first reminder pops up and 11AM is your scheduled lunch time, you’re going to have to click “Reboot Later” eighteen times until lunchtime. Not fun.
Firefox Keywords
Did you know that Firefox bookmarks have a cool feature called keywords? If you right-click any bookmark in Firefox and select “Properties”, you’ll see an entry called “Keyword:” with a blank text box next to it. You can enter any word you’d like to use as your own personal keyword; for example, the address for the Ars Technica “The Lounge” forum is:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/34709834
However, I have made lounge my keyword for that shortcut, so all I need to type is lounge into the address bar and the above page will load! Some of my other keywords include:
me – this site
yellow – http://www.realpageslive.com
damn – http://www.damninteresting.com
feed – http://feedvalidator.org
goof – http://www.myspace.com/jimcofer
Remember, Firefox keywords can be just about anything you wish. You can also use %s as a wildcard for searches if you’d like; for example, I could bookmark the myspace.com home page, then edit the bookmark to read http://www.myspace.com/%s with a keyword of msp. If I then typed msp jimcofer into the address bar, Firefox would put the jimcofer where the %s is in the keyword, so it would go to my profile (http://www.myspace.com/jimcofer). Typing msp someoneelse would take me to http://www.myspace.com/someoneelse and so on. In fact, there’s a whole slew of little tricks you can use with keywords; a good list of them is here.
The Recovery Console
Back in the Windows 9x days, it was often easier (and faster) to simply reinstall Windows on a non-booting computer than to actually diagnose the problem. Corporate IT departments still do this to a large degree – after all, it’s usually cheaper to just re-image an employee’s desktop than to pay an IT guy four hours of labor to troubleshoot some arcane issue. But for many home users it’s just not an option. Reinstalling XP itself doesn’t take that much time; installing the dozens of programs and “system tweaks” does.
Thankfully, Windows XP is pretty bulletproof; aside from basic “newbie problems” and self-inflicted issues (like spyware), you really have to work hard to take down an XP machine. But it does happen – in fact, it happened to me twice in just the past week! I decided to play around with various flavors of Linux. I decided to try the most “user friendly” version, Ubuntu, first. After playing around with the “live CD” version of the operating system, I decided to actually install it on my hard drive. Which was easy… but the Ubuntu installer overwrote the Master Boot Record (MBR) on my hard drive and Windows wouldn’t start (Ironically, in an effort to make Linux “easier” to use, they apparently removed the option not to install a bootloader… which made it impossible to boot into Windows!).