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In Windows XP, it was easy to configure Task Scheduler to run a certain event on weekdays only:

Windows 7, however, doesn’t have a “weekdays” option, just “Daily”, “Weekly”, “Monthly”, “One time”, “When the computer starts”, “When I log on”, or “When a specific event is logged”:

So… how do you configure tasks to only run on weekdays? It’s totally counter-intuitive, but you choose “Weekly” and then choose which day(s) you want the task to run on:

It doesn’t make a lot of sense at first, but new method is actually far more powerful than the old “XP way”. You could, for instance, easily create a task that only runs on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays using this method, whereas in XP you’d have to create three individual daily tasks that run on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Or if you had a business that was open every day but Sunday, you could easily schedule a backup to run Monday – Saturday with this method.

Play around with it – I think you’d like it better in the end!

Virgin Mobile USA, the Sprint-owned prepaid cellular company, has three product lines: “Beyond Talk” (for smartphones and advanced feature phones), “Paylo” (for basic feature phones), and “Broadband2Go” (for mobile adapters and hotspots).

For some reason, Virgin has chosen to sell prepaid cards for each service. And the market for such cards – at least in the Charlotte area – is oddly segmented. For example, my local Walmart used to sell Beyond Talk cards next to other prepaid cellular cards from Boost Mobile, Net10 and Tracfone. But Walmart stopped carrying them for some reason, and now only sells Broadband2Go cards in the computer accessories section. Walgreen’s still has $25 or $50 Beyond Talk cards, while the CVS across the street only sells the “you choose” $10/$30/$50 Paylo cards. Lowe’s, across the street from CVS and next door to Walmart, sells Paylo cards in $10, $20, or $50 amounts.

So here’s the tip: it’s not a secret – in fact, it’s printed right on the front of the cards – but you can use any Virgin Mobile prepaid card to add funds to any Virgin Mobile account. If you have Beyond Talk, you can use a Paylo card. Or you could use a Beyond Talk card to add money to your Broadband2Go account. As I say, the front of the cards clearly states “adds money to any Virgin Mobile account”. But it wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t know there wasn’t a difference between them. I figured someone out there might not know either, and have the same question.

I have a desktop computer running Windows 7 Ultimate with Aero enabled, and a netbook running Windows 7 Starter without Aero. So when I use my netbook to connect to my desktop over Remote Desktop, the desktop has to switch from Aero to Classic mode. And when I log back in to the console session on my desktop, Windows is supposed to switch back from Classic to Aero.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Just the other day I was in bed and decided to use the netbook to connect to my desktop so I could go through some RSS feeds and tweets in Outlook. But, after I disconnected, the desktop remained in Classic mode… which is just ugly. I knew from previous occurrences that I could just reboot the computer, but I had a lot of stuff open and didn’t want to do that. So I tried shutting down and restarting Explorer (the shell, not the web browser), but that didn’t help. I had a flash of inspiration and tried restarting Desktop Window Manager session service… and it worked!

If this happens to you, all you need to do to fix it is open a command-prompt with admin privileges and type the following (be sure to wait for the “service stopped successfully” message before entering the second command):

net stop uxsms
net start uxsms

If you know of a more elegant way to fix this, please let me know!