How-To Geek

Ok!  In Part 1 we went through and set up the basic configuration for our Virtual PC using Windows Virtual PC 2007.  Now lets go ahead and load the Operating System and look at some of the features.

After writing about how to see the number of times an article has been bookmarked on del.icio.us, it occurred to me that it would be incredibly easy to write an application to loop through all the pages on a website and check the del.icio.us count for each one, giving a total at the end.

My good friend Daniel asked me yesterday how to change Firefox so that Shift+Enter auto-completes *.org instead of *.net. After about a 2 minute google session, I had the answer to share with everybody.

Why should Vista Ultimate get all of the cool toys like Virtual PC?  You can add Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to your existing XP box now.  This is a free download from Microsoft.  In this post I am going to go through the set up and basic configuration of a virtual machine on Windows XP.  I find this most useful for other Microsoft OS’s.  If you want to run Linux an other alternative OS on Windows I would check out vmware.

In IT having good backups is extremely essential.  Your worst nightmare is when an end user deletes the company yearly accounting reports.  If your business is using Server 2003 getting those files back in a hurry is extremely easy with the Shadow Copy feature.  This feature was added to Server 2003 for just such instances.  In fact, by educating the end users they can retrieve the files without having to involve IT.

So you installed Windows DreamScene through Windows Update, but where did it go? You can’t find it in the start menu anywhere, and it’s not in Program Files… Turns out that just installing it doesn’t always mean that it’s enabled.

If you like the way Ubuntu requires you to enter your username and password instead of clicking on an icon, you can enable the same thing for Windows Vista in a somewhat similar style logon process. This is really most useful for home users, as domain users should already see this screen.

If you are tired of hacking together commands at the terminal or having to open a giant bloated IDE just to perform search and replace across a number of files, then Regexxer is the tool for you.

Gmail Drive is a third party software extension originally thought up by Richard Jones  that allows you to use your Gmail account as though it is a drive attached to your local machine.  You have the ability to drag and drop files into that drive and retrieve the files from another machine if necessary.  Let’s take a look at how it works.

The Desktop Cube effect for Linux is extremely popular because people love eye candy, but the choices for Windows are much less interesting. The latest utility to give this effect for Windows is surprisingly fast, and works on both XP and Vista.

Geeks everywhere have embraced the lightweight and free Foxit PDF reader instead of using Adobe reader, but did you realize that you can index PDF files without Adobe installed on your computer?

This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.

You can install Add-In software to most Office 2007 applications.  Microsoft bundled add-in software with this release of Office.  The software is included with 2007 but is not automatically installed.  Here I am going to demonstrate how to complete the process with Excel 2007.

If you’ve ever wondered how to change the name of the person that Windows is registered to, this is the quick tip for you. It’s not all that useful, but it might come in handy if you got a computer from somebody else.

If you spend a lot of time inside your registry editor, you might already know that you can use the Favorites feature to add in a bookmark to a specific key in the registry, saving you immense amounts of time when you need to check a bunch of different keys.

This tip won’t be useful for everybody, but for anybody with a dedicated server you’ll probably be familiar with this error message that gets sent weekly from the security scanner on your server.

How many times have you tried to email a co-worker or colleague an executable or batch file that is desperately needed and you get a message such as:

The new indexing service built into Windows Vista has been the subject of a lot of complaints, since it seems to kick in at strange times and thrash your hard drive. So what can we do to speed this up?

If you’ve ever wondered how to configure the number of documents shown on the Recent Items menu, you’ve found the right article. The default value is set to show 10 documents, but you can increase that with a registry tweak.

It’s amazing how often I get the question “I deleted my Show Desktop icon, now how do I get it back?” arrives in my inbox… so I’ve decided to just zip up the icon and provide it here for everybody.

Every month or two, we come up with a list of the great geek sites that we read and share it with our readers. It’s also a great way for me to take a day off, since it only takes a few minutes to come up with…

If you are a recent Mac adopter and are frustrated by the weird tab behavior in OS X, you aren’t alone. By default the Tab key only works for text boxes and lists, but excludes select controls (drop-down menus) on a form when using Firefox.

A source of annoyance for many Windows users is the ” – Shortcut” text that is added to the name of newly created shortcuts, and every time you have to manually edit the shortcut and remove that text. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a registry hack for this?

Hate the new calendar in Vista?  Not a fan of the Outlook calendar or don’t like the idea of always being connected to the web to use Google’s Calendar?  Love Open Source and all things Mozilla?  Then Sunbird is for you. Sunbird is a stand-alone calendar application.  If you want Sunbird to integrate with Thunderbird then you would want to install the Lightning extension.

As everybody knows, using the Windows+L keys together will lock your workstation running Windows 7, XP or Vista. Did you realize that you can also disable this function by using a registry hack?