useful tool for windows when you have lots of ‘windows’ open

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

WinSplit Revolution is a small utility which allows you to easily organize your open windows by tiling, resizing and positioning them to make the best use of your desktop real estate.

http://www.winsplit-revolution.com/

Mapping caps lock to ctrl - windows XP

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Why even have a Caps Lock key - I hate it! Also to save my wrists I want to map it to the control key (rather than swap caps lock for control). It is an easy thing to do - just create a text file and paste this into it:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
“Scancode Map”=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

Rename the file ‘caps-as-ctrl.reg’ and then run it. You may need to restart to have caps lock mapped to ctrl.

Joy…..

caps-as-ctrlreg

Windows XP Pro - Automatic updates won’t run

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

I had not bothered about this for some time - but I thought I had better get it sorted now as I had not updated for a while.

I kept getting the error Automatic Updates, BITS and Event Log services not running. Even if you go to the services list and find that they are running it still does not work.

I found that the problem was with the Automatic Updates service that was not set to start up automatically - probably something I did a while back when I pretty much switched almost all the services off!

Anyway - to solve this problem - right click on the automatic updates service and change its start up mode to automatic, make sure RPC is running and then restart your machine.

That should do the trick!

Mounting ISO’s Win XP Pro

Monday, March 17th, 2008

great little tool:

http://myutilities.blogspot.com/2005/10/mount-iso-files-under-windows-xp.html

Sync Toy

Monday, February 4th, 2008

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx

http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/2006/09/20/how-to-using-synctoy-to-make-a-nightly-mirror-of-my-documents/

To schedule a task using the operating system:

  1. From the Start menu, select All Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Scheduled Tasks.
  2. Select Add scheduled task to start the Scheduled Task Wizard. You will see a list of possible programs to run.
  3. SyncToy may appear as an option in the list. If SyncToy does not appear in the list, click Browse and go find it.
    (Note: Odds are, it’s in your c:\Program Files\Microsoft\SyncToy directory)
  4. The wizard will next prompt you to enter how often you want to run the scheduled SyncToy (for example, daily, weekly, et cetera). Select a frequency.
    (Note: I’d suggest weekly unless you make lots of changes to your documents)
  5. The next page asks when to start the task. Select a start time.
    (Note: I’d suggest middle of the night.)
  6. The next page asks for the user name and password to run the program under. Enter your user name and password.
  7. The final page contains an option to open the properties dialog when the wizard ends. Select this checkbox.
  8. Modify the Run textbox to include (append) the –R command line option. –R all by itself will run all folder pairs that are active for run all. (Note: Sufficient if you only have this one pair, or other similar pairs. In which case, you’re done with this step) If you want to run just a single folder pair, add –R“My Pair” to the end of the command line. Note: there is a space before the hyphen but not one after the R. If the folder pair name contains a space, surround it with quotation marks, as the example above shows. For another example, assume that SyncToy is in the folder named C:\My Folder and that you want to run a folder pair named “My folder pair.” Enter the command line as follows, including the quotation marks: “C:\My Folder\SyncToy.exe” -R”My folder pair.” Note that there are two sets of quotation marks in this case: one is around the path to the SyncToy program file and the other surrounds the folder pair name.

Terminals - needed this for ages!

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Ever run more than one remote desktop at once? If the answer is yes then get yourself this:

http://www.codeplex.com/Terminals/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1697

Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools - 64bit?

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Windows-Server-2003-Resource-Kit.html

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en

Multiple Websites running on Win XP Pro?

Friday, January 11th, 2008

http://bluedragon.blog-city.com/multisitesoniis.htm

Symlinks for NTFS - (Junktions)

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/fsutil.mspx?mfr=true

Who locked me?

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

Very useful:

http://www.dr-hoiby.com/WhoLockMe/