Archive for May 2008

Congratulations to the Internet Explorer 8 Developer Team

2008-05-25 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, software

In the early beta phase of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 I posted some improvement thoughts to the official developer newsgroup and never got any response or feedback.

One thing I find pretty important is the option to close only the current tab if you click on the global close ‘X’ in the top most right corner if you have more than one tab open. In IE7 it would only ask you if you really want to close all tabs. If you accidentally clicked on the global close icon but only wanted to close the current tab you had to say ‘No’ and then close the actual tab.

But hey, guess what it looks like in IE8 beta (Konqueror style, woohooo) :IE8closecurrenttab

Update:

Wow, we’re really getting somewhere here. Playing around with IE8 beta a little more I discovered that the search box in the upper right corner has a sort auf auto correct mechanism. For example you type ‘target audiecne‘ instead of ‘target audience‘ in the box with Google as your search provider and then Google offers you to correct your search with a link above all the results of your original search query.

If you would like to use the corrected search query in the search box you had to copy’n'paste in the pre IE8 era but now IE8 is doing it for you. I already love this browser.

IE8_AutoCorrect_SearchBox

Virtual PC 2007 VHD: Resize NTFS Windows System Partition

2008-05-05 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, software

As you may have recognized reading my last post I sometimes use my blog as a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS). This post is filed under the same category.

Virtual PC 2007 is a free virtualization product from Microsoft. You can download many M$ Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files from here

  1. Go to http://vmtoolkit.com and download the VHD Resizer (btw they also have a tool to convert VMware VMDK images to VHD files)
  2. Run the tool and open the VHD file you want to resize (make sure its not currently used by a running VM)
  3. Specify a new VHD file as destination with a type (fixed/dynamic) and a size and click on the button “Resize” (this may take a while so go and get a drink)
    VHDresizer
  4. Add the new resized harddisk image to your virtual machine as second/third HD and boot into it with the original small VHD as system disk.
    Disk Managment wo Letter
  5. VERY IMPORTANT: Use “Computer Management” -> “Disk Management” to
    assign a drive letter to the second/third HD
    (otherwise dispart will not work)
    Add Letter to HD
  6. Now open a CMD console and type diskpart to get into the interactive mode of the partition utlitiy. The tool is part of Windows XP / 2003 and later and may be downloaded for Win 2000
  7. type list volume to display the list of available volumes in your system
  8. type select [volume ID] (where [volume ID] either is the drive letter or the number given by the list volume command
  9. type extend
    Diskpart
  10. Shutdown the system
  11. Use the extended HD as your primary VHD file in your virtual machine configuration and remove the original (small) VHD file from your setup
  12. Boot the virtual machine and download lots of movies in HD quality to fill up the new space

Direct access to Windows "Network Connections"

2008-05-01 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft

On my own account (just a personal reminder):

Press
[Win] (+ [R])
then type
ncpa.cpl