After I wrote about the Office compatibility pack, a reader asked this question:

I just saw your post on the compatibility pack. This seems like an ideal thing we can use here, but I can’t seem to locate the msi file so I can push it through the domain

After doing some experimentation and using the sysinternals tool filemon…I discovered that it extracts the contents of the compatibility pack into this folder:

Then you can simply copy the entire contents of this folder, and put it on a public share.

Then deploy O12Conv.msi to your computers using GPO…and if you don’t know how to do that, then check out my last article about it.

• Pinnacle Systems Announces PCTV Remote Kit for Windows Vista
  If you use Media Center and don’t have a remote, Pinnacle has what you’re looking for.
  (tags: Remote Media Center )
• Robert McLaws: Windows Vista Edition : Everything You Know About Vista is Wrong, Part 1
  Part 1 of Roberts four part series talking about the bad press Vista has received.
  (tags: Review PR )
• Robert McLaws: Windows Vista Edition : Everything You Know About Vista is Wrong, an Introduction
  Robert introduces a four part series discussing the negative press Vista has received.
  (tags: Review PR )

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 2.0.0.6 has been released. It’s the popular Mozilla Firefox web browser bundled with a PortableApps.com Launcher as a portable app, so you can take your bookmarks, extensions and saved passwords with you. It works from any removable media (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, CD, etc) on any Windows computer (Windows 98 through Vista) or within Wine on your favorite Linux/UNIX distro. And, it’s packaged in PortableApps.com Format so you can use it on its own or with the PortableApps.com Suite. (more…)

apps, computer windows, Firefox, firefox portable, firefox web browser, Internet, mozilla, passwords, portableapps, portable hard drive, removable media, Software, sourceforge project, unix distro, usb flash drive, Web, web browser, windows computer

Where do YOU want to SCRATCH today?  :-)

Although this image may seem funny, in reality you can have data on audio cassettes and even records like this (LPs)

I can recall the sinclair spectrum micro computer had about 50kb per 5 mins of tape or that would give us 450kb per LP record…
Since one LP record can fit 45 mins of sound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_album

Therefore to fit a Vista dvd (I estimate the dvd to be 3 gb of data) in LP
records you would need 6666.66666666666…. records

Screenshot for those who mix up the decimal points with commas (depending on what part of the world you are)
Notice the last digit is 7, but I suspect that the real number goes on with …666666… infinitely

The number 6666.6666…. seems satanic… I wonder what would be installed if you would play these record backwards :-)

I dont think you can get much more demonic that Vista already is.. LOL!

Eject the CD or DVD drive when your PC is switched off
You will need some sort of pin (or straightened paper clip) which you can push into the small hole on most CD or DVD drives to manually eject the tray.

Stop your DVD playback stuttering
If Windows detects a problem with one of the drives on your PC, it may reset the disk controller mode to a slower level, causing DVD play back to halt intermittently.

To fix this, right-click on ‘My Computer’ and click ‘Manage’.

This will open up the Computer Management console: click on ‘Device Manager’.

Open up ‘IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, and right-click on ‘Secondary IDE Channel’ and click on ‘Uninstall’.

Restart your PC.

Windows should re-detect the controller and set it back to a quicker mode.

Prevent scans from showing details from the opposite side of the scanned sheet
When scanning some media, particularly newspapers, you will notice that text and images from the other side of the sheet appear on the scan. To prevent this place a dark piece of cardboard - preferably black - on top of the sheet that you are scanning.

How big?
Scanning software generally defaults to a fairly high resolution for scanning (measured in dpi - dots per inch). If you are using the scanned image or text in a word processing document or a slide-show you probably don’t need the dpi setting to be all that high - 90dpi should be enough.

Setting a lower resolution means that your documents won’t be so large, and if you do a lot of scanning into documents this tip will help save hard-drive space.

Commenter Phil Quirk wants to know what the rules are for determining which windows
appear in the Alt+Tab list .
It’s actually pretty simple although hardly anything you’d be able to guess
on your own. Note : The details of this algorithm are an implementation Read More……(read more)