Reinstall of Vista – what software goes back on?

It’s nearly Christmas! And the phones were quiet this afternoon (for once!). And my PC at work has been driving me around the bend for the last 3 months, so it was time for drastic action …..
After a fresh reinstall of Vista SP1 64bit – here are the tools that are pretty much essential to [...]

Living with the Lenovo ThinkPad T60

One of my first blog posts last year was on my new T60 – I was really pretty happy with the purchase – at least after wiping it to get rid of all the pre-installed nonsense and sticking on a nice fresh install of Vista . So after 15 months hard use am I still [...]

Web Browser Shortcut keys

While we’re on the topic of shortcut keys – here’s a nice post from Jeff Atwood on his blog Coding Horror.
The Five Browser Shortcuts Everyone Should Know
This is one area where a little effort can result in a big return in daily efficiency …. save a few seconds on something you do hundreds of times [...]

Junction Links / Symbolic Links

These will be very familiar to the UNIX heads – but they’re a pretty unutilised concept for us windows types. I certainly don’t use them every day, but there are times when a junction/symbolic link can be very useful.
For example, I had an issue today where I had to create a load of files [...]

F6 for a storage driver – death of a floppy

While installing our new server today I hit the age old problem of getting the RAID controller drivers installed during setup.
Press F6 when prompted to install a third-party driver

Pressing F6 is the easy bit! For some unknown reason the only way to provide these drivers for windows setup is on a 3.5″ Floppy Disk. [...]

Telnet missing from Vista

Telnet.exe is a very old command line client tool designed as a client for the TELNET network protocol (circa 1969) . Use of the network protocol itself has been largely superseded, but the telnet.exe client tool in Windows is still used by many of us for testing basic network functions – sending a request to [...]

Where’s the file-edit-view menu bar gone in Vista?

I was just following some of the comments in another thread on the blog and picked up on this – I think it may be one reason that people often find it difficult to locate more advanced features in Vista.
One of the main changes in Vista is the lack of the traditional menu bar at the top [...]