Category: Microsoft

Bolster Your DOS USB Boot Disk – Part 1

File Conflict Warning

Yesterday, I walked through how to make your own DOS USB boot disk with the final result being a bootable USB stick that won’t do much more than let you browse the USB stick itself and other internal FAT and FAT32 drives. Today, we’ll make that USB stick a bit more useful. The first and …

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Windows Phone 7 and Google’s Artificial Limitation of Multiple Calendars

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If you happen to use more than one calendar in Google Mail or your corporate e-mail then you might have realised that Windows Phone 7 only seems to support the primary calendar for some reason over Exchange ActiveSync. This is despite other EAS compatible devices such as the iPhone and iPad having worked with multiple …

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What Does 3G+ Mean in Windows Phone 7?

Here’s a quick tip for tonight. If you use Windows Phone 7 you might notice on the lock screen that you have a “3G+” symbol from time to time and wondered what it meant. You might be forgiven for thinking that you’ve unlocked some sort of turbo charged connectivity but there is quite a simple …

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Make Your Own DOS USB Boot Disk

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

This one might be a bit out there for the regular crowd out there but for those of us who grew up on the DOS command line (myself included) sometimes you need to get back to basics. Some faithful tools and utilities such as SpinRite only work in DOS and in order to use them …

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Boydo Test Drives Windows Phone 7

Just a quick update for tonight. From here on in I will be using the new Samsung Omnia 7 I picked up on the weekend as my primary phone. For me, there’s no better approach in becoming more familiar with a device than to jump in with both feet and work it out as you …

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Samsung Omnia 7 Unboxing

Well, I have been itching for a little while to get a device that would let me test drive Windows Phone 7 ahead of the highly anticipated Mango release. As I own an Android device (Samsung Galaxy S) and an Apple iPad I have two major players covered but was lacking when it came to Microsoft’s latest …

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Safe Mode and Recovery From Windows Registry Errors

Today, I bumped into a colleague at work who reads this blog and we had a brief chat about yesterday’s article and the fact that I could have come off a little too casual in the way I provided the instructions without warning about the potential risks (up to and including nuking your Windows installation) …

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Stop Windows Update Taking Over the Shutdown Button

Shut down and install updates button

Another quick tip for tonight. Sometimes, when you want to shutdown your computer you might notice that the shutdown button looks like this in Windows 7: When pressed, this button will finish the installation of pending updates for Windows and then shutdown the computer. Sometimes, this isn’t convenient and if you have a habit of …

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Learn More About Command Line Applications

These days, most people won’t have much reason to fall back to a command line in Windows given that most functions have a corresponding graphical interface. However, for more serious things like network diagnostics (like ping, traceroute, pathping, nslookup etc) there is often no avoiding the command line window. Anyway, one tip that I always …

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Snap Your Applications into Place in Windows 7

Last year I covered a stack of keyboard shortcuts for Windows including some specific to Windows 7. I covered the keyboard shortcuts for snapping windows the the left or right half of the screen 9and hopefully that has come in handy for you). In true form, Microsoft provides another way to do the same thing …

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