I love Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client. As a Network Admin I use this on a daily basis. An improvement that comes with remoting into Windows 7 and Server 2008 machines is that you can use both of your monitors to work on a Remote Machine. 

I don't use this all the time but it's nice to know how to do it: Go to Run (windows button + R) and you type mstsc /span. Put the computer name that you'll want to remote into (make sure the  "Use all my monitors for the remote session" box is checked under the Display tab) and you'll be able span your Remote Session on both your monitors. 

I'm going a step further here since I usually save a .rdp file that I'll be using a lot so I don't have to type the server I'll connect to. So this is the easiest way to do it (at least for me). 

1. Open Remote Desktop Connection (Run> mstsc)
2. Click on the Save As... button and save this .rdp file to whatever you like. For me I'll use work.rdp so I can RDP into my work machine.
3. Right-click on the .rdp file and open it with Notepad
4. Make sure these two lines appear on the file:
5. use multimon:i:1 (this is the same as checking the  "Use all my monitors for the remote session" box)
6. span monitors:i:1 (this is the same as the /span parameter)
7. Save your file and when you connect to the Remote machine you'll have the Remote Desktop span on both your monitors. 

And that's how you do it!

Here's something that I've run into many times. You need to Remote Desktop to a machine so then you can Remote Desktop to another machine because it's safer to keep some machines this way. Only problem with this is that you end up with the Remote Desktop Bar (where you can Minimize, Restore or Close the session) right in the middle where you can't get to the second Remote Session you started. 

Remote Desktop in Windows 7 now allows you to move the bar out of the way, this is great feature if you want to minimize the second Remote Desktop session so you can work on the first session you were working on. To do this simply click on the bar with your mouse and drag it to your left so you can see the other Remote Desktop bar.

And that my friends is how you do it!


Here's some Examples:

I've been using Dropbox for a while now and I'm really enjoying it but it wasn't until yesterday that I found out that you can sync folders that don't live inside the My Dropbox folder. This is a huge advantage if you already have a structure in place and don't want to change it.  

I find this useful if you have a folder, for example Important Docs under C:\Users\Alex\My Documents\Important Docs, I don't have to create a batch to copy these files onto the Dropbox folder for it to be backed up. I can work on my usual My Document folder and the Dropbox has an exact copy at all times and is synching all the time.

To do this in Vista and Win 7 all you have to do is something like this on a command prompt:

mklink /D "C:\My Dropbox\Important Documents" "C:\Users\Alex\My Documents\Important Docs"

NOTE: The first path is the Link Folder you'd like to create and the second one is the Target folder where it'll be linked to. You'll need the quotes in the path if there's any space such as C:\My Dropbox\Test won't work you need "C:\My Dropbox\Test"

Happy Backups everyone!

Today I had to install Windows 7 on a new machine I put together for the office. I've installed Windows many times, XP, Vista and more recently 7 countless times. Every time had gone smoothly and no issue at all. This time though, the machine would get stuck on Setup is Starting. This was very unusual and I thought if I'd leave it like that while I had to build the other machine it would go away. No dice, it was still there stuck on the beautiful page that said "Setup is Starting".
So I searched as always in Google and there were a couple of solutions floating around. Disconnect all USB, disable USB in the BIOS, etc. In the end it's all about the Legacy Floppy drive. I found my answer here.

On the ASUS motherboards I bought they were both enabled by default and this is what made it hang up. As soon as I disabled the Floppy Drive on the BIOS all issues went away. So if you're building your machine with an ASUS motherboard make sure you disable the Floppy and you're good to go.  

Hope this saves someone a headache.

Since I've used Outlook pretty much for the last 9 years of my life at work (through various versions and companies I've worked), I've now come to the conclusion that the Email Address AutoComplete is quite useful. You start typing and a list of emails you've written to comes up, select the desired email and you're ready to write your email.

I've recently come across two situations with this feature. A colleague needed for the AutoComplete to be emptied so not to email to addresses he was no longer supposed to send email to and another who got a computer upgrade and wanted to continue to use this feature without having to rebuild it. So I Googled away as always and I came across this article and this KB from Microsoft. Since they're a little bit out of date they both fail to mention Vista or Windows 7 so I've figured out where the .nk2 file is!

The location for the outlook.nk2 in Vista and Windows 7 with Outlook 7 is the following:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook

The key difference here is that you need to go to the Roaming folder instead of the Local folder as specified in the other articles.

Hope this helps someone!