Have you ever had an Error Dialog that you wish you could copy the text so you could search it in Google?

I learned this trick from some Russian friends I worked with a while back. In reality it's not a trick but an old school way to copy and paste. 

See the dialog on the right? If you wanted to search for that you would have to type all that out, instead of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste do the following:

- Select the dialog you want to copy
- Try Ctrl+Insert to copy
- Open up your favorite Text Editor and paste to see your results
- You should get something like this:
--------------------------- 
Intel(R) Network Connections 
--------------------------- 
This package is not supported on this platform or operating system. 

- To install software on this system, download the correct package from support.intel.com. 
- To install this software on a supported system, run this package on that system. 
- To extract the contents of this package on this system for use on a supported system, use the /e parameter. 
--------------------------- 
OK   
---------------------------

Why does this work? Back in the day the shortcut to copy and paste were Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert to copy and paste respectively. 

I hope you find this informative and useful. I always try it to see if I can copy the text from the dialog. If it doesn't work, no worries, at least I tried; but when it works it's that little extra that can help you debug something.

And that my friends is how you do it!

NOTE: This may not work on all dialogs but Microsoft has been way better at being able to copy text from their dialogs. I've seen in SQL dialogs that have a Copy button so you can copy the text and basically get the same results. 

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!

I've often had to run a command prompt and run ping with the -t parameter to check out if you are droping packets or if your connection is getting lost.

Most of us know to run something like this: ping google.com -t this will give you a continous pinging to google.com. Now what if I want to check how many drop packets I've had? Usually I would stop the ping (control-c) and you'll get your stats but you'll have to run the command again.

The trick here is to do control-break and you'll see the stats thus far without interrupting your ping. Check the screenshot of how it looks. 

Hope this helps!