June 8th, 2007
Did you know that Microsoft Windows allows you to define virtual disk drives? Any drive letter that is not currently used to represent a physical drive can be defined as a virtual drive. What is a virtual drive? It’s a folder of a physical drive that acts like it is a separate drive, unto itself. Some reasons you may a want, or need, to do this are:
- As a handy shortcut.
- Because some software requires it.
- In a batch file, so that the path only needs to be referenced once at the top of the batch file, and therefore could be easily changed later, if need be.
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June 7th, 2007
Anyone upgrading from XP to Vista may be wondering what happened to the file-type association menu option that used to be in the Windows Explorer. For example, say that *.TXT files are currently associated with NotePad as the default editor, but you want to change them to be associated with WordPad, Textpad, NotePad++, or whatever your favorite editor may be. In XP, such associations were managed via the Windows Explorer under Tools >> Folder Options… >> File Types.
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June 6th, 2007
We’ve gotten some questions about the survey software we used for our reader opinion poll. Here are the details: It’s a web-based service called SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey offers a lite version of their service that you can use for free. At the lite level, you can post up to 10 multiple-choice questions and poll up to 100 respondents. Continue Reading »
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June 6th, 2007
SQuirreL SQL Client is a mature, open source, Java based, universal SQL Client — which means that it is a tool for exploring any SQL database. It doesn’t matter if the database is Oracle, Microsoft, MySQL, Postgre, etc. If there is a Java JDBC driver for it, then SQuirreL can connect to it. Squirrel was developed with a plug-in architecture, and there are dialect-specific plug-ins for it. This is definitely not a lowest-common-denominator solution.
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June 6th, 2007
For anyone who is considering upgrading an existing PC to Windows Vista, there are a couple of free downloads available from Microsoft that you may find useful.
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June 4th, 2007
Are you the alpha geek in your family? — The one who knows (slightly) more about computers than anyone else, and is therefore tapped to provide troubleshooting assistance? If so, and if any of the machines that you need to support are Windows Vista (or soon will be), then here are a number of important tips you need to know in order to take advantage of Microsoft Windows Remote Assistance (RA).
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