This one’s for my cousin Rachael, who started college this year. Over Thanksgiving dinner, she admitted that she’s too busy studying (and partying) to remember to run the anti-spyware program that her father installed on her laptop. Well, here’s a handy way to make it (or any other program) run itself automatically.

Windows has a built-in scheduler. You just have to know where to look for it. It’s hiding in the Control Panel.

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One of my clients has packages going in and out of their office all day long. Sometimes, they miss the mailbox collection time by a matter of minutes, and that costs them real money.  So, I turned them on to a website that I read about on Brent Evans’ blog. It’s called www.mailboxmap.com. Continue Reading »

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The other day I was trying to help an associate install Apache 2.2.6 (the httpd server) plus PHP 5.2.5 to run locally on a Vista box, but we kept having problems with error messages that said the PHP CAB file was corrupted. After some digging, it turns out that the Vista UAC security feature was getting in the way. We had to turn off the UAC completely. After that, the PHP install went like clockwork.
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The first thing I did once I had Leopard installed on my new MacBook Pro was to install Parallels, a virtual machine that lets you run Windows, or any other operating system, from the Mac operating system. Parallels is a bit different than Bootcamp, which now comes included with Leopard. With Bootcamp, you create a dual boot machine. If you want to run Windows you have to shut down the Mac and reboot into the Windows side of things. With Parallels, you don’t.
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I finally did it. I bailed from the dark side and got a Macbook Pro. So in the coming weeks (months) I’ll be documenting my progress as I stumble my way through the conversion process. I plan on running Windows on the MacBook as a bridge so that don’t lose too much time while working. Leopard comes with Bootcamp and I also purchased Parallels to run Windows XP on the Macbook. There are a few pieces of software that I’m hoping to find good Mac replacements for. Currently I’m looking for something to replace Textpad and WinSCP. I’m sure the list will grow longer as I start to work on the machine more.

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