I like the "My Network Places" functionality in Windows XP. The way I use Windows Explorer is to have mapped drives for high-use locations. "My Network Places" becomes a psuedo-"favourites" - linking to, for example, a folder where a third-party extract is dropped, or a shared folder from another department, or a folder used for backups but rarely accessed. With that in mind I thought it would be handy to keep a copy of the UNC paths contained in "Network Places". There's a few tools that will allow you to print folder contents ("Network Places" is stored in the "NetHood" folder...

The other day my PC started beeping at me. Every "Are you sure?" message box was accompanied by a "beep". I don't know how or why this started...I only wanted to make it go away. First check, Control Panel -> Sounds. I confirmed that I had my sound scheme set to "No Sounds", but the beep stubbornly refused to budge. Next, Google. Did you know there's a "Beep" driver? Neither did I! The HowToGeek has a nice article on disabling this driver on XP, only issue is you have to be admin. I rolled up my sleeves, ran an elevated command prompt using...

This is something I need from time to time, so I'm posting it right here - extracting files from an MSI installer using the command line: start /wait msiexec /a [MSI installer].msi TARGETDIR=[fully qualified folder, no trailing backslash] /qn Where [MSI installer] is the name of the MSI file, and [fully qualified folder, no trailing backslash] is the folder where the MSI contents are to be extracted to e.g. "C:\TEMP\Folder1". Thanks to Peter Bromberg's blog for this tip (and Google for helping me find it, again and again!) Tags: installer, extract, windows, msiexec

Just after Christmas, I got onto an Outlook plug-in called Xobni ("inbox" spelt backwards) (via Lifehacker). Xobni adds a new sidebar in the main Outlook window which provides a wide variety of relevant information on the sender of the currently-selected e-mail. This information includes the number of e-mails you've received from that contact, contact details, who else they've CC'd or been CC'd on in all e-mails indexed by Xobni, quick links to their most recent e-mails, and a list of files sent to or from that contact. I've used Xobni for only about a week and a half as I've been on...

Scott Kuhl has put out the challenge to "Show us your Start Menu". Mine is below. It's horribly mis-representative of what I run because a) I've used TweakUI to ensure that some programs never make it to the frequently used list, and b) because I'm training myself to use Launchy to run things from the keyboard rather than the mouse and Start Menu (I don't think running a program using Launchy makes it appear on the frequently-used programs list, but I'm not 100% sure). Here's some points of interest from looking at my Start Menu screenshot: I'm running Windows XP (I don't believe...

I don't know why I was thinking about this the other day - but it came into my head that I really like "split buttons" and think they are very usable, for the right situations. I'd better explain. "Split buttons" are buttons that also have a drop-down menu. Pressing the button should carry out an action*; alternatively, clicking on arrow to the right of the "split" should display different but similar actions that can be performed by clicking on the menu item. I don't know if "split buttons" have a better name or are even accepted controls, but they've been used...