Microsoft Talk

Offers Additional Opportunities for IT Pros and Hardware Vendors
Q&A: Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Windows Server and Solutions, says coming improvements in the Windows Server operating system will offer greater opportunities for customers and partners in areas such as virtualization and scalability.

In part:

What sort of reception has Windows Server 2008 been getting in the market?

Laing: There’s been a lot of excitement about this product and its momentum is still growing. For example, since its launch in February, we have seen more than one million downloads of the RTM versions of Windows Server 2008, and more than 500,000 customers and 90,000 partners trained on Windows Server 2008.

But the real measure of its success is the bottom-line svalue our customers have been experiencing. For example, earlier this year researchers at consulting agency Capgemini looked at several companies and institutions that were using Windows Server 2008. They found that Windows Server 2008 streamlined their IT operations and improved management, security and reliability. IT costs were reduced by up to $124,000 per year through staff efficiencies and reduced downtime.

How does Windows Server 2008 R2 differ from the previous version? What are the most notable new features?

Laing: We think it’s important to give customers a predictable timetable to plan for the next versions of our server technologies. We are working on an update release for Windows Server, named Windows Server 2008 R2, which is in line with the release cadence Bob Muglia outlined several years ago. As part of this update, we are integrating the latest service and feature packs with some new technology investments focused around four categories: virtualization, management, scalability and the Web.

From a virtualization standpoint, we’re building on our state-of-the-art virtualization technology with a newer version of our Hyper-V hypervisor technology as well as some new features that customers have been asking us for, such as Live Migration. This feature, which is included with Windows Server 2008 R2 at no additional charge, lets you move a running workload from one machine to another in milliseconds, with no loss of performance from the user’s point of view.

On the management front, Windows Server 2008 R2 will be a foundation for datacenter automation. We are making multiple improvements that give customers the reins to truly manage their servers the way they desire, whether that is locally or remotely, via a graphical user interface (GUI) or from the command line via Windows PowerShell. We are also making improvements to help customers reduce and better manage their datacenter power consumption. Windows Server 2008 R2 can automatically turn processor cores on and off based on the workload of the system, or reduce the power consumption by adjusting processor speed.

Another area of innovation in Windows Server 2008 R2 is the ability to more easily administer and support Web applications on a streamlined Web platform. We’ve integrated Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS) manager extensions to make it simpler to administer local and remote Web servers, and added support for ASP.NET and PHP to the Server Core.

And finally, we continue to invest in scalability. In Windows Server 2008 R2, we have built in support for up to 256 logical processors, which will allow our customers to more fully exploit today’s powerful CPUs, deploying only the features they choose and scaling those solutions to meet their organization’s needs.

If you like watching sports, you’ll love Windows Media Center SportsLounge.1 Included in Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate, this rich portal takes your sports television viewing experience to a whole new interactive level. A partnership with FOXSports.com, SportsLounge is the place to catch your favorite games, players, teams, and fantasy sports leagues—all from the most comfortable chair in your den.

Keep an eye on the Live Scoreboard

With On Now in SportsLounge, you can watch your favorite game live, while seeing real-time scores on the Live Scoreboard that runs across the top of the screen. The displayed scores are shown for all the additional games on other channels that are available with your current antenna, cable, or satellite TV service.

If you want to quickly see what’s happening with a different game on another available channel, just select the game from the Live Scoreboard, and Windows Media Center will instantly tune to that channel with instant access—no need to navigate the program guide.

Find upcoming games

You no longer need to search the entire program guide to find out when the games you care about most are coming on. On Later finds all the games airing over a two-week period that are available from your television service and neatly arranges them according to date and sport.

You can record a future game at the press of a button on your remote while viewing the upcoming schedule. Just find the upcoming game you want to watch, press the record button, and Windows Media Center adds it to your scheduled recordings.

Track your favorite players

With the Players feature, you can set up Windows Media Center to track your favorite professional athlete. Players displays stats over the course of the season or the stats for a current or recently played game. If you’re using the On Now feature and watching one game, and your favorite player makes a huge play or is on deck to bat on another channel, you’ll be notified of that event; SportsLounge will give you the option to directly tune to that channel to watch the play.

It’s no secret that the nature of software development is radically changing. Come to PDC2008 to experience Microsoft’s vision for cloud computing and building applications that seamlessly bridge the gaps between PC, Web, and phone, and be the first to see the full range of advances in Windows 7, the next major version of the Windows client operating system.

What are the platform infrastructure details behind the Mesh technologies? Corporate Vice President of Live Platform Services, David Treadwell, will be spilling all the beans in his PDC keynote in just a few weeks, but in this Q&A he gives us a sneak peek. David explains how there’s so much more to Mesh than just the user experience, and how he and his team will be revealing the underlying particulars that fall below the line at PDC – the platform infrastructure that helps developers build stellar Software + Services apps. And did Treadwell mention bits that will be given out at the PDC? We think he did, but you gotta listen to find out more about what the PDC team affectionately calls the “goods.”

Use this letter to convince your boss to let you attend the event!

Dear {Enter Your Manager’s Name Here},

I enjoy my job and have always appreciated how well you manage me. As you know, I don’t ask for much. I am a humble employee with simple needs, and I would like to attend Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles, October 27th-30th.

Wait! Before you respond, let me explain. This is not the typical conference that is more boondoggle than substance. The PDC (which is what the kids on Facebook call it) is where the best and brightest come together with the technical geniuses of Microsoft.

The PDC is where the speakers are not marketing folks, but actual developers and technologists who build the products. Remember those tough questions about Microsoft tools we had last week that we could not find an answer to? Well, I will have an opportunity to talk directly to the product team from Microsoft. In fact, one night they all gather in one place where I can ask all the questions we ever had and get real answers! And business cards!

But it isn’t just the speakers; it’s the other attendees. These are some of the smartest folks using the same tools and technologies we are. I can learn a lot from them and see how they have overcome issues we have run into. I keep reading the blogs (on my own time, of course) and everyone says that networking is one of the top reasons to attend.

(more…)

Software plus services approach fuels adoption as applications and services, new phones, and updates reach customers.

Choice: A Smartphone for Every Style

Today, customers can choose from a growing portfolio of new Windows Mobile 6.1-based phones and updates, with more expected in 2008 and beyond, bringing new time-saving features, easier phone navigation and management as well as increased security safeguards. Windows Mobile 6.1 supports System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 and Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 advanced mobile policies, helping keep business information protected. Information about the latest updates and new phones is available at http://www.windowsmobile.com.

Recent related announcements include the following:

• AT&T announced that upgrades are available now for the BlackJack II, MOTO Q Global and AT&T Tilt smartphones, with new Windows Mobile 6.1-based phones launching later this year.

• Intermec Technologies Corp. today announced that its CN3 mobile computer is the first rugged handheld to operate on Windows Mobile 6.1 and will begin shipping later this month.

• The HTC Touch Diamond with TouchFLO 3D, HTC’s captivating 3-D touch interface, surpassed 1 million in global phone sales in its first three months and is expected to debut in the U.S. soon. HTC is also shipping the HTC Touch Pro and HTC S740.

• Sony Ericsson has released a beta SDK for Windows Mobile 6.1 for building and testing XPERIA Panels and applications. The SDK, integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio, offers developers a familiar environment and sets a new direction for a rich, immersive user experience with a focus on hardware-accelerated visual effects and interactivity. The XPERIA X1 will be available soon.

• Velocity Mobile announced the Velocity 103, a touchscreen device that features the easy-to-use Odyssey interface and Velocity Over the Air updates. Along with the Velocity 111 and Velocity 83, the Velocity 103 will be available later this year.

Versatility: Applications and Services Enhance the Windows Mobile Experience

Helping people discover new experiences, Microsoft created the new Total Access (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/totalaccess), a guide to everything people can do with a Windows Mobile phone. Available online by registration, the site provides exclusive offers such as trial applications, extras such as ring tones and wallpapers, and how-to content.

To accommodate the creation of new applications, Windows Mobile provides a flexible, open platform for developers. AT&T announced Nikos Konstas, an independent developer from the United Kingdom, as the winner of the AT&T Game Development Contest for Windows Mobile, the first collaboration of all members of the mobile gaming ecosystem to further innovation of games on the powerful Windows Mobile platform.

Microsoft LifeCam users get bonus with access through new Windows Vista gadget.

Microsoft Corp. unveils Video Messages, a groundbreaking service that combines the flexibility of e-mail and voice mail with the personal expression of a video call; it is the video version of voice mail. Video Messages allows consumers to record and send personalized videos that their friends and family can access anytime, anywhere they are online* the perfect solution when they are not available for a live video chat.

Microsoft is offering this new service through a LifeCam video messages gadget and a Web site so everyone can get in on the fun. Video Messages is the perfect way to send a personalized “happy birthday” message to a friend or have the kids leave a quick “hello” message to grandma across the country when she is not home.

“Video Messages offers a groundbreaking way to communicate,” said Bennie Soto, product marketing manager at Microsoft. “It provides a free, easy and fun way to stay connected and share the special moments in your life without thinking twice about time zones or busy schedules; you’ll never have to plan a specific time for video calling again.”

Go, Go LifeCam Gadget

The best way to experience Video Messages is with a LifeCam video messages gadget, available for people running Windows Vista and using a supported Microsoft LifeCam. By downloading the new gadget, LifeCam users can create, send and receive video messages from their desktop. They can even select six of their top friends who will always be visible in the video messages gadget just like storing top friends’ numbers on speed dial for easy access. This added convenience is a great benefit for LifeCam customers because the Video Messages controls are always available; they can just click on a friend’s image, record a video and hit send. A demo of the LifeCam video messages gadget in action is available at http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/digitalcommunication/videomessage.mspx.

Just learning about Windows Vista? Now updated with Service Pack 1, Windows Vista is easier, safer, and gives you more entertainment choices than earlier versions of Windows. Want examples? Here are ten of the coolest things you can do:

1. Find that file in a few quick clicks
You don’t need to remember folder names to be organized anymore. Save time by instantly tracking down any document, photo, e-mail message, song, video, file, or program on your PC using Instant Search.

Just open the Start menu and begin typing in the Instant Search box—Windows Vista searches file names, application names, the full text of all files, and metadata, and then displays the results right away.

2. See everything you have open at a glance
Have you lost track of what files and programs you’ve opened? Flip through all your open files and windows with a simple click of your mouse using Windows Flip 3DA—you’re just one click away from everything you’re working on.

Plus, in Windows Aero,A when you rest your mouse pointer on the taskbar, you can see thumbnail images of the windows you have open without having to expand them—so you can find what you’re looking for at a glance.

3. Keep photos organized—and ready to share
Is your collection of digital photos getting out of hand? You don’t have to search through folders to track down the ones you want. Now you can tag your photos with a date, keyword, rating, or any label you choose so you can find them quickly and easily in Windows Photo Gallery.

You can also use Photo Gallery to fix and edit photos, and then share them with family and friends through slideshows, e-mail, or prints—so everything you need for photos is in one place.

4. Create a custom movie without a fine arts degree
Making a great home movie just got easier. Use Windows Movie Maker to blend videos and photos into a rich movie, complete with your own soundtrack, titles, and credits.

When your masterpiece is ready to share with family and friends, you can easily create a professional-looking DVD in Windows DVD Maker.U

5. Keep track of your music—and play it anywhere
The larger your collection of digital music grows, the harder it can be to organize and keep track of it. But now you can easily scroll, flip, browse through, and play your entire music library in Windows Media Player 11. You can even create new playlists of your favorite tracks with a single click.

You can keep your music moving with you by easily synchronizing your portable music device. Or you can share the contents of your entire library with other computers on your home network or with digital media devices such as Xbox 360.

6. Surf multiple waves of the web at once
Do you like to jump from website to website? Satisfy your appetite for multitasking without having to open several browser windows. You can open multiple webpages in one window and easily click between them with the tabbed browsing feature in Windows Internet Explorer 7—plus, you can see thumbnail images of all your open webpages at a glance with Quick Tabs.

7. Record and watch TV on your time
Watch TV on your own schedule—not the TV networks’ schedule. If your PC has a TV tuner, you can record, watch, and pause live television on your desktop or mobile PC using Windows Media Center.M

With multiple TV tuners, you can even record one channel while watching another. When and where you watch your shows is now up to you.

8. Bring your TV and PC together—and take home entertainment to a new level
Tired of huddling around the PC for entertainment? Connect your PC to one or more televisions in your home using a Windows Media CenterM Extender like Xbox 360, and enjoy all your digital entertainment on the big screen—from photo slideshows, home videos, and digital music to live and recorded TV shows and movies.

9. Keep the things you need most at your fingertips
No need to open a web browser to check traffic and weather, open a calculator to add up a few numbers and open an application to see your calendar. Now you can put mini-applications called gadgets right on your desktop, where you can see and use them whenever the mood strikes. Just use the Windows Sidebar pane to store and organize your favorite gadgets.

10. Help your kids stay safer
Worried about your kids’ computer use or about what they may encounter online? Now you can give your kids a safer experience and set PC usage boundaries for them by using the centralized Parental Controls in Windows Vista. You can even restrict games and websites based on your family’s values.

Plus, you can better protect your PC and your personal information, as well as your family, with built-in security tools like Windows Defender and anti-spam and phishing filters.

An advertising blitz intended to help Microsoft polish the tarnished brand of its Windows Vista operating system began this week with a head-scratcher of a commercial.

The ad features Jerry Seinfeld flexing some new shoes, Bill Gates adjusting his shorts and no mention of Vista. Microsoft says the ad is meant to get people talking, and that other parts of the marketing campaign will actually get into what its software can do.

But the advertising, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars over several years, is really just “air cover,” according to Bill Veghte, the Microsoft executive who is responsible for sustaining Windows, probably the most lucrative franchise in history.

For more than a year, Mr. Veghte and his team have been developing ways to transform the experience of buying and using personal computers that run Microsoft software.

Corps of Microsoft engineers, for example, have been dispatched to tweak hardware and software to make Vista PCs faster and less crash-prone. Microsoft has stepped into the world of PC retailers in a way it never has before, offering training and advice — and even paying to put hundreds of “Windows gurus” in stores.

By now, Microsoft insists that most of the frustrating technical problems with Vista, which was introduced in January 2007 after repeated delays, have been resolved — and many industry executives and analysts agree.

Vista represented a big shift from its predecessor, XP, so it required a lot of new drivers — and Microsoft did a poor job of communicating how much work was needed. Often, Microsoft said, an older driver still worked with Vista, but it slowed down the PC or made it crash unpredictably. Today, 77,000 hardware devices and components are compatible with Vista, more than twice the number when Vista was introduced.

In a Seattle warehouse, Microsoft built a “retail experience center” to test ideas about the behavior of shoppers. With retailing now accounting for 40 percent of PC sales worldwide, and growing twice as fast as other sales channels, Microsoft decided it had to get more directly involved instead of just delivering products and promotional subsidies. “We weren’t coming in with the tools and people to help them,” said Bill Brownell, general manager of retail marketing at Microsoft.

Microsoft is sharing its research with retailers. It is also paying for a few hundred Windows experts to talk to shoppers in Best Buy, Circuit City and other stores. These Windows gurus technically work for employment agencies, but Microsoft recruits and trains them.

With PC makers, Microsoft started an initiative called Vista Velocity to improve performance. It includes days of specialized testing, close collaboration with Microsoft engineers and fine-tuning of software programs and hardware drivers. On some models, for example, the start-up time for Vista has been reduced by 60 percent.

Share more than photos; share an experience.

First there was the snapshot, and then came video. Now there is Microsoft Photosynth, a new service from Microsoft Live Labs that goes far beyond how you now view, experience and share photos.

You can share or relive a vacation destination or explore a distant museum or landmark; with a digital camera and your own creativity and inspiration, you can use Photosynth to transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Anybody who sees your “synth” is put right in your shoes, sharing in the same sense of exhilaration and wonder that you did at the time, with detail, clarity and scope impossible to achieve in conventional photos or videos.

Imagine yourself beneath the Eiffel Tower or in the heart of Times Square. Now imagine being able to see that exact scene in an amazing new way. With Photosynth, you can look up or down, pan from left to right, zoom in, or pull back to reveal the full sense of where you were. Photosynth provides incredibly realistic close-up detail of a place as seen in the collaboration with National Geographic. Exclusive synths of some of the world’s most renowned locations, such as Machu Picchu and the Parthenon, were created using photographs taken by National Geographic.

An Entirely New Medium

Synths constitute an entirely new visual medium. Photosynth analyzes each photo for similarities to the others, and uses that data to estimate where a photo was taken. It then re-creates the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos. The potential uses of Photosynth can range from sharing experiences to storytelling and documentation:

• Share experiences. Think about the times you have been in the midst of a beautiful location or having a once-in-a-lifetime experience and wished you could share it with more immediacy and sense of place than still photos or video can capture. Photosynth puts viewers in the center of the moment and in control of how they experience it.

• Tell a story. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a synth composed of 20 or 50 photos makes visual storytelling as rich and compelling as a short story. Synths capture the totality of important moments in time, such as the anticipation and joy of an entire wedding party and guests at the moment vows are exchanged, or the elation of a child scoring a winning soccer goal as the fans cheer.

• Form a community. Synths can bring the best of your digital photos together with the best of everybody else’s. Imagine if you took a trip to Rome with your friends and each of you took photos of the Trevi Fountain. Later, you can tag and upload all of the photos from each person’s camera to create a synth of it. In addition, you can share that experience and your favorite places with others by embedding the synth in your profile on a social networking site.

• Educate or archive. If you want to re-create how you decorated your home for the holidays or how you planted your garden last season, the ability of Photosynth to provide intricate detail allows documentation impossible to achieve with conventional photos.

Using Photosynth

Getting started with Photosynth is easy:

• To begin, just take a few dozen digital photos — 20 to 300 photos are required, depending on the size of the place or object — with overlap between each shot, from a number of locations and angles.

• Next, download a small, free software application to your computer from http://photosynth.com. This software works in concert with the Photosynth Web site, which is also a free service.

Is this a product and service you’ll use? Tell me how you will use Photysynth in your daily personal and work life.

Browse Encouraging Health.

On July 24th, Microsoft announced that it intends to acquire DATAllegro Inc., a provider of breakthrough data warehouse appliances. The acquisition will extend the capabilities of Microsoft’s mission-critical data platform, making it easier and more cost-effective for customers of all sizes to manage and glean insight from the ever-expanding amount of data generated by and for businesses, employees and consumers.

“DATAllegro is a tremendously innovative company that has started to redefine the data warehouse market,” said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft. “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers enterprise-class capabilities in business intelligence and data warehousing, and the addition of the DATAllegro team and its technology will take our data platform to the highest scale of data warehousing.”

“Integrating DATAllegro’s nonproprietary hardware platform and flexible software architecture into Microsoft SQL Server will provide customers with the strongest offering in the market,” said Stuart Frost, CEO of DATAllegro. “We are excited to join forces with Microsoft and continue the innovation this company was founded on.”

Unlike most data warehouse appliance vendors targeting the 1–25 terabyte range, DATAllegro has specialized in large-volume, high-performance data warehouses. DATAllegro’s data warehouse appliance installations boast some of the largest data volume capacities in the industry — up to hundreds of terabytes on a single system. DATAllegro clients span such markets as retail, telecommunications and manufacturing.

According to a report by Donald Feinberg of Gartner Inc., “As data warehouses are becoming more strategic to organizations and as data warehouse appliances mature, the adoption rate of the data warehouse appliance is increasing rapidly.” (“Data Warehouse Appliances Are More Than Just Plug-And-Play,” July 13, 2007.)

In addition to offering large capacities, DATAllegro’s patent-pending technology is designed for complex workloads including high concurrency and mixed queries. DATAllegro is one of the few data warehouse appliances built on a nonproprietary hardware platform including Dell and Bull servers and EMC storage. This flexible architecture makes it ideally suited to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server.

After completing the acquisition, Microsoft will retain most of DATAllegro’s team as well as its headquarters in Aliso Viejo, Calif., making it a Center of Excellence for data warehousing. Existing DATAllegro customers will continue to be supported.

What this means for you and me, is faster and more effecient service from any company.

Check out the newest books over on The BookStacks.

Microsoft Office 2007 introduced new Open XML-based file formats for Office applications. These new file formats reduce file size, improve security and reliability, and enhance integration with external sources.
To allow Windows Mobile users to work with Office documents created in the Open XML formats, Microsoft has developed an upgrade for Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, and PowerPoint Mobile applications. This upgrade to the Office Mobile applications allows viewing and editing of Word documents and Excel workbooks and viewing of PowerPoint slideshows created by using Microsoft Office 2007.
Other improvements include:
• Enhanced viewing experience for charts in Excel Mobile.
• Ability to view SmartArt in PowerPoint Mobile.
• Ability to view and extract files from compressed (.zip) folders.
Microsoft Office Mobile 6.1 Full Version to support Microsoft 2007 file formats
If your Windows Mobile device does not have a version of Microsoft Office Mobile prior to 6.1, you can purchase the full version of Microsoft Office Mobile.
The Office Mobile application suite includes Microsoft Office Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint® Mobile for Windows Mobile 6 powered devices, helping users manage and review documents. Microsoft Office Mobile includes support for rich reviewing and minor editing capabilities as well as support for rights-managed documents.
The primary user scenario enabled by Office Mobile is viewing e-mail attachments, performing minor edits, sharing document versions, and opening documents from an SD card or a SharePoint server. Office Mobile provides a high-fidelity document viewing experience, with capability to edit as well as fast performance in loading the first page of the document.
Note: This free upgrade works only for Windows Mobile powered devices that have an earlier version of Office Mobile. If your Windows Mobile powered device does not have Office Mobile applications, this upgrade will not work for you. You can purchase the full version of Office Mobile 6.1 online. For more information, click here

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Mobile 5.0 software for Pocket PC; Windows Mobile 6

• Supported Operating Systems on the Computer: Windows 2000 Service Pack 4; Windows XP; Windows XP Home; Windows XP Professional; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1; Windows XP Professional x64; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-Bit x86); Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1; Windows Server 2003 64-bit; Windows Vista
• Supported Operating Systems on Windows Mobile Powered Devices: Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC; Pocket PC Phone Edition; Windows Mobile 6
• ActiveSync 4.5 (on Windows 2000/XP/2003); Windows Mobile Device Center (on Windows Vista)
• At least 6 MB of Available Storage on your device or storage card.

Download 

Recommended Reading:

Tip: Disable/Enable Screensaver with a shortcut | Outlet USB Charger

How many times have you been watching a long video on your computer and had the screensaver come on? Then you play the game of trying to jiggle the mouse every certain number of minutes to make sure it doesn’t happen again…  seems like it would be easier to have a really quick way to disable the screensaver.

Our solution comes in the form of a little utility named flipss.exe which can be used to easily enable or disable the screensaver via a command line argument… we’ll just have to manually create shortcuts for each task.

Create Disable/Enable Shortcut

Right-click on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.

You will need to enter in the full path to where you saved the flipss.exe file, followed by either "/off" or "/on". For instance, if you saved the utility in C:\MyFiles you would use this path to create the disable icon:

C:\MyFiles\flipss.exe /off

On the next screen you’ll need to give it a useful name, and then create a second shortcut with "/on" which you can use to turn the screensaver back on.

You can give them different icons by going into the properties for the shortcut and choosing the "Change Icon" option. Personally I moved the icons into the quick launch bar for easier access and indexing in Launchy.

Download Flipss.zip from jddesign.f2s.com

Source | PowerPoint Tip: Copy a presentation to a CD or anyhwere | Word: Compatibility Pack for End Users

I just came across some secret codes for 3D Pinball in Windows XP. Now you don’t need to start from ground zero! Howzzatt?!!

Note that the 3D Pinball window must be active for these codes to work.

• Regain your old rank from a previous game by starting a new game and immediately typing rmax. Each time you type this secret command, you’ll advance one rank level.
• Get an extra ball while the Awaiting Deployment message displays by typing 1max.
• Activate the Gravity Well by starting a new game and immediately typing gmax.
• Get an unlimited number of balls and essentially play for as long as you like by starting a new game and immediately typing bmax. Each time you lose a ball, a new one will appear. (While playing with an unlimited number of balls, none of the other tricks will work.)
• Control the ball with your mouse by starting a new game and immediately typing hidden test. When you do, you can click the ball with your left mouse button and essentially drag it anywhere you want and rack up an unbelievable number of points.

Keep in mind that there isn’t a text box into which you enter these secret codes — you simply type them.

In addition to this, how about tweaking your Windows XP sound scheme to play Pinball sound effects!

Here’s how:

1. Go to Start | Control Panel and double-click the Sounds And Audio Devices Properties tool.
2. Select the Sounds tab and then choose the program event that you wish from the Program Events menu.
3. Click the Browse button
4. Select the Look In drop-down list and navigate to the C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Pinball folder.
5. Sample the .wav files by hovering over a file and clicking the Play Sound button in the Preview panel located in the bottom left corner of the Browse For Default Beep Sound dialog box.
6. Once you’ve identified an interesting sound, double-click the .wav file, click the Apply button, and save your Sound Scheme.

Trick: Try assigning Sound999.wav to the Minimize Program event.

How cool is that?!

Source TechRepublic

Recommended Downloads: Windows XP Video Decoder Checkup Utility | Downloads: Windows Media Codecs

One of the nice little features in Windows Vista that you don’t think about is the graph of drive space for your drive icons, so you can visually see at a glance how much space is used. There’s no reason to upgrade for this feature, especially since some programmers created a small utility for XP that gives you the same functionality.

You’ll notice the new icon looks very similar to the ones in Vista, but the more interesting addition is the new bar under the icon that gives you a tiny graph of the current drive space.

The graph will show up on most of the icon sizes other than the details view.

When your drive is running low on space the graph will turn red to indicate that you should probably stop downloading so much.

You can see in task manager that it really doesn’t use all that much memory.

Download Drvicon from Sourceforge.net

Some Third-Party Gems since Active Directory is based on LDAP standards, you can query and modify it using any tool that can speak LDAP. Many third-party vendors have released fee-based tools to assist you in administering Active Directory, but sometimes you find a treasure that has been made available to the community at no charge. Such is the case with a collection created by Directory Services MVP Joe Richards, available for download from joeware.net/freetools. There you’ll find numerous tools to serve many different functions. Three that I turn to again and again are adfind, admod, and oldcmp.

Adfind and Admod

Adfind and admod are similar to dsquery and dsmod; adfind is a command-line query tool for Active Directory, and admod can create, delete, or modify one or more Active Directory objects.

Unlike the ds* tools that have multiple submenus and different switches depending on the type of object, adfind and admod have a consistent syntax regardless of the type of query or modification you’re trying to perform. The basic syntax for adfind is:

adfind –b <Search Base> -s <Search Scope> -f <Search Filter>
    attributesDesired

So a query for the DN and description of all computer objects within your domain would be:

adfind –b dc=contoso,dc=com –s subtree –f (objectclass=computer) dn
    description

A query for all user objects would look like this:

adfind –b dc=contoso,dc=com –s subtree –f "(&(objectcategory=person)
    (objectclass=user))" dn description

Notice that except for the contents of the LDAP query, the syntax has not changed.

As you work with adfind, you’ll find a number of shortcut operators that can save you a lot of typing. For example, the -default switch can replace -b dc=contoso,dc=com in the previous example and search your entire domain; -gc searches against a global catalog (GC) and returns all users in your Active Directory forest. You can also use the -rb switch to set a relative base for your search; if you want to search the Training OU in the phl.east.us.contoso.com domain, you can save yourself quite a bit of effort by simply specifying –default –rb ou=Training rather than –b ou=Training, dc=phl,dc=east,dc=us,dc=contoso,dc=com.

Adfind can also perform a number of advanced search functions that can’t be easily managed at the command line otherwise, including those shown in Figure 4.

An example using the –asq switch would be "Show me the group memberships of the members of the HelpDesk," like this:

adfind –default –rb cn=HelpDesk,ou=IT –asq member memberOf 

Admod, as its name suggests, is used to modify objects within Active Directory. As with adfind, there are no specialized submenus with particular syntaxes to remember; admod uses the same syntax regardless of the type of object you’re working with. You can also use admod to add, move, rename, delete, and even undelete objects simply by adding the appropriate switch, such as -add, -rm, -move, -undel. And just as with dsquery and dsmod, you can also use the | character to pipe the results of an adfind query into admod.

Note that performing an undelete with admod simply performs a tombstone reanimation operation, in which most of the objects attributes have been removed. To fully restore an object and all of its attributes, you’ll still need to perform an authoritative restore of the object.

Oldcmp

There’s one additional joeware tool I consider an indispensable part of my automation toolkit: oldcmp, which scans your Active Directory database for computer accounts that have not been used in a specified number of weeks and can do the following:

• Create a report of accounts without taking any action against them
• Disable the unused computer accounts
• Move the computer accounts to a different OU that you designate
• Delete the computer accounts outright

Note that because oldcmp has the potential to wreak serious havoc on your directory, it has a number of built-in safety features. It will not delete any account that has not already been disabled (and without manually specifying a "No really, I mean it!" command-line switch). It will not modify more than 10 objects at a time without a similar "No really, I mean it!" switch, and it absolutely will not do anything to the computer account for a domain controller.

Despite the now-misleading name of the tool, Joe has updated oldcmp so that it will perform similar functions for user accounts that have not been used for a certain amount of time as well.

For a small Active Directory environment or one where you’re only working with one or two additions or changes at a time, the GUI tools such as Active Directory Users and Computers might be sufficient for day-to-day administration. But if you’re adding and modifying large numbers of objects on a daily basis or simply want a more streamlined solution for your administrative tasks, moving to the command line can greatly speed up the process of creating, modifying, and deleting objects within Active Directory. As you’ve seen, there are a number of flexible and powerful tools available free of charge, both built right into Windows and downloadable from members of the Active Directory community. Any of these tools has the ability to greatly enhance your productivity as an Active Directory administrator, and together they become even more essential to your daily work life.

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Dsget and Dsquery

The ds* command-line toolset also includes two tools used to query Active Directory for information rather than for creating or modifying objects.

Dsget takes an object’s DN as input and provides you with the value of the attribute or attributes you specify. Dsget uses the same submenus as dsadd and dsmod—user, computer, contact, group, ou, and quota.

To obtain the SAM Account Name and Security Identifier (SID) of a user account, enter the following command (note that the following is all on one line):

dsget user cn=afuller,ou=IT,dc=contoso,dc=com
    –samAccountName –sid

You’ll get output such as that in Figure 3.

Figure 3 Running dsget (Click the image for a smaller view)

Figure 3 Running dsget (Click the image for a larger view)

Dsquery returns a list of Active Directory objects that meet criteria you specify. You can specify the following parameters no matter which submenu you’re using:

dsquery <ObjectType> <StartNode> -s <Search Scope> -o <OutputFormat>

For ObjectType, dsquery can use the following submenus, each of which has its own syntax: computer, contact, subnet, group, ou, site, server (note that the server submenu retrieves information about domain controllers, not any member servers in your environment), user, quota, and partition. And if one of these query types doesn’t fit the bill, you can use the * submenu, which lets you enter a free-form LDAP query.

StartNode specifies the location in the Active Directory tree where the search will start. You can use a specific DN such as ou=IT,dc=contoso,dc=com, or one of the following shortcut specifiers: domainroot, which begins at the root of a particular domain, or forestroot, which begins at the root of the forest root domain using a Global Catalog server to perform the search.

Finally, the Search Scope option specifies how dsquery should search the Active Directory tree. Subtree (the default) queries the specified StartNode and all of its child objects, onelevel queries only the immediate children of the StartNode, and base queries the StartNode object only.

To better understand search scopes, consider an OU that contains both user objects and a child OU that itself contains additional objects. Using the subtree scope will query the OU, all of the user objects contained within it, and the child OU and its contents. The onelevel scope will query only the users contained within the OU and will not query the child OU or its contents. A base query will search only the OU itself without querying any of the objects contained within it.

Finally, you can use Output Format to control how the results of dsquery are formatted. By default, dsquery returns the distinguished names of any objects that match the query, like this:

"cn=afuller,ou=Training,dc=contoso,dc=com"
"cn=rking,ou=ITTraining,ou=Training,dc=contoso,dc=com"

To query for all user objects contained within the IT OU and any child OUs, use the following:

dsquery user ou=IT,dc=contoso,dc=com 

You can further refine this query by adding additional switches such as -disabled, which returns only disabled user accounts; -inactive x, which returns only users who haven’t logged on in the past x weeks or more; or -stalepwd x, which will return only users who have not changed their passwords in x days or more.

Depending on the number of objects in your directory, you may need to specify the -limit x switch when running your query. By default, dsquery will return up to 100 objects that match the specifics of your query; you can specify a larger number such as -limit 500, or use -limit 0 to instruct dsquery to return all matching objects.

You can use the other submenus to perform useful queries for other object types as well. Consider the following query, which returns every subnet defined in Active Directory Sites and Services that’s in the 10.1.x.x address space:

dsquery subnet –name 10.1.*

Or use the following to return every subnet located in the Corp site:

dsquery subnet –site Corp

With another submenu, you can quickly determine how many domain controllers in your forest are configured as Global Catalog servers:

dsquery server –forest –isgc

You can also use this syntax to help you determine which domain controller in your domain hosts the Primary Domain Controller (PDC) Emulator Flexible Single Master Operations (FSMO) role:

dsquery server –hasfsmo pdc

As with the other ds* commands that include submenus, you can view all of the switches available within a particular dsquery submenu by going to the command prompt and typing dsquery user /?, dsquery computer /?, dsquery subnet /?, and so forth.

An additional slick trick is to pipe the output of dsquery into another tool such as dsmod using the | character (shift-backslash on U.S. keyboards). For example, let’s say your company has renamed a department from Training to Internal Development and now you have to update the description field of each relevant user from the old department name to the new. On a single command line, you can query for user objects that have a description field of Training and then modify that description field in bulk, as follows:

dsquery user –description "Training" | dsmod
    -description "Internal Development"

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