A new feature in Windows 7 is the ability to burn ISO images directly from Windows without the need for any third party software, its as simple as double clicking on the ISO file which will bring up the Windows Disc Image Burner application. Then it’s as simple as selecting the drive to burn to and clicking ‘Burn’.
In a follow up to my previous post about restoring the standard right-click menu options on a window below are a list of further Windows 7 shortcut keys.
| Windows Key + Up | Maximise window |
| Windows Key + Down | Restore window if maximised, otherwise minimise window |
| Windows Key + Left | Snap window to left |
| Windows Key + Right | Snap window to right |
| Windows Key + Shift + Left | Jump to left monitor |
| Windows Key + Shift + Right | Jump to right monitor |
| Windows Key + Home | Minimise or restore all other windows |
| Windows Key + T | Focus on first taskbar entry, multiple presses cycles each taskbar entry |
| Windows Key + Shift + T | Focus on first taskbar entry, multiple presses cycles each taskbar entry in reverse |
| Windows Key + Space | Aero Peek, peek at desktop |
| Windows Key + G | Bring gadgets to the front |
| Windows Key + P | External display options |
| Windows Key + <number> | Launch the taskbar program at position <number> |
| Windows Key + Plus | Zoom in |
| Windows Key + Minus | Zoom out |
| Alt + P | Toggles display of preview pane |
| Shift + Left-click | Open a new instance |
| Middle-click | Open a new instance |
| Ctrl + Shift + Left-click | Open a new instance with administrator privileges |
| Shift + Right-click | Show window menu NB: Used to be standard right-click on previous versions of Windows |
| Ctrl + Left-click <on grouped icons> | Cycles through each window in that group |
As great as Windows 7 is it does have a few annoyances one of which is the changed taskbar, I’m getting used to the taskbar but one I am missing is the ability to minimise multiple windows grouped by the program. Apparently this has been removed by default due to the implementation of Aero Shake and Aero Peek. After a bit of research I did find that you can restore the options by holding Shift and right-clicking on the button, this should display the menu with the old options of Cascade, Show windows stacked, Show windows side by side, Restore all windows, Minimize all windows and Close all windows.
As an extra I also found that if you hold down Shift and left-click then it will open a new instance of the icon you clicked on, very handy.
When recently upgrading my work PC to Windows 7 Enterprise I was told that I needed to uninstall Virtual PC 2007 before installation. I did this but as I use it for website compatibility testing I needed to reinstall it afterwards. I found that Virtual PC 2007 has been superseded by Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 so I installed that instead, the only problem is my work PC does not support hardware virtualisation and as such I could not use it. I then tried to reinstall Virtual PC 2007 but kept getting the following error:
Read the rest of the article in order to see how to get around this.
Continue reading “Installing Virtual PC 2007 on Windows 7” »
I recently started to play Assassin’s Creed
Being one of the eight people left in the world that doesn’t own an iPod I do not need to have iTunes installed on my PC, but i still needed a simple piece of software that could serve my podcast downloading needs. Finding none that worked fine ‘out of the box‘ on Windows Vista* I decided to write my own and Liquid is the result. It’s still a little experimental at the moment but I am using it everyday tweaking the code as I go.
More information on Liquid is available through this link
* I had found Juice on Sourceforge.net but it requires some tweaking to work on Vista and hasn’t been supported in ages.
To take an in-game screenshot whilst playing Free Realms you can press the F12 key, if you want to remove the interface it can be toggled on and off using the F10 key.
You can find the screenshots you have taken in the following folders:
Replace <username> with your Windows user name.
One of the trickest parts of web development is ensuring your code is backwards compatible, there are a variety of utilities that can be utilised in order to assist with this, below I’ve listed the most useful ones that I have found.
Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC ImageThe most useful of these utilities is provided by Microsoft, realising that a lot of people were still using older versions of Internet Explorer they release Virtual PC (external link) images containing versions of Internet Explorer from version 6 onwards. The images expire after a few months but Microsoft are constantly updating them to include the latest Windows updates. Download the Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images (external link) from Microsoft’s site. |
Browsershots (external link) is a open source web farm running multiple versions of operating system and browsers which can be used to check rendering of a single web page. As it is free it can sometimes fail to render your page on certain selections and can also take a long time to render but it is very helpful to see what it will look like on more obscure operating system and browser combinations. |
Litmus (external link) is a website that offers paid for and free versions to show you how your web pages and emails render in various browsers and/or email readers. It is more reliable than Browsershots but the free version’s list of browsers is limited. |
Even though the Wii does not come with built-in media streaming capabilities, unlike the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360, you can use a piece of freely available software to do it yourself.
You will need the following:
Step-by-step instructions:
Disclaimer: Use the information in this document at your own risk. I disavow any potential liability for the contents of this document. Use of the concepts, examples, and/or other content of this document is entirely at your own risk.
Please note that this fix was tested on Windows Vista but should work on other versions of Windows.
Recently I was experiencing some issues with a Windows Vista machine not updating from Windows Update correctly, eventually it was tracked down to a single registry key in the following location:
HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\WindowsUpdate
If you set the DisableWindowsUpdateAccess flag to 0 then it should now work, if you do not want to do this manually you can also download a fix below:
Windows Update Error - Code 80240025 Fix