ADVANCED TIP FOR THE TECHNICALLY INCLINED: Assuming you didn't jump right in like me and delete your recovery partition on a Windows RT device (haven't tested this on an OEM Windows 8 or Windows 8 Pro machine - yet here's the official guidance - http...

WARNING: This is an advanced tip for users that understand the ramifications of deleting a recovery partition. If you have problems in the future and did not back up your recovery files, you will likely need to visit a Microsoft Store. I'm going to do...

In PowerPoint 2010 there is a Hyperlink and Action feature that allow you to navigate to a certain slide when a word (hyperlink) or area/section (action) is touched by the presenter (on a touch screen) or clicked with a mouse.  I have found this...

in my five years at microsoft i’ve had a chance to attend a lot of events.  my first “launch” event was for windows vista in february 2006 where I had a chance to do two of the keynote demos in front of an audience of over 4,500 attendees. ...

a question came up today at one of the it pro windows 7 sessions today about applocker - whether you can setup an applocker policy on windows 7 professional. here's the answer - straight from the windows 7 professional help for applocker (you can setup...

i recently noticed that anytime i open internet explorer, i have two iexplore.exe processes on windows vista. in trying to troubleshoot this, i reinstalled a test system and was reminded in internet explorer 7 and protected mode we introduced a secondary...

i haven’t used office 2003 for a while, but this evening i installed it for a demo environment on windows 7.  then i installed office 2010 click-to-run (a virtualized second copy of office built upon the same application virtualization technology...

first – even though you can use these procedures on a running, active windows vista or windows 7 operating system, if you care about your data, back it up – somewhere else – please!  critical personal data i synchronize it using windows live mesh...

two years ago this month i joined dekalb area toastmasters. for the past year i have served as our club's president. today i was able to recreate my "icebreaker" speech the way i would have two years ago if a projector were available. the title of the...

in windows 7 you have a performance information and tools in control panel that can rate the various subsystems in your computer.  the program that runs these assessments is winsat.exe.  it’s a command line utility so you can actually run individual...

yesterday was april fools day (or the beginning of my wife's birthday month) and the pranks were flying online. here are 10 of my favorite this year. 0. my wife woke up to say there was snow on the ground - she forgot i had already been outside to...

mike verta was kind enough to remind me of a classic mechanical keyboard that can be ordered with no inscriptions on the keys.  i just ordered the das keyboard ultimate model silent which will help in learning the dvorak layout (no reason to look...

there are a lot of things we take for granted in a full version of an operating system.  i’ve been interested in learning the dvorak keyboard for years, but only recently have i been spending time learning it.  imagine the increased security...

wow! last week i purchased an asus n73s notebook with sound from bang & olufsen and liked it so much i got my son an asus n53. at the top of the feature list was the blu ray player, but having usb 3.0 bootable port in a laptop for windows 8 performance...

for the last 30 years i have been using a computer and the one common thread among all those computers?  applications that made it useful.  many of these applications were “off the shelf” meaning i or someone i lived with paid for the application...

before joining microsoft i was a technical trainer and part of that job was dealing with the constant "what if" questions that would come up in a microsoft course ("what if you created or deleted an object from two windows 2000 active directory domain...

i did some additional testing on three dell desktop systems with the pre beta windows 7 build - fast extraction of the wim from dvd (i'll need to time it, but i believe the extraction was around 10 minutes) and setup on systems with 4 gb of ram. all these...

this beta has single handedly reignited my interest in the 64 bit version of windows 7.  why?  because the number one reason i was using the 32 bit version was to demo some of our virtualization capabilities but with windows virtual pc i can...

finally - n-trig drivers for the release candidate (had problems with interim builds, but this should allow me to upgrade the dell latitude xt to rc!). check them out here - and note that hp touchsmart tx2 beta drivers have gone public as well!

hopefully you've installed the windows 7 release candidate by now (and if you haven't download and install it) - so the next thing you'll want to take a look at is how your applications and utilities will perform under the latest operating system. if...

microsoft has made a program available from verdiem called edison.  this free tool is available for windows xp and windows vista - check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/environment/edison.aspx

one of my goals with windows 7 is to install and test it on as many systems and as many times as i can. much of this will be on my own time since i do have a day job :), but looking towards the future, or dogfooding as they say at microsoft, is part of...

i'm an impatient person with computers. i wasn't always this way. i remember when you could watch the output of the dir command (i don't know in the first version of dos whether the /p was even available because i certainly didn't need it). i now expect...

my first two builds of windows 7 in one way brought me back to when windows vista was in beta (downloading the bits, burning dvds, waiting while the installation runs), but since windows 7 is building upon the foundation that windows vista sp1 and windows...

woo hoo! i'm running the windows home server connector on my 64 bit windows 7 build. need to double check if the backup works (which won't surprise me). i've had pretty good app compatibility success with windows 7 so far. continuing my tests....