Random Rants & Raves

One of the cool new features of PowerPoint 2010 is the ability for you to broadcast your presentation over the Internet for remote or networked viewers. This allows you to show presentations even if there is no projector available.

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I really liked the blog post by Bill Evjen regarding some of his favorite desktop gadgets. I’ve been using a bunch of gadgets since Vista days and I continue to use them here. Here’s my list of gadgets on the desktop:

Large Notes Gadget: This is a modification of the built-in Notes gadget available in Vista (but not in Win7). It allows you  to quickly write a sticky note on the screen and also increase the size of the note. I know Windows 7 has a built in Sticky Notes application, but I like my desktop to be clean and this fits the bill perfectly. Just remember to click the “English” link at the top to view the site in English when you go to download the gadget.

I also use the built in Weather and Currency gadgets with settings for my city and country. I find this quite sufficient for my needs. The good part is that these gadgets are  now enhanced in Windows 7 and have a large mode as well for looking at multiple days of weather or multiple currencies at a time.

System Monitor is the next gadget I use. It’s a combo gadget which shows a multi-CPU monitor, a memory monitor, date & time, notebook battery level, wireless strength and IP address. It also has useful tools like ping, traceroute and whois as well!

Another gadget from the same company is the Quick Launch gadget. This allows me to store shortcuts to apps that I use occasionally but are not “installed” normally. For instance, I have moved the Recycle bin off my desktop to this gadget as well as quick clicks to my C and D drives. I also have “portable apps” such as WinSCP, FireFox 3.5.2 and MS FTM that I use occasionally but are not in my Start Menu.

Next is “The Region” Gadget which allows me to see the latest featured posts from TheRegion.com – the blog aggregation space for Microsoft Regional Directors. It’s good to see what some of the top experts in the Microsoft technology space are talking about and i’m honored and humbled to be in this same list!

Since I’m on a 17” notebook running at 1920x1200 i have a bunch of more space that I occasionally try out some other gadgets in the space available. But the above ones are some that I use all the time.

Once it finally hit MSDN Subscriptions, I downloaded Windows 7 and went around installing it. One of the things I did differently this time is that instead of burning the ISO to a DVD and then booting my machine off it, I created a USB drive based install following these steps:

1. Plug in your USB drive (thumb, hard disk, etc.). Must be >= 4GB in size
2. Open a Command Prompt with Admin rights and run the following commands:
• DISKPART
• list disk [This will show a list of disks attached to your system. Note the # for the USB drive]
• select disk # [where # is the number of the USB drive selected above]
• clean
• create partition primary
• active
• format fs=ntfs quick
• assign
• exit
3. Now mount your ISO or open it with WinRAR and copy all the contents from it to the new drive partition
4. Use the USB to boot your machine (if your BIOS supports it) and start the installation

On my 3 year old notebook, the complete installation off the USB drive took just about 18 minutes from start to finish. I highly recommend that you use this technique to get up and running with Windows 7 fast.

Every single device on my machine was detected and drivers installed automatically. It also found the latest official nVidia drivers for my video card from Microsoft Update and downloaded them and installed too. I had a fully working machine in about 30 minutes and have started installing all the software I need. Kudos to the Windows team on getting this so right this time.

PCQuest has just published 3 of my articles in their current issue. It was actually supposed to be 4, but the one on ASP.NET 4 got lost in the mail and a resend was received too late for this issue. You can read these articles here:

• MS Office 2010 Preview
• Silverlight 3 LoB Apps Part I (new series)
• Windows 7 Development Part I (new series)

I’m also going to try and compile a list of articles I’ve written in PCQuest over the last few years and link to them here.