Look for IT over here

When I’m troubleshooting a Windows XP machine, I find myself almost always going into Device Manager to check the status of hardware devices.

But what if you want to find out information about devices that aren’t connected eg USB based devices?

Try this:

1. Go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Properties.
2. In the System Properties dialog box, select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.
3. In the Environment Variables dialog box, locate the System Variables panel and click New.
4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES in the Variable Name text box and type 1 in the Variable Value text box.
5. Click OK twice.
6. To view the nonpresent devices, go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Manage.
7. Click Device Manager, pull down the View menu, and select Show Hidden Devices.

Do you have a lot of email clogging up your inbox and have trouble organizing it all? I’ve found this great (and best part free) plugin for Outlook that does it all for you.

It’s called Xobni, and works with Outlook 2003/2007 on XP and Vista Operating Systems.

One of the many features it has is when you open an email, the Xobni sidebar will show you all related emails from the sender, how many emails you send receive the them, and even a trend graph of what time you get emails from him/her.

That is one of many. Check out the Youtube video below for a tour of this plugin:

SP3 have now been added to Windows Update, and from all reports does make a difference in performance. A few people that I have spoken to have all said that boot times are reduced, and overall running seems to be quicker.

If you need to download it manually and/or hate windows update, here is a link to a page that lists the locations of the SP3 ISOs ready to download.

The most common/popular one will no doubt be the English ISO, so here’s the direct link from Microsoft for it.

A common way to lock your computer (assuming you are running XP) is to hit the Windows + L key simultaneously.

But what if you don’t have a Windows key on your keyboard? There are a couple of other ways to do it:

My choice is to create a shortcut on your desktop as you will probably use it over and over. Right click on an empty area of your desktop and click on new>shortcut. Enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation and click on next, name your shortcut and click finish. That’s it.
If you want to change the icon, right click the shortcut and go to properties>shortcut>change icon. Browse to the moricons.dll in your system32 folder to see a large number of cions to choose from.

A quick and dirty way to achieve the same result is clock on start>run and enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation in the command dialog box.

If you have fast user switching enabled, another way is to bring up task manager, click on the shutdown menu, and select switch user. Same result.

Just made the switch to Linux from Windows (or even OS X?) and are having trouble finding software similar/equivalent to what you are used to?

Yes, the linux learning curve is steep but rewarding when you do start working it all out.

Here is a good website that lists the Windows/OS X software and the linux equivalents.

In a lot of cases there are multiple options which is good. You aren’t tied down to one thing which you may not like.