Everyone knows this already, right?

To put start menu items into a subfolder, use folder name and backslash.

I use it to try and help keep the start menu tidy, since the most commonly used shortcuts end up on my desktop and/or quick start menu. If I can tidy away Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Kompozer and whatever else that’s Net related into an Internet folder, my Start Menu might not grow to take over the whole screen when I open it.

You can also move them around after installation, but that means if you ever remove the application, it won’t know where to find the shortcuts and remove them. (You’d hope one day they’d get this fixed in Windows.)

Bill Gates’ rant about Windows (or to be precise, microsoft.com) usability:

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

Read all of it here. It’s from five years ago, but still makes entertaining reading.

(via Cameron Reilly)

I’m working from home today, and looking at some system monitory stuff in Firefox. In the background I’ve also got an Remote Desktop session open to my work PC.

Every few minutes, the corporate screensaver kicks-in on the work desktop. For some reason, RDP decides it absolutely has to show me this. It grabs focus, bringing its window into the foreground.

STOP GRABBING FOCUS, DAMMIT! I DON’T CARE IF THE SCREENSAVER HAS KICKED-IN. YOU’RE INTERRUPTING ME! JUST FLASH YOUR TASKBAR ITEM!

It even does this while connecting. If I alt-tab away onto something else while waiting for the connection, it keeps grabbing focus to show me… that it’s working on it, so please wait… Other applications do this sort of thing too.

And it keeps losing the connection, and re-connecting. But that may be a server and/or VPN issue.

(This is the RDP client in XP SP2. I’ll upgrade to SP3 in the next few days and discover if that’s any better.)

Sounds like there are broadly two ways of getting a small WinXP installation:

• Build it that way using a tool like the freeware nLite — here’s an article about it
• Do it after the event by ripping stuff out using something like XPlite (not freeware, but free trial available; it also works on Win2K, and also available for Win98) — article here

Something else to do for performance is shutdown extraneous services, though it’s said this doesn’t gain you much. This guide goes into a lot of detail, but is painfully formatted with one service per page. This guide is a bit briefer. This one is a nice balance.

Do you live in a DOS window, and use ClearType? Microsoft has made the Consolas font, previously only available in Vista and a few products, available for earlier versions of Windows. Looks very nice. Instructions for getting it working here — it requires a registry hack. And like many things in Windows, it only works after a reboot.

(One font = 4.3 Mb download?! Aye carumba! Check first if you already have the font; it comes with some versions of Office and Visual Studio. And why do they give so many setup programs meaningless filenames like setup.exe?!)

Watch out, Windows iTunes users: Apple is pushing, via its security updates feature, Safari 3.1 onto Windows users. You can opt-out of it, but if people just click OK on the default, they’ll get it. Ed Bott rants about it here. (Amusingly the report, at least for me, is accompanied by an Apple advert.)

I’ve got IE7 and FF on my PCs already. I don’t need or want another web browser. It was rude enough that Apple insisted Quicktime be bundled with iTunes… no wonder the size blew out from 19Mb to 33Mb.

But now they’re pushing Safari onto people as well?! No thanks.

A little update to my previous entry on purchasing a iPod Touch.

Apple surprised me by releasing a 64bit version of iTunes 7.6 with little or no fanfare on the 15th January 2008. I actually didn’t get the update until the following week and it was only by chance I noticed a 64bit version.

I’m very happy to say that I’ve been using 7.6 on my primary 64bit box and have been extremely happy with it, i’ve even moved over my iTunes music collection from my temporary home (a 32bit Windows 2000 installation in VMWare (thanks Josh for the tip)).

As I write this I’m still hunting down Album covers for music that iTunes can’t find and removing all duplicates from my library, but it’s fun

It’s been just over a year since Microsoft released Windows Vista to the public (30th January 2007) and Microsoft seem to have ignored the “optional features” that would be available to only Ultimate Edition owners.

To date three extras (Texas Hold’em Poker, Windows DreamScene and BitLocker/EFS, hardly inspiring or everyday wonderful extras) and a number of language packs have been released. The last extra, Windows DreamScene, being made available on the 14th March 2007, since then na-da, stuff all, absolutely nothing. Even the Windows Vista Ultimate site is lacking in any form of communications (news or blog posts) about the future of Ultimate Extras.

Long Zheng (a wonderfully witty Melbournian) posted on the 9th January 2008 a fabulous tongue-in-cheek post on this very subject but still Microsoft and the Windows Vista team remain quiet on the future of Ultimate Extras.  A few commenters to his blog posted their own suggestions as to what Microsoft could provide as Ultimate Extas (these are some of the ones I’d have liked to have seen):

• HD-DVD playback software that supports the 360’s HD-DVD player (waste of time now?)
• Advanced/More features for Windows Movie Maker
• Multiple Desktops (Workspaces)
• Sidebar/WPF version of MSN Messenger
• TweakUI for Windows Vista
• Sidebar integration of MediaPlayer (so it shows cover-art and other details in the sidebar)

Will we ever get anything more from Ultimate Extras, we can all believe that there will be but honestly I think (apologises to Monty Python) :

“The Ultimate Extras are no more! They has ceased to be! They’ve expired and gone to meet their developer! Bereft of development, Ultimate Extras rest in peace! “

When you want your PC to work silently, you switch Windows to a silent sound theme. But it still beeps at you for some things. Very irritating, especially when I’m trying to listen to music on headphones, to have an ear-shattering BEEP every time an email arrives or you dare to try and move the cursor beyond the end of the document in Wordpad. WhoTF decided it should beep for that anyway?

Solution 1: Double click on the volume control speaker icon. Options / Properties, and get it to display the PC Beep volume. Then mute the sucker.

But if there’s no sound devices on the PC, including a Virtual PC you’ve otherwise got the sound disabled on, you need to resort to other methods.

Solution 2: (Windows 2000 and later) net stop beep will stop the beeping for the current session.
sc config beep start= disabled will stop it permanently. Note the space after the equals sign.

(There are whackier ideas too, like recording silent WAV files to use for system events. And you could physically disconnect the speaker, if you have access to the hardware.)

This is driving me crazy.

Some process, somewhere, every minute is flashing up this icon in the status bar, momentarily grabbing CPU time and focus, and interrupting my workflow.

I don’t know what it is. It’s too quick to right-click on to close or query it.

It’s even disruptive enough that I can’t capture it using PrintScreen; I had to grab it using a camera.

It’s similar in appearance to the MediaGate NDAS software, but that’s not it.

I think it only started happening a week or two ago, but you know how it is — I don’t recall what I’ve installed in that time. I know I upgraded iTunes, but I’ve already killed every Apple-related task I could find, and it’s still doing it.

Can anybody identify it?

WAIT A SEC. I did a search of all EXEs then scanned down looking at icons. It looks like it’s something to do with DivX. Hmmm.

My sister is fuming because she got an iPod Nano for Christmas, and apparently it won’t work with her 3 year old PowerPC MacBook, which runs MacOSX 10.3. Sure enough, the Nano specs say it needs 10.4.8 or higher. She’s got no real interest in paying and installing for an OS upgrade to get around the problem, so she’ll ask a friend to load her iPod for her.

Basically it means that Apple is saying you can’t have a new iPod if you run a version of OSX from before April 2005 (with the appropriate free updates).

Whereas it does run happily on Windows XP (SP2) or Windows Vista. So you need to have a version of Windows from no earlier than before October 2001 (with the appropriate free updates).

How does Apple get away with treating its customers like that?

Jeff Atwood reminds us of the consequences of tricksters taking advantage of unlocked computers, including installation of the joke Clippy, which pops up Office 97-style, but more annoyingly.

It reminds me of some of the tricks I used to play in my youth (well, my early career), back in the days of Windows 3.1.

• Change the screensaver to call up Calculator, or Notepad, every few seconds (I wonder if you can still do this)
• Change the mouse buttons, or the sensitivity on the X and Y axes — one really fast, one really slow
• That old favourite, putting a desktop full of icons on as a background image, so you couldn’t click the icons (significant in Windows 3.1 when minimised programs sat as icons on the desktop)
• Swapping keyboards or monitors with computer next door
• Swapping individual keys on the keyboard over (didn’t work for touch typists)
• Spoofing a frequently-used icon to look like it had sent an abusive message to all the network users (followed by another colleague tapping the victim on the shoulder and saying the boss wanted to see him in her office).
• Emails advising of an imminent audit of pirated software (this caused a rapid deletion of files before anybody could stop the victim).

Low-tech tricks worked too. The pisstake-de-resistance was one morning putting a notice on a late colleague’s desk to advise him that he’d been moved to elsewhere in the building. (This was met with an accepting “Oh.” and shuffled departure.)

The scary thing is that all of the above tricks were tried on one person, and he fell for them every time.