Even at the MSRP, this is a great deal compared to purchasing individual licenses as it pays for itself after 2 upgrades. Just something to keep in mind.

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Upgrade Several Computers To Windows 7 For A Low(er) Price

After doing some searching on the Internet regarding this subject, it appears my case was isolated to say the least. From what I can tell, they are used by just about everyone with no negative effects. I can certainly see why because dealing with tiny screws is difficult without one.

I imagine most of our readers use a magnetic screwdriver when working on computers. If you do, have you ever experienced a failure you would attribute to the use of one?

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Computer Repair And Magnetic Screwdrivers

Something FloatLED does that your case light cannot is it can tell you want drive is actually working. If you have multiple disks in your system, this can be very useful as you can actually see the source of the ‘grinding’. Additionally, if you are working on a remote system (via Terminal Services, Log Me In, etc.), by firing up this application you instantly have access to this information on the system you are connected to.

While this is probably not for everyone (i.e. you have a laptop with one disk), for those of you who do have a use for it, FloatLED is a great utility.

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On Screen Hard Drive Activity LED

One option you have for doing this in the Save As dialog box is changing the option in the “Files of type” drop down appropriately and then typing the filename. However if you simply put the full name of the file – including the extension – in quotes, this forces the specified filename regardless of what the “Files of type” drop down says.

For example in Notepad, if you type some text and then go to Save As, you will see the default extension is text files (TXT). If you type “myfile.zyx” (including the quotes) into the file name field, the file will save with the extension you specified instead of the default extension.

While this may not be a huge time saver, it definitely can save you some clicks when you need to use it.

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Force Saving A File With A Certain Extension

While Virtual PC does not support hardware acceleration, you can see that it runs the FPS Quake 2 quite well using software rendering. That said, true legacy games should run fine in a virtual machine with little performance hit. You should, however disable Integrated Mode if you are using Windows XP Mode in Windows 7.

Does anyone currently play games in a virtual machine? If so, how is the performance?

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Gaming On A Virtual PC

I do not yet have Windows 7 so I cannot test them, however I can see the quick closing of programs from the dock window and new folder creation shortcut being very useful.

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Useful (Brief) List Of Windows 7 Shortcuts

You remember one master password. (It is not stored anywhere, don’t forget it!) Then, with a (somewhat simple)  cryptographic hash function, the extension combines your master password and the domain name of the site to make another unique password for that site. The password is not saved in Firefox, or anywhere else. It’s secure!

Keep in mind, this extension is completely separate from the password manager built into Firefox. Basically, passwords are generated on the fly each time using an algorithm based on the current domain name.

This extension works best if you only use a single computer, but if you use multiple, there are tools available on their website to help you find out what your password would be.

While Magic Password Generator is certainly not for everyone, some of you may find it useful.

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Firefox Extension Generates A Unique Password Per Domain

The dashboard lists some of the information associated with the Google services you use: your name, your email address, the number of contacts, the number of conversations in your Gmail inbox, your Google profile, the most recent entries from the web history etc. It’s a long answer to the question: “What does Google know about me?”.

If you have a Google account, you can login to Google Dashboard and you are presented with pretty much everything having to do with Google.

This is actually a pretty useful tool as it gives you a gateway all of your Google services. This is also a great tool for the paranoid because you can see what Google lets you know they know about you.

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See What Google Knows About You

START /D “path_to_program” program_name

For example, to open both Firefox and IE, the batch file would look like this:

START /D “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer” iexplore.exe
START /D “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox” firefox.exe

Just save the above text into a batch file named Browsers.bat and then run it. You will see both Firefox and IE are launched. This is just a simple example, so you would want to configure the programs to be what you need.

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Batch Script To Open Multiple Programs At Once

The documentation is pretty easy to follow, but for example suppose you want to extend the size of your E drive with some empty space on the end:

1. Make sure you have your data backed up (just in case)
2. Open a command prompt as the Administrator
3. Type ‘diskpart’
4. Type ‘list disk’ to get the disk number of the drive
5. Type ’select disk=[disk#]‘
6. Type ‘list partition’ to get the partition number of the partition to extend
7. Type ’select partition=[partition#]‘
8. Type ‘extend’
9. Once the command completes, your E drive is now resized to include the additional empty space

Note: You cannot use this to resize the active system drive (usually C), so if you do need to resize your C drive, you would need to remove the hard drive from the computer and plug it into another computer where it is not the C drive. Once you do this you can then resize it.

This also works in virtual machines, so you can use this in combination with the VHD Resizer tool to completely manage your VHD files.

While there are certainly more user friendly and feature-rich products available, this tool does the job quickly and easily.

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Builtin Microsoft Tool To Easily Extend A Partition Size