Tips n Tricks

The BIOS on my Acer 1694 laptop was 3 years old and I did manage to find an updated version of the same on the Acer support web site. However ever after trying for about say 10 times, I couldn't upgrade the BIOS from Windows Vista.

The upgrade from Vista always ended with a blue screen and a system restart. I even booted from the Vista DVD and got into the command console (using Alt + F10 on the License screen) and tried updating the BIOS using command line; again blue screen followed by a system restart !!

After digging through some forums I realized that the BIOS could only be updated via XP which meant

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When Google Calendar was launched in 2006, I didn't find anything unique except the "Quick Add" feature. I might not have spent too much time exploring the powerful features of Google calendar then, but I am sure that most of them would agree that there was no single compelling feature in Google Calendar. At that time, my usage of Calendar was also pretty limited; However age is catching up with me and I really had to start using a calendar to keep track of my day to day events. (I am not going to write in detail about these events, but these were the ones which made me realize that I was getting old :) ) When I ...

In one of my earlier post I covered some of the tools that can be used to copy songs from iPod to PC. Most of the tools available are shareware and there are very few free quality applications. Sharepod is one such quality application for iPod. It's a lightweight music management tool for iPod which you can run from within the iPod disk. This circumvents the necessity of having iTunes on every other system for managing your iPod. Below is the list of Sharepod features which might motivate you to install and use it :-) Track tag editing Video import support iPod Shuffle supportDrag and drop tracks to Explorer Completely rewritten codebase to safely ...

Many a times I have been in a situation where I need to delete a windows service and every time I end up "googling" to find the easiest/fastest way of doing this. Most of the posts in the search result talk about modifying the windows registry to delete the service, which isn't always foolproof.

The easisest way of deleting a service is by using the sc.exe command line tool. This tools comes bundled with Windows and is probably the easiest way of maintaining and administering Windows Services.

Lets take an example of a totally useless service on Windows: Windows Search Service.

The first thing to do is to get the name of the Windows Service; What is shown in

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Synergy is an open source software lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware.

It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk. I have a similar setup at work and till now I was struggling while switching between the desktop PC and the notebook. You could remote desktop to one of the computers, however you would loose out on using both the display units.

The official documentation for configuring Synergy isn't that straightforward. Here is how I configured Synergy between 2 computers running Windows.

Install the software ...

Pointui (pronounced point-you-i) is a software which brings in a total new user experience on Windows Mobile 5/6 powered devices. Techcrunch notes that this software is probably more for the users who are envious of iPhone; The UI navigation does look very much on the lines of iPhone, but again iPhone is not just about the easy navigation. As we all know the basic user interface of Windows Mobile sucks big time and it hasn't improved much in Windows Mobile 6. This post by Gizmodo discusses some of the flaws in the current version mobile OS and also confirms that Microsoft will probably work on these in the future version of Windows Mobile. I have been using Pointui on ...

One of my favorite tools, Launchy just got upgraded to 2.0. As the website says, Launchy is an utility desinged to help us forget about the start menu in Windows. I have recommeneded this tool to many of my friends and  not one of them have complained about it. Its like a "must have" tool for Windows.

The new version has been completely written in QT and hence the old plug-ins and skins will no longer work. The old configuration will also be wiped with the upgrade to 2.0

The options are now merged into a single preference dialog.

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After upgrading to Windows Vista, setting up the communication between Vista and my HTC Touch was a PITA ! And I would like give the entire credit of this pain to Vista !

On Windows XP, Activesync did a very good job in syncing with the smartphone and I also managed to synchronize over Bluetooth. When I plugged in the handset (via USB) to the vista upgraded laptop, the windows mobile device center opened up and showed the connection status as "Connected".

The dialog box looked something like this:

Open "Windows Mobile Device Center" and you are treated with a dialog box with 2 check boxes (as

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When I bought the HTC Touch Smartphone I was never told by the reseller that it was locked onto Airtel Network in India. Only after seeing some of the comments left on my earlier post, I realized that it was a SIM locked phone.

Recently when I traveled to Beijing, I felt the pain of having a SIM Locked phone. I had all my contacts and other details on this phone and yet it wasn't useful when I needed it the most.

When I inserted the China Mobile SIM onto the phone, I was prompted to enter the "Unlock Code". A search

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Windows Live Writer Beta 3 was released a few days back and this is one tool from Microsoft that deserves a lot of praise. It definitely simplifies the task of writing posts for your blog.

Beta 3 has the following new features:

 

 

Insert videos using new 'Insert Video' dialog

Upload images to Picasaweb when publishing to your Blogger blog

Publish XHTML-style markup

Use Writer in 28 additional languages

Print your posts

Justify-align post text

Better image handling (fewer blurry images)

Resolved installation issues from last release

Many other bug fixes and enhancements

More on

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