Mark's Technomusings

18 Portable Apps That Every Tech Needs

18 Portable Apps That Every Tech Needs � CaseyTech.com The subject says it all. Plus, in the comments, there are quite a few more apps named.

Extract Windows, Office, etc encoded CD registration keys

Occasionally, you may wish to know what CD key was used to install an application. Provided this data is stored somewhere, it can be retrieved. This utility is designed to find and display this data. CD Key Reader : Utility to read CD keys from the registry

Why Do We Have to Use a Floppy to Flash BIOS?

Slashdot | Why Do We Have to Use a Floppy to Flash BIOS?

"With all the time and technology that has come and gone with computers why must we still use a floppy disk to flash the BIOS anymore? Yes, some manufacturers are enabling BIOS flash from within Windows, but there are still a lot of motherboards out there that require you to find a floppy to flash the BIOS. It took me two floppy drives and four floppy disks just to find one of each that worked." Are there reasons why BIOS manufacturers haven't moved BIOS flashing to modern media like USB flash drives, or bootable CD-ROMs?

Mount .iso files under windows XP

This free program for Windows XP lets you create a virtual CD drive on your hard disk. winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe

For anyone unfamiliar with the terms 'virtual CD' or 'CD emulator', they mean that you can copy the entire contents of a CD-ROM to your hard disk and run the programs or access the files without the need for the original CD. This can make files more accessible, faster and more convenient. Given the speed and size of today's hard drives, you could easily fit a number of CDs onto your hard drive without noticing the difference. Assuming you had 30 full CDs, these would take around 20GB on a hard drive and all will be accessible after a few clicks of a mouse.

Hard drives are about 10 times faster than a CD, plus you can instantly access the file instead of grabbing the CD case, inserting the CD and awaiting for the contents to load. It's true, you could try copying the files over to the hard drive, but this can get messy, plus some programs require a CD to be loaded in order to run. This virtual CD program 'pretends' it is a CD drive (even though the files are on your hard drive), so your programs will run as normal.

It only works with ISO images

Installation instructions
=========================
1. Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%system32drivers folder.
2. Execute VCdControlTool.exe
3. Click "Driver control"
4. If the "Install Driver" button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%system32drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.
5. Click "Start"
6. Click OK
7. Click "Add Drive" to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click "Add Drive" until an unused drive letter is available.
8. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click "Mount".
9. Navigate to the image file, select it, and click "OK". UNC naming conventions should not be used, however mapped network drives should be OK.

You may now use the drive letter as if it were a local CD-ROM device. When you are finished you may unmount, stop, and remove the driver from memory using the driver control.

Identify your Intel Processor

Sometimes, windows machines will identify your processer as something crazy like, x86 family 6 model 5 stepping 2 at/at compatible . Well, is that a Pentium II, or a Pentium III? Or something else entirely. Intel has provided a solution to that problem:
Intel(R) Chipset Identification Utility - Production Version On this page are 2 utitilities.

The Intel® Chipset Identification Utility provides an easy way to identify the specific Intel chipset that is located on your motherboard. This information can be used to determine if your system supports software such as the Intel® Application Accelerator, Intel® Chipset Software Installation Utility, or Intel's Graphics Drivers.

To identify what type of Intel processor you have, such as the Pentium® III processor, Pentium® 4 processor, or Intel® Celeron® processor, download the Intel® Processor Frequency ID Utility.

Embedding Flash in Powepoint

Oftentimes people have asked me how to embed a Flash movie into a Powerpoint document. This website: .flashgeek....Embedding Flash in Powerpoint explains how to do it.

Note, this only works for Office XP and the Flash file must be in .swf format, not an .exe. Also, you should already have the ActiveX plug-in installed, so you can skip to step 3.

Google Deskbar

Wow! They've done it again. The brains at google have come up with the Google Deskbar, which allows you to search with Google from any application without using your mouse!

Easy keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-ALT-G) which are redefinable will have you typing in your query in the taskbar. A mini browser window will pop-up with your results. Then, if you click in the corner of that window, you'll get your results in your default browser! (Which for me happens to be Netscape 7.1)

All in all, awesome.

Multiple version of IE

Wow. I have now seen the light. For years, Microsoft has caused me to struggle as a web developer...because Bill forced me to run only 1 version of IE at a time. With Netscape I've been able to keep multiple installations on the same computer for years. But no, not with Microsoft....not until now that is.

Joe Maddalone reports in his blog entry titled Multiple IE's in Windows how to "trick" windows into allowing you to have more than 1 version of IE installed at a time. Thanks Joe!

Update: Found another entry Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer -- but this guy has .zip's that you can download, saving you from having to create these files yourself.