Printing Multiple Photos On One Sheet From Vista / Windows 7

In XP, if you opened a picture in the native viewer, and then told it to print, you could easily select which photos (in that folder) that you wanted to print in the same batch.

Vista and Windows 7 make this much more counter intuitive. But luckily not impossible.

To achieve the same in the newer Windows, first navigate to the folder your photos are in, then select all the photos you want to print. Next hit the alt key, which will open the inconveniently hidden menus in that window. Select print.

Then you get the same sort of multi-photo printing that you know and love from XP.

Fix Outlook 2007 Instant Search Under Vista

Outlook 2007's best feature is the instant search box.

But on a few occasions I've seen that functionality stop working, or start giving incomplete results. The issue appears to be that the search index it uses gets screwed up in some way.

You see, the way an instant search works is that it pre-scans the contents of whatever it will be searching, and then creates an index to work off of. That way it doesn't need to crawl through all your data everytime you want to look for something. This gives very fast (some might say instant) results. But if this index gets corrupted in some way, instant searching won't work correctly.

The fix under vista is to go under control panels, indexing options, advanced. Under troubleshooting, there is an option to re-index selected locations. Click the rebuild button to start the process.

It can take a while to rebuild the index, depending on how big your mailbox is, and what other locations are indexed. But after a bit you should be back to searching without issue.

How To Enable Remote Desktop On A Remote Windows PC

Microsoft apparently has no easy way to set a remote windows machine to enable remote desktop access.

While you can use MMC to do a lot of management of a remote machine, allowing remote dekstop is (I guess) not one of them.

Intelliadmin has the cleverly named utility "Remote Desktop Enabler" to do this job.

And it is free. I have not tested it to enable on Vista but it works for enabling RDP on remote XP boxes. thanks Intelliadmin.

Vista - Offer Remote Assistance Shortcut

Since XP, windows has been able to offer and request remote assistance.

Remote assistance allows you to share a desktop, similar to gotomypc, or VNC, to help solve issues, or just see the same thing.

If you are supporting a workstation that on the same network as you, it is an easy free option for remote desktop assistance.

I've setup our domain policy so that all machines are pre-set with remote assistance enabled from any IP in our subnet. This is still secure, because the user must accept any remote assistance connection requests. Without this domain setting, you would have to right click on "my computer" select properties, and then enable remote assistance from the "remote" tab.

The thing about offering or requesting remote assistance that is a pain is that to do so you need to go under the start menu, help, then find offer or request remote assistance. Which sucks if you need to help folks (offer assistance) all the time.

The good news is that under vista, you can create a shortcut direct to the offer assistance tool.

just create a shortcut and put the target as:

%windir%\explorer.exe “hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US/Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/Unsolicitedrcui.htm

Then then next time you need to remote a machine, you can then just launch that shortcut, drop in your target's machine name in the client, and away you go.

Ubuntu Google Gadgets - Who Gives a F...

Google Gadgets are now available on Ubuntu. I read about this here.

I read the post, and was all ready to start using all these fantastic gadgets. So I loaded a few up. Pretty boring stuff. The same sorts of stuff that I don't ever use in Vista on my work machine. Then I loaded the NASA picture of the day. That sounded sort of cool. It crashed my session.

What?

That is right. It killed my session. It dropped me to black screen and then I had to log in again. I was actually writing this blog entry on how to set this stuff up, and I lost all but the first sentence (the one that you see starting this post).

The funny thing is, I'm actually glad it happened. I've always said widgets, gadgets, desklets, whatever you want to call them... They suck. They waste resources in your system, and you really don't gain much benefit from them. The NASA gadget crashing my session was just a reminder of that.

The analog clock in vista is a great example. Does it provide any real benefit over the clock in the system tray? Well it is a lot bigger, and don't get me started on how it is realistically lit and shaded! Really, how much value does that provide? And now you have less desktop to use. And I would bet real money that it more than uses more than twice the amount of memory and CPU cycles needed for the system tray clock. And while I have no hard data, I'd also bet it has an impact on laptop battery life as well.

These things are typical of the bloat that folks always bitch about when it comes to operating systems. Why is it that I need to have an 80GB hard disk when I could run windows 95 on 100mb? Well, you didn't have a shiny over sized-analog clock taking up desktop real estate in windows 95. YOU'RE WELCOME.

When active desktop came out with Internet Explorer 4, everyone thought it was the greatest thing ever - for about 15 minutes. Then they realized it was no real benefit, and it was a big pain in the ass. Apps and content running on the desktop rightfully went into hiding for a few years, until Apple made it popular invented it in OS X Tiger. Of course their implementation is very different, with Apple using a dashboard to house the widgets. And of course they would never rip-off Microsoft - they ripped of Konfabulator. But that is a different story.

The bottom line is this - of course any modern computer can probably take any small performance hit caused by running these little apps all the time - BUT WHY? there is just not enough benefit that I can see. Want your RRS feeds visible? load them on your home page. Want to know what time it is? Look at the clock the computer already gives you. To me these are mostly just useless eye candy, with very few real productivity gains.

Update - I found a Vista gadget I'm actually interested in. When I first got Vista, I could not believe that the included calendar gadget did not integrate with Outlook or Exchange. Well, they now have some gadgets here that show upcoming tasks and appointments. I will run this for a while and see if it really is worth it...

Update to the Update - They suck. you have to have outlook running for them to work. Which means they look like this when you boot:

so, if I need to outlook open, what is the point? Oh well I keep outlook open all day anyway.

Vista Searches

The one thing that Vista does really well is searching.

Now I'm sure some people would say that the Mac has great searching with spotlight - and it is very true.

But vista does a great job searching with specific criteria, even in un-indexed locations, like network drives.

It also has a nice save search function - which, when combined with the Windows Desktop Search: Advanced Query Reference, can be extremely useful.

For example. Let's say that I have a SQL Server that refuses to delete it's old backups the way it should. Let's also pretend that I don't want to have them removed automatically by some other process.

So I could browse to the folder that I want to find the old files, and do a search in vista using the cute little search bar:Then when the results come back, I can right click in the results area, and choose save search.

I can call it what ever I want, and save it wherever I want - my desktop, my documents - anywhere. Then when I want to perform the search, I can simply launch that saved search, and viola! I have my results, nice and up to date.

Remote Desktop Client To Console - BROKEN in RDC 6.1

As I have written before, it is possible to connect to the console on a windows 2003 server using remote desktop and the /console switch.

This doesn't work now in version 6.1 of remote desktop client (which you apparently get with Vista service pack 1).

But you now have an /admin switch which does the same thing.

More detail on this can be found here, but the bottom line is that Microsoft has changed the console behavior in 2008 server, and also changed the RDC client to be in line with it.

User Account Control In Vista

Windows Vista has all sorts of great new security features.

One of them is User Account Control, which is designed to limit a user's ability to operate with administrative powers. This should prevent some exploits from jacking up the machine.

However it frequently prevents apps from running properly. This is due to many legacy (and some new) apps requiring Administrative privileges to run correctly.

The first thing I try when an app fails strangely in Vista is to right click the app, and run as administrator. You can also go to properties, and set it to always run this way.

But if that is not good enough, you can disable UAC, by doing the following:

go to control panels, user accounts, and disable User Access Controls.

This will require a reboot to take effect.