Well, this may not really be a shortcut to success, but it definitely is a shortcut to controlling all system settings from one place. Before I tell you what this trick does, let me tell you how to do it…

1. Create a new folder anywhere on your system (preferably the desktop)
2. Rename it to “TheBestShortcut.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” (without the quotes, of course!)
3. Notice that the icon changed? Well, open it…

See a bunch of shortcuts? These are various control panel shortcuts, all in one place… What’s the advantage, you ask? Well, I like this simply because it lists all the configurations I can meddle with in one place. There is no need to dig into various sub-menus in the control panel. Note, however, that all these shortcuts are the same as in the control panel – we’ve just created a new view of control panel to see it as a normal folder here.

So, what kind of a feature is this? Well, it is quite simple, really - there is this concept of “junction points”, and this is just one sample usage of it. You can read up more about junction points here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144096(VS.85).aspx

And for the list of common GUIDs, check here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee330741%28VS.85%29.aspx

So to summarize, all you need is a GUID for the folder you want ({ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} in the case of Control Panel) and a name for the folder. Naming a folder “Name.GUID” (without the quotes of course) will create a junction folder of your choice.

In case you want to create a junction folder for something not on the list on the list of GUIDs, don’t worry. All it needs is that the folder be registered under Classes with a valid CLSID. To get you started, open your registry (for details, read this) and search for {ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}, which is the GUID for control panel. Do you see the stuff on the right, and does it make you go “Ah! So that’s what this was…”?

Now play around using the other GUIDs on the left panel. For example, you can use {ED228FDF-9EA8-4870-83b1-96b02CFE0D52} for the Games folder!

Now for the funny part. There are many blogs that go on and on about the new and hidden Windows 7 “God Mode” – supposedly an interesting Windows 7 feature. CNET says: “Windows enthusiasts are excited over the discovery of a hidden ”GodMode” feature that lets users access all of the operating system’s control panels from within a single folder“. Well, I guess it really was hidden if it took people almost 14 years to uncover a feature!  Who reads the documentation anyway? Well, it is CNET to the rescue with a list of a few more GUIDs for shortcuts, supposedly sent by Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft. It doesn’t mention what each GUID is for though.

And as for the name “God Mode”: well, you can name the folder anything you want – so “God Mode” is actually whatever you choose to call it. Considering everyone seems to call it the same, I’m guessing one person called it “God Mode”, and the others just heard about it and wanted to show off that they knew cool stuff; without even bothering to dig into the details…

Anyway, search for “Control Panel.” in the Windows 95 KnowledgeBase link – it’s been there for over 14 years. And the hype comes now – I still can’t believe it!

A simple example is your “status” in messenger applications… It’s not jargon per se, but it can be used in a pun… Set it to “Available” (meaning, to chat) and you’ll have some jobless people (like me ) asking if you’re so desperate to get hitched - hey, it looks like you’re advertising that you’re single and ready to mingle – correction, desperate to mingle!

Then come the “clashes of jargon” – “taking a dump” in some countries means relieving yourself after a heavy meal (not drink!)… In software, the same term is used to indicate taking a snapshot of the memory, or taking a “memory dump”… So it can be quite hilarious when someone is asked on a mail-thread to “take a dump and share it”, or told that he should use “a remote computer to trigger the dump”! And it’s also funny when the said someone responds saying “I’ve shared my dump at this network share. When can you analyze it and tell me what’s wrong?”… I feel extremely tempted to respond with “You need to contact a medical lab for that!”

But the best, in my opinion, are the following two:

1. “Privates”… When a big code change is made, the programmer usually builds the binaries privately and gets the tester to verify them. Over the years, the term “private binaries” has decayed to just “privates”. I can’t help laughing when I hear a programmer ask the tester to “test his privates”, “check the privates” or better yet, ”verify that the privates work fine”. It’s funnier still if it is meant to be tested for performance or reliability (under stress)! Imagine hearing: “When can you get me the performance numbers for my privates?” or “I want you to stress my privates out completely – run everything on it for a week!”… Now don’t tell me you wouldn’t laugh if you heard such stuff…

2. The other one is something that people on the lookout for jobs would’ve heard a lot of: “openings”… Typically, “job openings under a manager” is the term used. I’ve heard of people asking managers if they have any jobs for them, and the managers responding with “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any openings under me right now”, or “Sorry, but all my openings got taken just last week and I’m full up”; worst is “I’ve found someone more qualified for this opening”. And job search ads say they expect “x years of experience to fill this opening” or that they expect someone with “expertise in x field” for the opening. I think they should probably add ”should not have any sexually transmittable disease” to that list – sounds more practical, right?

If you come across any more, leave a comment about it – I’ll update this now and then with any new gems I encounter…

Well, as I said, at work, we have multiple machines, of which at least one has no special data, and can be messed around with. This was what I used in my first couple of weeks at work. That was more than a year ago. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been experimenting – I have merely found a better and much more efficient way to play with the operating system (OS). When most of us say “playing with the computer”, we rarely mean the hardware (though there are people who do that as well). Most of us would like to explore the OS and/or some special software. And there are much easier ways of doing it. What, you ask? Virtualization – the simulation/emulation of an entire physical computer. Simulation/emulation is not technically correct, but who cares about technical accuracy?

There are quite a few virtualization providers out there, some free, others priced exorbitantly. I’m sure most of us are into this for the fun factor, so I’ll pick one of the free ones – Virtual PC 2007. Now, don’t think I’m picking this up because it is a Microsoft product – that isn’t the reason at all! The real reason is, this is the team for which I work at Microsoft! Just kidding… Though that is the team for which I work, I wouldn’t recommend that you pick our other products (Virtual Server 2005 or Hyper-V) for playing around. I have picked Virtual PC simply because, of all the virtualization software I’ve seen out there, this seems the most user-friendly and least geeky and easiest to play with. You could pick one of VMWare’s products, or something from the open source side – the basic idea remains the same, but some of the things I mention here might not be possible with those products. Obviously, I’ll also not be talking about features that they might have that Virtual PC doesn’t.

What you should know before using any virtualization software is this: they do not do any magic – if they’re simulating another computer, it is by temporarily using resources that your computer already has. For example, let us say you have a physical computer with 2GB RAM, and have created a virtual machine (VM) with 512MB RAM. When the VM is running, your physical computer will say 512MB of memory is being used up by Virtual PC. When you turn off the VM, that memory will be freed up again. This should be obvious and expected, but I just wanted to clarify this before we started. It is quite surprising how many people still have computers with 256MB RAM and want to run virtual machines – not impossible, but you will be severely limited in what you can do and in how fast things are. Also, the OS you install in the VM will take up space on your hard disk – so you need to have sufficient free space on your hard disk as well.

My recommendation for a passable experience would be at least 256MB of RAM greater than the amount recommended for your OS, and at least 4-5GB of free space on your hard disk. Note that I said “at least” everywhere. Of course, this all depends on what OS you have on your physical machine and what you want to install in your VM. For example, if you want to run Vista in your virtual machine, then you will need a minimum of 512MB of RAM for your VM. This would mean that the OS on your physical machine (I’ll call this the host from now on) should be able to run just fine if you take away so much RAM from it. And oh, 4-5GB of space on your hard disk won’t be enough for even the installation of Vista, I think. Usually, a rule of thumb is that the space used up in the VM’s hard disk will be used up on your host as well, but is not exactly accurate – it will take a little lesser, sometimes much lesser.

Ok, how is a VM represented on your host computer? I mean, a Word document is seen as a .doc or .docx file; a website is seen as a link or URL. What about a VM? A virtual machine is usually represented by two files: a Virtual Machine Configuration file (.vmc) and a Virtual Hard Disk file (.vhd). The .vmc file saves most of the hardware information about the Virtual Machine you have created, and is usually a few KB in size. The .vhd file contains the hard disk contents of the VM, and is typically a few GB in size, and grows as you use the VM and copy files in and so on.

So now you know what you are up against. I have given you all the minimum requirements. If this didn’t scare you off, the only other thing that might scare you is this: You need to have a separate licence for the OS you run inside the Virtual Machine. This typically isn’t a problem for people who decide pirated OS’s/illegal copies are good enough. And this definitely isn’t a problem if you want to try open source OS’s (Linux).

Now let’s get to the action: First is installing Virtual PC. You can download Virtual PC from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=28C97D22-6EB8-4A09-A7F7-F6C7A1F000B5&displaylang=en. Based on your system architecture, choose either the 32-bit or 64-bit setup.exe file. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this and find out which applies to you: http://caffeinecomputing.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/32-bit-or-64-bit

The installation should be simple enough – just double-click on the downloaded file.
Start Virtual PC – if this is the first time you are doing this, it should automatically throw up a Wizard to help you create a VM. You can safely cancel this – if you do, click on the “New…” button to launch the wizard again!

Here are some steps to help you through this Wizard:

1. Click on next – there’s no input required on the first page anyway.
2. Select “Create a virtual machine” which is the first option, and press next.
3. Provide the name you want to use for the Virtual Machine, and if you want, change the location where this is saved – this typically can be anywhere on your machine since space won’t be a problem and you won’t have to go to that folder to open that VM (you can launch it from the console itself)
4. This page asks you to choose the Operating System that you’ll install. You can choose something here and install something else; it shouldn’t create a problem. This page is mainly to decide what kind of default values to use. So pick anything you want and move to the next page.
5. This page lets you adjust the RAM the VM should use; if you want to adjust it, that is… Do what you want and move on.
6. Here, you have to choose whether you want to create a new virtual hard disk or use an existing one. You probably won’t have any .vhd files already, so choose create a new hard disk and click next.
7. Here, you will have to choose the location of the .vhd file, and the maximum size you want to allow it to grow to. The maximum that you can set this maximum to is the value shown there (130557 MB). This means, you can’t set the maximum size to more than this value. I usually set the maximum to this – this is the value that the OS inside the VM will see. Don’t worry, I’ve never heard of anyone having a VHD that had grown to its maximum value, unless they had set it to an extremely low value. However, remember what I said? This will be a few GB easily, so make sure you provide the path to some location where you have enough free space on your host.
8. This page will just show you the summary of what you’ve chosen. Click finish and you’re ready to go.

Now you should see the VM you just created in the Virtual PC console. Double-click on it, or select it and click on the start button. There you have it! You’ll be able to see the BIOS of the VM loading inside the new window that opens up. You can install the OS in any way that you usually will – through the network or using a CD/DVD. If you have an ISO file of the OS you want to install, you can also right-click on the small CD icon on the bottom left of the new window that opens up and choose “Capture ISO image”. Cool, right?

Something to note: When using a Virtual Machine, your mouse will get trapped inside the window where you see the guest OS. Press the “Host Key” (which by default is the right Alt key) once to release the mouse. You can avoid doing this by installing “Additions” inside the VM. This can be done by selecting “Install or Update Virtual Machine Additions” under the Action menu of the VM Window (the window where the guest OS is shown), once the OS is booted into and running.

There are so many amazing features that will make your exploration easy and fun: stuff like differencing disks, undo disks, saved states and so many more! I’ll explain them as part of my next few posts, so stay tuned!

Let’s not dwell on those people. Rather, let’s focus on how to find out whether you have a 32-bit OS or a 64-bit OS. What your hardware is capable of supporting is a different question that usually isn’t of much relevance – except if you’re trying to figure out if you can install a 64-bit OS.

1. Start a command prompt
   • Press WinKey and R; type “cmd” and press enter
   • Or click on start, run and type “cmd” and press enter
2. Type set and press enter
   • “set” is a command to set environment variables. In case no parameter is passed, like now, it will list the environment variables that already exist. Here, we are going to use an environment variable that Windows has already set.
3. Look for a variable named PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE.
   • If it says x86, then your OS is 32-bit. If it says amd64, your OS is 64-bit.

If you are using Vista/Win7, use WinKey+Pause or WinKey+Break. Alternately, right click on your computer and choose properties. There, under System Type:, you can see the same information.

Remember, just because your OS is 32-bit, it doesn’t mean that your hardware can’t support 64-bit. Most of the processors available in today’s market are capable of supporting 64-bit anyway.

Now, here’s the easy geeky part:

1. Open the registry editor (Start->Run->regedit)
   1. If you’re using Vista, and the Administrator prompt comes up, click “continue” or “OK” or whatever to get past it.
2. In the registry editor, navigate to the key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options”
   1. If you don’t know how to do that, read my previous post “Playing with the registry”
3. Right-click on “Image File Execution Options” (I’ll call it ImFEO from now on) and choose “New->Key” – you will get something that looks like a folder.
4. Name the key with the full name of the application you want to mess with. In this case, it is “outlook.exe”
   1. The actual name of the exe is needed (along with the extension) – this is not the same as the name that is seen. To find this name for any app, open task manager when the application is running (press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open it directly, or press Ctrl+Alt+Del and choose from the menu)
   2. In the “Applications” tab, right-click on the application of interest and choose “Go to process”
   3. Note down whatever is shown here under image name. For example, for Microsoft Office Word, it is “winword.exe” – this is the name you want.
5. Select the key you just created and in the right half of the screen, right-click and say “New->String Value” and name it “Debugger”.
6. Double-click on “Debugger” and type in the real name of the application you have decided upon in the research section (Use the same steps as in step 4 to find this). I’ll say “notepad.exe”
   1. Here, you might have to give the entire path to the application; for example, for Solitaire in Vista.

Done! Now if you try to start Outlook after this, it should open Notepad instead!
There are some known issues with this – Vista complains if the app you mention under the “Debugger” value isn’t really a debugger; but it complains stupidly, and the error it throws is so priceless that it would be better than having Solitaire pop up. What is it? Well, why don’t you try it out yourself?
With this little trick, you’ll soon have your productivity soaring! Do leave a comment and let me know if you successfully deployed this on some poor soul’s machine!

How does ImFEO work? Why on earth was it put in there? Well, I’ll save that for another post, which will probably appear much later…

P.S: For some more fun, try an application that requires elevation, or maybe try just a space instead of an application name…
P.P.S: The reader who doesn’t know me probably gets the impression that I absolutely detest my job and hate my company. Nope. It somehow doesn’t sound cool saying “I’m a guy in a common situation – working in a job where I like some things and working with people some of whom I really like” (though that’s what is true). And so, I take the “Dilbert approach” – just assume that every flaw that ever existed on earth, exists in every company.

Let me tell you up front that this is something that is not advised. The reason? You will be handling something that could screw up everything on your machine big time. Many applications depend on the registry for almost everything.

What you stand to gain though is some fun and a lot of learning. And you’ll also understand and appreciate why you should never mess around with the registry. If you do just what I say and nothing else, everything should be fine. Let me call out right now though, that if something gets screwed, I probably can’t help you and I definitely can’t be held responsible in any way whatsoever. Use this at your own risk. There – now that we’ve got the standard disclaimers and stuff out of the way, let’s get to the actual stuff.

For starters, I’ll take you through a very simple exercise, with a little treat for Vista/Win7 users at the end.

First off, let’s open the registry editor. In case you don’t know how to do that, go to start, click on run and type regedit.exe in the textbox and press enter. If you are a Vista/Win7 user, click on Continue in the UAC prompt. The registry editor should’ve opened up now. You’ll see “My Computer” on the left half with a few folders beneath it. If you click on the folders, they will expand to reveal more inside them. The right half would typically be empty for those of you that have opened the registry for the first time. The folder like thingies are called “Registry Keys”, while those on the right pane are called “Values”. Each value has a name and some data associated with it – the data type helps determine if it is a String (text) or integers (numbers)

Now comes the fun part. Remember, I told you that most programs save their info in the registry? Well, you can pick your favourite (or least favourite) program and mess around with its settings. You might even make the program unusable!
Ok, that wasn’t the simple exercise I was talking about. Here goes. I’ll just list them in steps for easy readability.
1. Expand HKEY_CURRENT_USER (double click on it)
2. Expand Software under HKEY_CURRENT_USER
3. Whoa! Huge list, right? Recognize most of the names? You should – they’re related to the software installed on your machine. Well, scroll down till you see Microsoft and double-click on it.
4. Scroll down this new list to Windows and expand that.
5. Expand Current Version under Windows.

That’s a lot of interesting looking stuff, right? Let’s try something simple. There are three folders under Current Version that are of interest to us right now – the third only if you are using Vista/Win7. These are named Applets, Run and Screensavers.

First, look for Run and click on it once. In the right hand side pane, right-click and choose:
New->String Value
Type whatever name you want for that Value – I’ll name it MagicValue. Now open MagicValue by double clicking on it. In the text field that it shows, type notepad.exe and click OK when you are done. Congrats! You’ve finished your first registry tweak! Now whenever you turn on your machine, a notepad window will pop-up. Irritating, yes, but you can replace it with anything else that you want, for example Outlook. Now some of the more computer-savvy ones might say this can be done through the StartUp folder that Windows provides. You can. What you’ve gained by doing it the registry way though, are two things: Firstly, you have now learnt a little more about the registry. Secondly, see if you can find a way of removing this application without deleting the registry key! You can’t see it anywhere in the startup folder! (There is another place though, but I’ll save that for another blog, another day)

Now you know how to annoy your friends with some weird programs that start every time they start their machine…
How do you remove it? Well, just delete this MagicValue that you created. Windows will say “this might affect some programs” or some similar rot. Well, we were the ones who created it, so deleting it should be fine. Go ahead and delete it.

That was it with Run. Now for the next part – applets. Before that, close regedit and reopen it. Notice that regedit opens in the same place you were just before you closed it? Nice, right? Let’s try to figure out how that is done. First, expand Applets. Wow, there’s paint. And wordpad. And I’ll be doggone, there’s regedit! Click on the Regedit key once. See something on the right hand side? Some value called LastKey? Read the value next to its name – heck, it is the same key that regedit opened in! That’s how it opened the registry to the same place you were in before you closed it! Delete LastKey. Ignore any warning from Windows if you get one. Close and reopen regedit – let’s see what happens. Whoa! Did you see that? Regedit still managed to open in the same place – and can you see why? The value is back! Well, those guys must be saving the value when regedit exits, so…

Now, here’s the ‘treat’ for you Vista/Win7 guys. I’m not sure which flavours of Vista this will work on, but have you noticed that for some reason, you can’t customize the screen saver? If you’ve never tried it, minimize regedit, right click on the desktop, and choose Personalize. Choose screensavers from the window and choose aurora or bubbles or something else. Try to modify them – you can’t. Now maximize the registry again. Expand the Screensavers key that comes under Current Version. (The same place where you found Applets and Run earlier) Click once on whatever screensaver you want to modify. Mess around with the data of the values (the stuff on the right hand pane) to your heart’s content. I’m not going to tell you what each one stands for – change them all and figure out what they mean or stand for. Let’s see if you can customize any of them to something you like!

That’s all for now folks. Next time, I’ll teach you a neat little trick – how to make Solitaire start every time your boss tries to start Outlook or Excel or whatever! Stay tuned!

When Windows crashes, it is due to the fact that a driver that was trusted has done something bad. In this state, Windows decides that it is much better for your system to be turned off, than have a traitor running amok on your system. So ironically, the Windows kernel is not at fault when it crashes – it’s just trying to save you from someone else!
So yeah, Windows is taking your machine down for your own good. But then, how do we find the culprit? Well, Windows dumps information about the state of the machine before it turned itself off into a file called a crash dump. This contains all the necessary evidence, and with one look (by an expert) at the dump we can identify the culprit immediately. But you have to tell Windows to put this information in the dump in the first place. Why? Well, this dump can get huge. Windows provides various options as to what kind of dump to enable. Think of it this way – based on the amount of disk space you are willing to spare in case of a crash, Windows does one of three things:
- tells you who the culprit is (Small Memory Dump)
- tells you who the culprit is and what it did wrong (Kernel Memory Dump)
- tells you who the culprit is, what it did wrong and tells you about the surroundings, so that you can decide if there were extenuating circumstances to excuse the culprit or if there was someone else who forced the culprit to do something wrong and so on. (Complete Memory Dump)

Needless to say, the first takes the least space (a flat 64KB) and is what is enabled by default.
The last takes the most space (=how much RAM you have on your machine+a little more).
The second is the best in most circumstances (takes somewhere around 30-70% of the RAM of your machine), since extenuating circumstances in computers are not many.

This is saved by default in your windows directory in a file called “Memory.dmp” or “Minidump****”

Ok, so how do you enable a kernel memory dump? Here are the steps:
1. Right click on “My Computer” and click on “Properties”.
1. b) If you are running Win7/Vista/Server 2008, click on the “Change computer settings” link that you can see to the right side of the page. If you’re prompted for administrator credentials, provide them.
2. Click on the “Advanced” tab at the top.
3. In the startup and recovery group, click on “Settings”
4. In the new window that comes up, you’ll see “Write debugging information” and a dropdown beneath it.
5. Choose whatever type of dump you want from the dropdown. (In certain cases, you might not see “Complete Memory Dump” as an option over there)
6. If you want, change the location of the dump file – the default would be “%systemroot%\memory.dmp”
7. Click OK as many times as necessary and voila – you’re done! Not really – you need to restart your machine.

So the next time your computer crashes and you’re asking someone for help, just give them this file as well and tell them “Here’s the crash dump; analyze it and tell me which module was the faulting module.” – you’ll sound a lot more technically savvy, and whoever is helping you will be happier as well and help you a lot quicker!
P.S: If you want to analyze it yourself, install WinDbg from http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx and open this dump using WinDbg.

SysInternals Suite: Now this is a bunch of kick-ass tools that are simple and unbelievably easy to use. And the best part – they’re free! You can download them from the Microsoft website at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx. Oh, and what’s on par with them being free is, you don’t have to install these to use – just double-click and run these!

WinDbg: This is even better. This is easily the best debugger around for Windows – it can simply point to the line of code that is causing trouble if you use it correctly. Easily one of the most powerful debugging tools for Windows, if not the most powerful. You get this tool for free as well! Pick it up from http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx
Don’t forget to use the help documentation – after MatLab, this is the best documentation I’ve ever come across.
A quick note – when installing WinDbg, make sure it is installed to a directory with no spaces in the path. The default location is in “C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows” or something like that. Change this to “C:\debuggers” or something. Having a space in the installation path used to cause inconveniences earlier (though I’ve never faced any issues)…

I will write about more tools soon, so stay tuned!

What will I talk about in this blog? To be honest, I have no clue whatsoever!   One thing though - I swear that whatever I write here will be a result of my working with computers or software after large doses of coffee!