Enough said.  More to come...

Yep it’s a new year.  I’ve had the last few weeks off so let’s start of with a fun re-post (thanks Steve Clayton) of a neat, but hidden, feature of Windows 7.  By adding a folder to your desktop called Expert Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and double click you’ll see a list of all Control Panel options on one page.  This uses the “Category View” text not the “Icon” text.  Here’s a screenshot showing this mode next to the normal control panel in “Category View”.

Note, the text in front of the class id (that cryptic code inside the brackets) can be what ever you want the icon name  to be.  So you could also call it Omnipotent Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} .  You can also create this “folder” anywhere in your system, not just the desktop.  I’ve created it on the desktop then copied it to my quick launch bar or just “pin” it to the task bar.

Very Cool.  Thanks again for all those that posted this.

Enjoy!

Now that Windows 7 is in general availability most hardware manufacturers have updated their lists of drivers available for their pc’s.  If you've installed Windows 7 like I have, it would be good advice to take a few minutes to update those drivers now.  I have an HP EliteBook that I use for work and when I took a look today at the HP support site I noticed that 9 of the drivers listed were newer.

Time to start the downloads and keep my system running smooth.

Later!

If you using the new Windows 7 and having fun with the new native VHD mounting and booting and the new Virtual PC, it wont be long before you’ll be looking for some utilities to make things easier for you.  I’ve found a couple of tools to help me create and manage all the the VHD’s I’ve been experimenting with over the past few weeks. 

Make a VHD image from an existing hard drive image.

Sysinternals has introduced a tool (Disk2Vhd) to convert you existing pc image to a VHD.

Expand the size of a VHD

vmToolkit has a great tool VhdResizer for increasing the size of a fixed VHD.  It requires creating a second VHD (so save some space) and then it copies the files over sector by sector.  I just used it on a Vista VPC image and it worked great.  Don’t forget to expand your partition after using this tool.  This tool only expands the VHD and not the partition found within the VHD.  Once expanded I used the Vista’s Disk Management (via the Computer Management control panel) to expand it to the fill size of the VHD.

Convert from VMWare Disks for use with Virtual PC

vmToolkit also has another great tool, VMDK2VHD, to allow you to convert from VMWare's VMDK format to the Virtual PC’s VHD format.  I haven’t tried this yet but looks like a promising tool.

Several of these tools have been around a while, but I’ve not found a consolidated list of these so hopefully this post will help you as it has me.  As I discover more of these tools I’ll try and keep this post updated.

Enjoy!