scmartindale

Thanks, Kelsenellenelvian, those are perfectly sufficient and concise answers. Am I right in saying that the "grace" period makes a better trial than the "trial" period? I read that the 90-day trial can't actually be activated after 90-days, where the 30-day grace period (extended with the rearm command) CAN be activated at the end?

I heard that Windows 7 has a 120 day trial option. How does this work? If Vista is anything to go by, I imagine that one installs it from the disk, with no key, and it works in trial mode for 120 days. If you then buy it, you simply put your key in and it activates. Am I right? Some concerns: Is the trial fully functional, or is it crippled? Can one install the trial from an RTM disk? Has anyone here tried out the trial? I want to see it before I buy it.

Thank you. From your responses, I created the following .reg hack and stuck it in my hacks folder: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Access.Shortcut.Diagram.1] "NeverShowExt"=- "IsShortCut"=-

It appears that files with ".MAG" as their extension have their extensions hidden in Windows Explorer regardless of the state of the "Hide Extensions for Known File Types" preference in Folder Options. These files are described as "Microsoft Office Access Diagram Shortcuts." Why does this happen and how do I stop it happening? (Honestly, after five years as a programmer, I have NEVER used an Office Access diagram and NEVER wanted to make a shortcut to one, either.)

I tried to right-click a file in explorer and use the "Open With..." dialog to open it with Notepad2. The list of known applications appeared and, as expected, did not include Notepad2. Using the "Browse" button to browse to Notepad2.exe did not cause Notepad2 to appear in the list of known apps. Because of that, I couldn't open the file with this program. Is this a known issue? Is there any way to work around it? I can run Notepad2 manually and use file->open to open the file but that is just clunky.

How do you banish that really annoying popup that appears when you press Ctrl+A in a folder that has hidden files in it?

I saved this tweak (http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/registry/8/) in a .reg file, double-clicked it and added it to the registry. It was successfully installed, according to the message boxes but when I opened Accessibility options in control panel, the settings had not been changed. Please, confer upon me the knowledge of the secret handshake or mysterious rain-dance required to make this work. (I hate StickyKeys.)

I solved my own problem by searching the registry for "calc.exe". Here's a convenient .reg hack that does it for you: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AppKey\18] "ShellExecute"="\"C:\\Program Files\\SpeedCrunch\\speedcrunch.exe\"" (Actually, this just changes the mapping of the keyboard key. I don't think Windows has a default calculator.) Use_SpeedCrunch_as_the_calculator.reg

How do you change the default calculator in Windows XP? I have installed SpeedCrunch (a popular calculator amongst KDE and Qt users) and I want to make it show when I hit the really convenient Calculator Key on my Microsoft keyboard.

Yes. I have just tried it. Thanks. What an obscure setting for what should be a rather intuitive feature.

I am experiencing recurring problems with Outlook 2003's very-broken contacts list. Here's one: I move a users "personal folder file" from their old computer to their new one. On the new one, I add it using "Data File Management", set it as the default mail delivery location, restart Outlook so that it can adjust the location for the default calendar and default contacts list. Finally, I remove the created-by-default PST file because it's empty and will never be used. If I click "Contacts" at the bottom right of the main window, I see the contacts list in the users PST file. All their contacts are there. ... but if they write a message and try to use the "address book" to select a recipient, there are no contacts?? WTF? Also, any searches for contacts automatically return nothing - even if you're searching for a contact that you know is in the list. You can see it in the list, but you can't search for it. This is REALLY annoying. Can anyone help?

Before I start: this is a Microsoft product forum, we have forums for operating systems, forums for Office and even forums for coding but we don't have a forum for the Visual Studio line of products. Why not? Anyway, ... I am trying, desperately, to stop Visual Studio 2005 from creating its annoying, p***y "Visual Studio 2005" folder in My Documents. (Or, in Vista, just "Documents") I have created a folder for it elsewhere, relocated the settings file, the project templates and item templates and the project default location. I have even removed the default Macro projects (which never work) and created my own one in another location, yet it continues to create that folder on startup. The folder remains permanently empty. Please, this moronic practise of creating folders in My Documents must be stopped! Why can't all developers be like Mozilla and allow you to relocate your profile?

My method worked. I now have Notepad2 (and the Powertoy Calculator from Microsoft) instead of the default Windows applications. I didn't try the nLite plugin. I do not want to use nLite, I've had problems with it, in the past.

I'm creating an unattend XP disk, manually. Basically, I'm only trying to slipstream updates and stick and answer file on the disk, nothing special. I do, however, want to replace notepad with SciTE (http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTEDownload.html). I expect that I could do this by replacing Notepad.exe with the "Sc1" distribution of SciTE - a single-file application, but I'm not sure that it would work, for two reasons: 1 - I'm not sure how I would replace Notepad.exe with Sc1. I expect that I'd have to rename Sc1 to notepad.exe and compress it to notepad.ex_ and replace that file on the disk. Is this correct? If so, what tool do I use to do the necessary compression? 2 - I think windows will moan if I do 1, although notepad may not be considered a critically important file, so it may be allowed. If it will not moan, that's good. If it will, how do I prevent it from moaning? Please suggest a course of action/investigation. ---------- Post 2 ---------- Umm... I've changed my mind. I'm actually going to do this with Notepad2, which is also available in a UPX compressed distribution. I'm still looking for help. I've found this blog article: http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/archive/2004/04/30/124093.aspx It describes how to exclude notepad from WFP *after* windows has been installed. In theory, all I have to do is exclude notepad from WFP on the windows disk and replace i396/NOTEPAD.EX_ with a compressed version of notepad2. (Please shout if I'm going wrong here.) ---------- Post 3 ---------- Now, I did find the MSFN unattend guide's notes on disabling WFP altogether. (http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/66/). This is NOT what I want. I only want to exclude notepad.exe from WFP. My thought process: %windir%system32Restorefilelist.xml (read Omar's blog) must come from somewhere on the CD. If I can find it on the disk, I can edit it... I think. If I look on the disk, I can't find it in i386/System32/.. That's not helpful. But wait - what are these i386/FILELIST.DA_ and i386/FILELIST.XM_. They look interesting. If I could decompress them, I might be able to find out what they really are... Darn. Stumped again by this compression thing. I'm still looking for help. (I apologise for the stream-of-conciousness nature of this thread.) ---------- Post 4 ---------- The saga continues... I found the Windows CABinet SDK. That's cool. It contains "extract" and "makecab" (aren't these supposed to be bundled with Windows?) Anyway, I extracted FILELIST.XM_ and found a FILELIST.XML that WinDiff determined to be identical to the one mentioned in Omar's blog. I extracted FILELIST.DA_ and received FILELIST.DAT. I'm not sure what that's for. I'm sort of hoping that I can extract FILELIST.XML, modify it (using the instructions from Omar's blog) and compress it again with MAKECAB, then put my modified FILELIST.XM_ along with my NOTEPAD.EX_ (which will actually be a compressed Notepad2) on the disk. Does anyone know whether this will work? Please don't say that FILELIST.DA_ is important or that FILELIST.XM_ will be checked for tampering. Or, if you do, please suggest an alternate route. <Edit> Posts merged; please use the edit button to append data without intervening responses </Edit>