Thursday 15 May 2008

Three tips for Windows desktop support...

Basic: When you need to take a screendump, you can get just the active window by pressing ALT+PRTSCN

Intermediate: For a quick way to get to the System Properties dialog, hold down the Windows key and press Pause

Advanced: Need to figure out which branch of HKEY_USERS belongs to which user? Right-click it and check the permissions for a clue!

Wednesday 14 May 2008

Vista 100% CPU in svchost.exe

Yeah, that old chestnut... yawn. Last night my laptop became completely unusable for at least two hours. It took me that long to figure out that the service causing the problem was Windows Update. By then I was tired and irritable so I went to bed bitching about how Microsoft must have wrecked my machine with some flaky update.

Anyway, I did some more digging today and noticed that this guy had the same problem and was using the same AntiVirus as me.

Another quick google later and I found this post... turns out the problem is with CA Antivirus and they should have a fix ready for us soon. And there's a workaround for us in the meantime which has brought my laptop back to normal.

Friday 9 May 2008

New Thing I Learnt Today: Calculated fields in Pivot tables

I think of myself as a dab hand with Excel and do a lot of pivot tables, so it was great to see this post from Joseph Chirilov about a feature I’d never even heard of until now! http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2008/05/08/pivottables-calculated-items.aspx
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