Volume Shadow Copy & System Restore in Windows 7 & Vista

“What you should know about Volume Shadow Copy/System Restore in Windows 7 & Vista (FAQ)”

I found this blog post to be extremely insightful concerning the inner workings of Windows, as far as the Volume Shadow Copy and the system restore features go.  If you’re concerned with the privacy/security of the files on your Windows machine, this may be a good read for you.  Opening up various files includes the creation of separate temporary files and many bread crumbs.  Knowing exactly how Windows handles this data is paramount when working with financial, medical, and other private data, or corporate trade secrets.

It may be too deep for many people to even care about.  In any case, here’s the link.

via What you should know about Volume Shadow Copy/System Restore in Windows 7 & Vista (FAQ) | Trying To Be Helpful.

Set or Unset NUM LOCK on Login

For those with number pad-less laptops who remote into their desktops through Windows Remote Desktop (RDP), you may well know of a very annoying thorn in my side.  But, alas, thanks to this gentleman at the site below, we have relief!  Enjoy!

“Here are two programs to turn on or off the NUM LOCK key state in Windows. These programs work in Windows 2000/XP/2003 and beyond. The NumlockOn.exe program will set numlock on when it is run, and the NumlockOff.exe program will set numlock off. These utility programs can be run automatically when the user logs on to set the numlock key to the desired state.”

via Set or Unset NUM LOCK in Windows Freeware.

Your Worst-Case-Scenario PC Survival Kit

I thought this article was interesting–but especially this part of it:

“The entire body of human knowledge. Say what you will about Wikipedia as a research source–we still wouldn’t want to go into a survival situation without a few copies of, well, everything humanity has ever known. You can download various chunks of Wikipedia from its Database Download page, ranging from the articles only (5GB or so compressed, 25GB uncompressed) to the all-pages, all-revisions archive (31GB compressed, 5TB uncompressed). Unless the world ends over a Wikipedia flame war, you’re probably fine with the articles-only package. Just make sure you have the Edible Plants index page.”

via Your Worst-Case-Scenario PC Survival Kit – PCWorld.

Outlook 2010 Envelope Notification with IMAP

In Microsoft’s infinite wisdom, they decided to not have an envelope icon show up in the systray (the icon area beside the clock) when new mail arrives for your IMAP accounts in Outlook 2010.  I discovered shortly after installing Outlook 2010 and setting up my IMAP email account that I was not being notified of new emails.

To get desktop alerts and a sound, you can setup rules to do so when a new IMAP message comes in.  However, for the envelope icon, you can try this nice little add-in from EmilStefanov.net.

“The Outlook Email Notifier is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook 2010 that displays an icon in the system tray when new email arrives. Outlook 2010 already has this feature, but it does not work for IMAP email accounts. This plugin works even with IMAP.”  via Outlook Email Notifier – EmilStefanov.net.

Give it a try and see if it works for you.  Maybe Microsoft will give us an update for Outlook 2010 that will do this very same thing.

PDF Creation & Editing for FREE

There are a seemingly innumerable amount of PDF creators and editors out there that do a fantastic job of both creating and editing.  But how about for free, guys?  I love the PDF format.  It’s being able to get documents out there the EXACT way you want people to see them.  That’s why it does so much better than Microsoft Word or other word processors for wide distribution.

There are key steps, however, for the home user who wants to produce his/her own PDF files.  Spend your money on Adobe Acrobat if you want full tech support available at the end of a phone line or an Internet tube.  But if you want it for FREE, read on.

To create a PDF from scratch, you need nothing more than a PDF printer driver.  I use PrimoPDF.  I’ve been using it for a while and it seems to have held up well.  The office uses CutePDF as the PDF printer.  Both seem to work just fine.  Create the document or image or combination thereof–or a multitude of other things–in a word processor, an image-editing program, or…whatever.  Print it out using the print function of the program you’re in and, presto!, a PDF.

What if you’re like me though and want to scan important papers for archiving.  (I subsequently shred the personal papers and recycle the shreds.  No filing cabinet space taken up!  But I digress.)  This is where you obviously need some imaging hardware.  For the purpose of archiving paperwork, your typical all-in-one will work just fine.  I do recommend, however, one with an auto document feeder (ADF).  (The Brother MFC series printers do just fine for this purpose but also use ink that’s gotten for cheap from Meritline.  They’ll run deals on it from time to time.  It works fine for home office use.  But pick your own poison for this scenario.)

Now comes the tricky part.  You need to find an all-in-one or scanner that comes with scanning software able to scan to PDF.  The Brother MFC series comes with ControlCenter.  It does a fine job of scanning to PDF if you want just the stack of papers turned into a PDF.  This works best, of course, for single-sided papers.  You can take the long way and scan each set of papers in the ADF, one set at a time.  That works just fine.  I’m going to venture a guess that all scanners and all-in-ones come with scan-to-PDF software.  So this shouldn’t be a problem once you have a scanner or all-in-one.

Then comes the times when you’ve let a whole stack of important papers build up.  You’re not looking forward to sitting there scanning each set individually.  So, here’s where I use pdfsam.  It made up for all the shortcomings I found in ControlCenter3 that came with my Brother all-in-one.  I looked high and low for a while until, one day, I happened upon this little diamond in the rough.  It’s open source.  The interface looks ugly, yes, but I’ll take function over form any day.  It does exactly what it needs to do.  Split, merge, rotate, etc., by page number, graphically, bookmarks, and other properties.  I love it.  Just stick that whole stack of papers in there to scan.  Break them apart later.  And never fear–pdfsam is free.

If you don’t care too much about watermarks on the PDF, ScanToPDF is a nice, quick PDF scanner.  There’s a paid version which does not leave watermarks, of course, but it, of course, has a price.  If you’re just scanning in receipts or billing statements, you may not care about the watermark.  (The version I use–the unlimited evaluation version 3.x–uses a very light blue watermark.  The 4.x version uses a bold red watermark that’s not easily missed.  You may want to try to find the 3.x version.)  The reason I like this is that it quickly allows you to rearrange pages in case you got one out of order; or had to rescan a page.  It also lets you scan pages and add them to an existing PDF–at the front or the end.  Unfortunately, ScanToPDF doesn’t allow you to select multiple pages and save just a subset of the pages as a PDF–just one page or all of them.

I love PDFzilla as a PDF reader.  And, yes, it’s free.  I think it leaves less of a memory footprint than PDFzilla.  And PDFzilla has tabs, just like your favorite Firefox browser or Thunderbird email program.

I hope this has helped!

-Kevin

Welcome!

I plan on putting up tips, tricks, notes, etc., of whatever comes to mind if it relates to tech. I spend a lot of time on the Internet and my computer figuring out how to do a multitude of things–whether it be Microsoft Office, Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, various open source programs, photo-editing, PDF processing, converting, and editing, or a MULTITUDE of other things.

I’ve come to realize that, yes, I know a lot about computers, and I know that there are those out there that know much more than I do, but there saying you’re good at “computers,” is like a pediatrician saying he’s good at “medicine.” He’s well-taught and knowledgeable about general pediatric medicine, of course, but don’t go to him for brain surgery or a new heart valve. There’s a wide range of IT fields out there and we all rely on one another to develop the entire industry and assist the masses of “non-computer geeks.”

Tech on!