Check out TFS files directly from SQL Server Management Studio

The other day I explained how to configure the external tools feature of Edit Pad Pro to allow direct checking out of files from TFS.

Today I did the same thing in SQL Server Management Studio.

Configuring TFS Checkout in SQL Server Management Studio

Here are pictorial instructions:

Command: we are using the environment variable created by VS2012 to provide a generic path to the TF.exe command line tool. If you are not using VS2012, open a command prompt, type "set" and see which path is closest. Alternatively, just put in the absolute path to tf.exe.

If you do not have Visual Studio at all you can install the standalone Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2012 which includes tf.exe.

Arguments: we are passing the "checkout" command to tf.exe with a parameter of the full path to the .sql file we are working on.

Use Output window: this is optional but it will show you the information returned by the tf.exe command line tool.

Using the External Tool

This is simple. The tool item you just created now shows up in the Tools menu. Just click it and it will checkout the current file you have open in the IDE.

Last Words

There is a small annoyance: SSMS will try to save all unsaved files before running the external tool. In this case, if we've modified the file then it will try and save over a Read-only file, causing it to try and Save As to a new file name.

I believe this is a bug in SSMS, or a well-intentioned, yet obstructive feature. I can't see a way to disable this behaviour. Just press Escape to avoid this - the external tool will then run.

Let me know in the comments if you need any more information!

How to automate TFS checkouts from EditPad Pro

I am a long time user of the great EditPad Pro from JGsoft. I use it for text file manipulation and basic programming. I starting using it when it was at version 3 or 4; purchased it at version 5, and even upgraded my licence to 6 and 7!

You may find Text Editors boring - understandable! They are one of those types of software that is not particularly exciting, but for certain people, they are an essential tool. And if they perform slowly or lack intricate features, they will be quickly superseded by something better.

Developers need a powerful text editor. End of story.

As a developer you have to deal with a multitude of file types - config files, data import/export files, source code, database queries, and so on. Often you need to quickly search files, or change their contents and produce a new file.

EditPad Pro is an awesome tool for getting in there and quickly doing what you need. As I mentioned, I've used it for many years

It's an indispensable tool for me. This is due to features such as:

• Customisable syntax highlighting for a very wide range of file types, e.g. sql, vbs, sh, XML
• Powerful regular expression search and replace (actually I also bought RegexBuddy from JGsoft to make constructing these easier)
• Stable handling of very large text files
• Fast operation - fast to load, never laggy
• External tool support - which is the point of this post!

Integrating TFS checkout into EditPad Pro

In my current job, we use Team Foundation Server for source control. Visual Studio 2010 has great integration, in that it automatically checks out files when you try to edit them. 

However, we also store various other file types in TFS, which we do not edit in Visual Studio. Personally, I use EditPad Pro (EPP) to edit these. I have been manually checking out the files when I need to edit them using the Shell Integration provided by the TFS Power Tools. This works fine, but becomes tedious. 

Then I remembered that I could integrate the TFS command line application into EPP!

The screenshots below will show you how to do it, but in brief:

1. Open a file from your TFS working copy, that is currently checked in (Read Only)
2. Click on the Tools menu, then Configure Tools...
3. Configure the command line and add a keyboard shortcut. If you want it in the toolbar, you can check 'Show caption on toolbar'
4. Close the Tools dialogue and press your keyboard shortcut.
5. Your file is now checked out!

Now a bit more detail...

Tool Definition

This is where you set up the command line to run, and add the placeholders which pass the information from EPP to the command line tool.

In this case it is very simple:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe" checkout "%FILE%"

Your path to TF.exe may differ - just search your C drive.

The important part to note is you need the "" around the %FILE% placeholder to ensure that if you have spaces in the path to the file, this will be handled correctly.

TF.exe does not require the working folder to be set.

Tool Definition - set up the command line here

Files dialog

You don't really need to set anything up here, but if you like, you can check 'Reload the current file'. This ensures the latest version checked out from TFS will be displayed. EPP should automatically reload the file anyway though, so it's not strictly required. (You can set this behaviour in the main Preferences dialogue, under Open Files: check 'Automatically reload the active file if it was modified on disk.')

This section may be more useful to you if you want to do something like save your local copy in another temp file before you check out. You could tick the second option to do this.

If you are setting up a TFS check-in task, then you would check the first option to make sure the file is saved before checking in.

Tool file actions - optional

Standard I/O Dialogue

This is useful in case we get any errors. In this case, I set up the standard error to redirect to the message panel. This means you will see any errors if they occur (e.g. TFS down)

You can also set this to save the standard output to the message panel or to a new file. We don't need it in this case, because the standard output just tells us the file was checked out!

These settings are most used for tools which take your file's contents, change them, and produce modified output. With these tools, it's ideal to set the standard output to capture to a new tab. I have done this when using perl scripts to format files, etc.

Standard I/O - where to send the command line output

So there you go - look how easy it is to integrate an external tool into your text editor - and save yourself a lot of tedious clicks AND time!

If you are interested in trying out EditPad Pro - it's your lucky day! You can get a 30 day trial of EPP right here. Once the trial ends, it just switches to the Lite version, so you can keep using it forever.

VPS.NET cloud hosting review

This post is a first hand review of the VPS hosting services offered by VPS.NET, known as VPS Cloud Server. I'll keep it brief and focus on the benefits and disadvantages of their service.

My background as a web consultant and developer means that I've had experience with a wide range of web servers and hosting plans: shared, virtual server, dedicated, and internally managed corporate servers. I currently have accounts with four other hosting providers for various purposes.

The timing of this review is funny in a way. I've had an account with VPS.NET since November 2009, and until recently have had hardly any technical issues.

What's good about VPS.NET:

• The node concept - you buy nodes and arrange them into VPS's. A node = 376MB RAM, 600 MHz CPU, 10GB SAN storage. They get cheaper as you buy more (currently they are $8 each!)
• Control - they use a custom control panel (which is based on OnApp) which is breath of fresh air from CPanel. It's easy to scale your VPS, add another VPS, manage backups, get your invoices, submit support requests, and so on. This panel is great. It may even be better than Dreamhost's custom panel, of which I am also a fan.
• DNS management - easy and simple. You can use softlayer.com or vps.net servers.
• Large amount of operating systems to deploy - including Windows 2008, Debian, Ubuntu, CloudLinux, JumpBox and more. They also include a LOT of preconfigured templates for common applications, such as Asterisk, Magento, Wordpress, Bugzilla, Nagios, etc. This saves a lot of time.
• Flexible offerings - I like how they have somewhat commoditised hosting and created a system by which you can add various add-ons to your account. I outline some of the add-ons below. In short, the modularisation of the service is a very good thing, and something they've done really well.
• Lots of locations: 3 cities in the USA, 2 in Europe, 1 in Asia (Japan) - and some have multiple zones (which I think means data centres)
• Support: I've found them to be quick to respond any time of the day, and straight to the point. This includes Tech and Billing. I only have good things to say about vps.net Support. They also just added phone support, which is a plus.

Some of the add-ons that I make use of:

• Server Density monitoring - quick to set up and allows you to monitor load and other things of your system, Apache, MySQL, and much more. VPS.NET have brokered a cheaper licence from SD. Integration and setup is quite easy. The only problem with this type of licence is that it does not allow you to use the community contributed plugins from SD. This is a shame because I really wanted to add php-fpm monitoring, among other things. To use this, you need to sign up directly with SD, which voids the need for the VPS.NET add-on.
• Rsync backups - basically they provide offsite storage to the same capacity of your VPS and simple instructions to set up secure rsync over ssh. You then set up your own rsync (ask me in the comments if you want help setting up rsync backups.) script and stick it on cron.
• Snapshot backups - for $5/mth per VPS this gives you a daily, weekly, and monthly snapshot backup, as well as one manual backup you can use to create templates for future VPS deployments.
• Managed support - for $99/mth/VPS you can have pro support to help you with upgrades, security hardening, and a lot of other stuff.

So all of the above is a winning recipe, but unfortunately there's one major issue that erodes a lot of the benefit. That is hardware stability.

Originally I signed up with a VPS on the Chicago-C cloud. For over a year I found this to be great. Fast performance and very little downtime. All hosts experience downtime, and I have come to expect a few hours here and there. 

In September VPS.NET asked everyone on CHI-C to move their VPS's to CHI-A, with their help. I ended up moving to CHI-D so I could use a Debian 6 template for the new VPS. The whole point of this move was to retire CHI-C, which apparently had been victim to ongoing problems and power outages. To be honest, I had been really happy with the stability of CHI-C!

As I said above, I recently began to experience system instability. This is related to the fact that all VPS storage resides on SAN storage. This is all good in theory, but based on my personal experience with SANs - they are great when they work but they seem to provide a single point of failure. And one which affects a lot of stuff.

I am not an expert but this seems to be because the failover mechanism of a SAN is to synchronise everything to the failover partner. This takes a very long time when you are syncing the data for hundreds of VPS's. I have seen similar SAN failures in large enterprises, with similar delayed restoration scenarios.

Just look at the running totals here for the data centre my VPS is on: http://status.vps.net/2011/10/chi-d-cloud/ You can see the synchronisation takes a LONG time to complete.

In fact if you search status.vps.net for SAN you will see many errors, affecting every zone.

SAN vs local is a big discussion, which I could not possibly cover here, but in general I believe:

SAN's provide an elastic storage solution, fault tolerance, and other benefits, but in my opinion they are not the ideal solution for a web server. The average web site does not require that much storage space, and the files stored generally need to be accessed often, and quickly. A local RAID storage solution makes more sense to me, in most cases. This provides better isolation both in terms of performance and faults. Yes, if a drive fails in with local storage, this may require downtime. But often, with hot-swap RAID solutions, it will not. And if there is downtime, it will be less, simply because there is less data to copy/rebuild.

Enough about storage...

This post is about VPS.NET but I think it'll help to compare to another VPS provider I've got a lot of history with: Dreamhost.

I've had a Dreamhost VPS for well over 2 years and have never had hardware-related downtime. With Dreamhost, I have only experienced downtime due to network connectivity and from overloading the box with too much traffic! Dreamhost told me that their VPS's run with local storage. While there are obvious benefits to SANs, from a stability point of view, just based on what I've personally seen, I'd rather have local storage for a web server.

As an aside, you may be wondering, why I have VPS with two companies? 

Well, I had the Dreamhost one for quite a while, and added many sites over time. Mostly Wordpress sites, which routinely use a tonne of RAM! I kept hitting the limit of the VPS, and had to increase the resources. My choice was to keep spending more with Dreamhost or move a few sites to another host. Dreamhost VPS's give you a kind sudo root access, which means you can install pretty much whatever you want, but it's not as straight forward as having actual root access. They also do not give a choice of Linux distro. At the time I was keen to play with alternate web servers like lighttpd, and PHP extensions like apc and php-fpm. This was not easily possible with Dreamhost, so I chose to try vps.net, who provide full root access.

Before I forget, a few other things that VPS.NET could improve on IMHO:

• Central SMTP server for customers would be a big help. I understand why they don't do it though (I'm looking at you spammers.)
• Add-on pro-rating (is that a word?) - their billing system does a good job of pro-rating services when you add them, e.g. if I add backups 75% through the month, they will debit $1.25 from my account. However, if I then remove it two days later - no refund. I don't care about a few bucks, but I've heard that Linode actually do this. It'd be nice from a completeness point of view. Please correct me if I'm wrong. For larger amounts, where I have dropped nodes, I've asked billing to credit me and they have quickly and graciously done so.
• Scaling - some VPS providers allow you to almost instantly increase your RAM and CPU share, without a reboot. To do so with VPS.NET means adding 1 or more nodes, and then rebooting your VPS. This also provisions additional storage to your VPS. I think I saw somewhere that they were working on instant scaling. This would be a great benefit.
• CPUs - for some reason on my VPS I have access to 3 Xen vCPUs. Most other providers I've seen offer 4.

So at the moment I'm shopping around for a new host for my, and my client's websites because I need maximum stability. It's a shame because moving a whole heap of sites is time consuming. But explaining downtime is not something I want to spend time on, and losing advertising revenue from other sites I run is also clearly a bad outcome!

My final thoughts on VPS.NET: they have most of the ingredients in place for a winning service. They are relatively communicative, and seem to genuinely want to create a service that is a cut above the rest. They have implemented some very creative features, and innovate regularly. They just really need to spend some time on their infrastructure and consider some ways to remove the dependence from the SANs, or improve their reliability. I have heard rumblings from management that they are in the process of improving the VPS infrastructure. This review is based on the current state of affairs, which, of course, I hope improves.

Their redundant geo-hosting service looks like a step in the right direction, but it's still in beta, so we'll see how it pans out.

Once I find alternate hosting for the clients I have on vps.net, I'll probably reduce my nodes with them and continue to use the VPS for less important sites. But even if I leave completely, I'm sure I'll be back when the dust settles.

Based on their affordability, flexibility and creativity, I absolutely recommend them for non-mission critical purposes. However, if you set up redundancy with another provider (e.g. with MySQL replication, rsync, etc) then VPS.net could be a fantastically affordable part of that solution. I am certainly considering this as an alternative option to finding yet another host: if I am going to set things up all over again, I may as well leave a redundant copy on vps.net, perhaps with a reduced set of nodes.

As a general comment I'll say that VPS is an excellent solution if you have unusual requirements. The powerful control panel and modular nature of features allows you to mix and match different technologies, and quickly add VPS's for testing. In that respect I feel they are a great component as part of your whole web infrastructure - just not [yet] necessarily the primary component.

Check out all the VPS.NET plans here. 

Note to future readers: Remember this review was written in November 2011, so if you are reading this in 2012, I am pretty sure that the VPS.NET storage issues have improved.

If you'd like to try Dreamhost VPS - sign up here for a two week free trial, and use the promo code RANDOMVPS to save $50 if you decide to stay!

Windows Live Essentials 2011 Web Installer from Behind a Proxy

You probably found this post because you tried to install Windows Live Essentials via the web installer (wlsetup-web.exe) and it sat on the 'Preparing to install...' screen for a while and you got this error:

Couldn't set up the installer
Check to be sure you are connected to the Internet

Details:
You cannot download Windows Live programs unless you're connected to the Internet.
Error: 0x8104000d
Source: WaitForCatalog

If you are sure you are connected to the Internet (i.e. other programs like your web browser work) then the problem is likely to be:

• It is being blocked by a Firewall - this could be the Windows Firewall, or could be built into a product like Norton Internet Security, or Sophos Protection, or could be a corporate firewall on your network.
• Your web traffic is routed through a proxy which is specially configured in your browser, and may require authentication with your Windows (or other) credentials. The issue with this approach, is that many Windows applications are not proxy-aware and assume they have a straight, unauthenticated connection to port 80 on external servers.

If you have a  firewall on your PC, temporarily allow all traffic and see if the installer will work. If you are behind a separate firewall, you would need to ask the system administrator to help you.


Relating to the second point above, if you are behind an HTTP proxy that you don't have control over (say at work), which is not configured to be completely transparent, then the Windows Live Web installer will not work.

It won't know how to connect to Microsoft's download server to get the packages for installation.

To my knowledge there is no standalone 'full' installer available, so we need to help it to use a proxy connection.
There is an offline installer for Windows Live Essentials, so you can use that if you don't want to mess with your proxy settings. It is 215 MB, though, so if you're short on bandwidth you should persevere with the web installer as this will only download what you select. Download Windows Live Essentials full install here.


On Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008, you need to do this:

Open a Windows command prompt - type cmd in the Start Menu

Type: netsh winhttp

You should then see:

netsh winhttp>_

then type:

set proxy yourproxyserver.example.com:port ""

OR, if you want to exclude some other domains:

set proxy yourproxyserver.example.com:port ";*.domain1.com;*.domain2.com"

(port should be 8080 or 3128 usually)


Then restart the Windows Live installer.

After it has installed, you can go back to the netsh prompt and clear your changes with:

reset proxy



Having trouble? Let us know in the comments!

How to force Internet Explorer to prompt for Basic Authentication credentials

1. Browse to the site you want to specify credentials for

2. Internet Options -> Security

3. The current zone will be selected. Click on "Custom level..."

4. Scroll to the bottom, and under "User Authentication -> Logon", click "Prompt for user name and password".

5. Click OK and close browser.

6. Reopen and go to your site.

A couple of useful tools for managing stored credentials in Windows Vista/7

While messing around with a problem with cached IE credntials today, I came across these Windows user management tools.

(put the commands into the "Run" box in the start menu)

Stored usernames and passwords:

Command: rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr

- in this tool you can see commonly stored credentials for websites, servers and programs. Some interesting things in here. TBH, not entirely sure what these are used for!
- this is also useful if you want to transfer all your credentials over to another computer.

User Accounts

Command: control userpasswords2
- this is a simplified version of the usual user manager
- under Advanced -> Passwords, you can get to the stored usernames tool mentioned above

Regular user manager
Command: lusrmgr

Latest Intel Drivers Tool

Not having the latest chipset drivers for your motherboard, storage controllers, graphics card, and even audio chips can significantly affect the performance of your computer.

Intel have quite a useful tool I used today which automatically detects which drivers need to be updated and gives you links to the required downloads.

There are actual multiple tools for all types, or each type of driver:

• All types
• Desktop motherboards
• Wired network
• Wireless network

(requires Java – if you haven’t already, you might need to install the Java browser plugins and restart your browser. If the tool hangs on “Installing…” just refresh the page, and click the Check button again)

Get Good at Javascript

Years ago when I first started doing web development, I hated Javascript. It was extremely problematic across multiple browsers, due to bugs and incompatibilities. We generally avoided it.

Fast forward to now and things have radically changed.

• Javascript is now essential
• Frameworks like jQuery have removed much of the pain from JavaScript programming, and have arguably made it FUN! This has resulted in a an explosion in the popularity of JavaScript.
• All web developers need to be proficient at JavaScript now.

So, if you are like me, you may know a bit about JavaScript - "enough to be dangerous," as they say - but you want to become properly proficient. After all, there's no point pasting bits of code from samples and hoping they'll work.

It's much safer for your clients, and more satisfying for you, if you understand the real intention behind Javascript, and the best ways to use it.

In such a fast-evolving area, the best thing to do is to follow the pace-setters. So here are a few recommended resources for helping you program JavaScript (and jQuery) in the best practice and modern way:

JavaScript:

• Start here: http://javascript.crockford.com/
• Book: JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
  
• Many fantastic videos here (including videos to match the above book): Javascript videos @ Yahoo
• Big list of JavaScript tools 

jQuery:

• 25 tips to improve your jQuery
• 10 things I learned from the jQuery Source by Paul Irish

(More links to come - subscribe to the RSS feed to get them)

Slow right-click Windows context menus got you down?

Here's what to do:

Use the free application ShellExView from Nirsoft to find unnecessary context menu items and disable them. This can actually have a big effect on the noticeable performance of your menus. Psychologically, this can result in a much more enjoyable computer use experience.

1. Download the program
2. Start it up.
3. Sort by Type and scroll down to Context Menu
4. Look for the items in red first - they are non-Microsoft applications.
5. For each item you want to disable, press F7 or right-click and select Disable. This happens instantly so you can right click on a file or folder in Windows explorer and see the result. You can also disable MS items.

This tool works on any version of Windows from 98 up to Windows 7 64 bit.
Thanks to this blog post for the tip!

Don't forget to donate to NirSoft if you feel like it helped you.

If you need help, just ask in the comments!

Download Adobe Reader without using Adobe DLM

When you go to Adobe's site to download Adobe Reader in Firefox or IE, they force you to install their 'download manager' add-on. Why? Not really sure. Perhaps they are using it for statistics, or something else.

(In IE, they also try and bundle the Google Toolbar - the nerve!!)

Most of us have enough garbage on our PC's and don't need yet another useless (well, single-use) addon!

So here's a direct link to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows: http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/10.x/10.1.3/en_US/AdbeRdr1013_en_US.exe (updated 27/7/2012)

Update: If you are using Chrome, the DLM download is not triggered. Go here to get Adobe Reader.

Should be fairly easy to guess the path as they release new versions.

Homework for mac users: figure out the corresponding URL!

The Microsoft Store

I only recently became aware of the Microsoft Store. It seems they are trying hard to improve the experience people get when they buy a Windows PC.

I actually heard about it on Windows Weekly, when they had a representative from that division on. He was talking about the 'Signature' program, which actually sounds pretty cool. The basic idea is to strip away all the garbage that you usually get on a new PC, as well as pre-configuring Windows and other common software with recommended settings.

The end goal? A PC you can boot up and be using to do actual productive work within a minute. The alternative has traditionally been to spend an evening configuring things, removing trial-ware, and getting it how you like it. Check out the whole Signature thing at the Microsoft store.

Update!
Over President's Day weekend, there's a special deal: $150 off a new PC from the Windows Store - click here for details!

Laptop Upgrade: Faster Hard Drive

Last month, in an incident involving a wriggling baby, my reliable Dell Studio 1537 was dropped on a tiled floor. It made some strange noises (coming from the hard drive), valiantly tried to boot Windows, but then ended up freezing on the BIOS screen.

I don't trust laptops as the primary source of important data, so this was not a data recovery issue. I was more interested in preserving the laptop or at least the drive for general use. Considering I've been looking at buying a new laptop, I wasn't so keen on replacing parts on this one.

Being a longtime fan of Steve Gibson, and listener of Security Now, I bought SpinRite 6 and fired it up.

After leaving SpinRite running on level 2 overnight, the hard drive appeared extremely sick. SpinRite reported 90 days to get through the entire 500GB drive, which meant drive access was VERY slow.

At that point, I switched it off. I had two options:

1. New laptop ~ $800+
2. New hard drive ~ $50-700

A fairly minor fall such as this one, was unlikely to damage anything but the hard drive (or the screen, which was fine.) So it was a safe bet that a new hard drive would get the laptop up and running again.

Now 3 more options, regarding the replacement drive:

1. similar 5400RPM cheap drive
2. 7200RPM performance drive
3. SSD for ultimate performance

Being a computer geek, I could NEVER bring myself to simply replace the drive with another crappy one. That's far too practical. SSD would be fantastic, but a good one, with enough space (128GB+) is almost the same price as a new laptop. Keep in mind, this laptop is almost 2 years old, meaning in another year or so I'd probably retire it to media centre or home automation duties.

The mid-level performance drive was the way to go.

Ah, but here's what I didn't mention before - there was a fourth option - option 2.5, if you will: a hybrid SATA/SSD drive! These are an awesome balance between price and performance. The main thing to know is that overall performance of these drives is between a 10,000 RPM and an SSD drive - for a great price.

If you read hybrid drive reviews, you'll immediately see that (at the time of writing) the Seagate Momentus XT is the drive to get. Even though they make a 500GB model, I chose a 320GB model to save a bit of cash - I definitely wasn't even close to using the 500GB drive.

The Seagate Momentus XT is the clear choice because they get fantastic reviews and are very fast. The regular SATA drive is 7200RPM and has 32MB of cache.

Just quickly, if you're wondering how these drives make things faster, a very basic explanation is that the 4GB SSD is used as a cache for frequently accessed files. This means if you are using Photoshop, then all the files that Photoshop is using will be loaded in the SSD, thus giving you SSD-like performance for that application. It's more complicated than that (since the operating system's files are also partially loaded in the SSD) but the drive's technology makes an effort to prioritise files that are used more often than others, over time.

Anyway, it's faster!

And to give you an idea of performance increase, here are the typical performance improvements quoted when comparing Hybrid to 7200rpm SATA drives:

• Boot time: 40% quicker
• ITunes: 40%
• Adobe Photoshop: 20%

Did I notice the speed difference?

In a word, YES! 

My laptop is now noticeably more responsive. Windows resumes from sleep much faster, and also boots noticeably faster. I also find Firefox is much more responsive, being the performance hog that it it.

I am going to get one for my desktop too - as I feel the normal SATA drive is really holding back my Core i7 processor in some types of operations.

OK, I want one too! Where do I get it?

In Australia, it's best to buy parts like this from small-mid online computer retailers since we don't really have PC Parts megastores.

But in the USA or Canada you should check out the hard drives sections here for the best prices and easy shipping/returns etc.. :

• Newegg.com USA
• Amazon.com USA
• Newegg.ca Canada
• Amazon.ca Canada
  

[By the way: I just noticed Amazon USA is doing a deal on this drive at the moment - $100 with free shipping anywhere in the US - check it out here!]

The silver lining?
The cool thing about this incident, was that the original hard drive was a fairly slow 5400RPM Samsung. The new Seagate has an average read time of about 3 times faster - now programs load noticeably quicker in Windows!

If you are underwhelmed by the speed of your laptop, I highly recommend upgrading the hard drive, since it's a pretty cheap easy upgrade overall. If you have less than 4GB of RAM, then you should definitely update your RAM now - another cheap and even easier upgrade.

If you have the money, then consider buying a full blown SSD drive. They are not cheap

If your laptop is still under warranty, then perhaps consider buying an official upgrade - but if not, then do it yourself! It's easy, fun, and rewarding when are using a machine, whose improvement you are responsible for!

Good luck and please post all questions in the comments here - I'll be happy to help you out.

For those of you considering a new laptop

... then you're probably looking at getting an Intel Sandy Bridge powered device. The new platform offers great performance and much improved battery life. Great, right?

Yes, in theory - but it has a big fat FLAW in it. A design flaw in the chipset can cause your SATA performance to be severely impacted. Intel are working a fix but replacement devices are due in April at the earliest.

Anyway, this site has a lot of useful information about Sandy Bridge laptops.

In particular, there's a post from today which explains how you can get a Sandy Bridge device returned, depending on the manufacturer.

Check it out - but unfortunately you will need to wait until end of March to put in your orders! Oh well.

Editing document properties in Microsoft Word 2007

Nothing new here, but a lot of people have trouble finding this in Microsoft Word.
1. Click on the Office icon in the top left:
2. Click on Prepare -> Properties
3. There is a menu in the top left of the panel that has just appeared. Click where it says Document Properties, then click Advanced Properties.
4. Click on the Custom tab, and there you have it.

Bonus Tip!


Once you've updated your fields and clicked OK, you need the updates to reflect in the document. To do this:

Press Ctrl-A
Press F9

Happy Wordsmithing!