Windows Tools, Help & Guides

After releasing the PC Security Handbook Second Edition and the PC Maintenance Handbook Second Edition, we asked you which handbook you’d like to see next. The options were:

The results were very enlightening:

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The latest version of Microsoft Virtual PC lets you run applications installed on your virtual Windows XP Mode in Windows 7 without loading the whole operating system in the background. In this guide you’ll learn:

• How to turn on Auto Publish to view programs on Windows 7’s start menu.
• How to run Windows XP Mode applications in Windows 7.
• How to add XP Mode programs to Windows 7’s start menu.
• How to exclude XP Mode programs from Windows 7’s start menu.

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Update: More information on RAID can be found here.

And who wouldn’t put their hands up for RAID? The Redundant Array of Independent disks can improve your disk performance, or give you data integrity, or both.

Windows Media Center provides an excellent home for your digital entertainment — and like any excellent home you want to pack more and more into it. Take a look at your physical collections — photos, albums, CD’s, DVDs, video tapes, etc. If you are into home entertainment then you’ve probably collected plenty of good stuff. The same thing will happen to your digital collection. Before long you will outgrow a single drive, then two. Around the time you get your third drive and file searches need three separate operations you’ll start looking around for a better storage system.

Adding a RAID Controller card and an array of 3 or more hard drives will combine those separate drives (minus a bit of space for safe data storage) into a single virtual drive that is easier to manage and provides protection against a single disk failure. It may improve your disk performance, depending on how you configure it.

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We have a number of new writers on the team lately and, in this article, I’d like to share a little about each of our writers so you can get to know us all a little better.

Here’s a quick overview of the team:

	Name (Username)	Joined Team	Location	Operating System	Profile
	RSVR85	September 2009			rsvr85
	Mike	November 2009			Mike
	Thomas	January 2010			Thomas
	Harry	February 2010			Harry
	Steven Downer (DarkNovaGamer)	March 2010			DarkNovaGamer
	Angel Luis	April 2010			Angel Luis
	Taylor Ling (ghost 301)	July 2010			ghost301
	Deck Hazen (Deck)	July 2010			Deck
	swooper	July 2010			swooper
	Spazz	August 2010			Spazz
	N J West (Nicholas)	October 2009			Nicholas
	ashmsa (Scragg)	January 2010			Scragg
	sergiogarcia9	May 2010			sergiogarcia9
	Rich Robinson (Rich)	February 2008			Rich

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First of all, it is fair to say, that this article is written by a former Mozilla Firefox user of many years and a current Google Chrome user.

Microsoft is planning to release the beta of Internet Explorer on September 15, 2010. Before the beta arrives, we can see many of the new features in the Internet Explorer Platform Preview.

The most recent Platform 4th was released on august 4.

Since the beginnings of Internet Explorer, it’s had two main problems: support of web standards and poor performance.

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When you’re using Windows XP Mode in Windows 7, you’ll likely need to access files on your host (Windows 7) machine. Luckily, Windows Virtual PC makes this really easy and there’s not much you have to do. In this guide, I’ll show you how to access your files in the intended way and also show you a trick that will make file sharing between the two operating systems even easier. Specifically, this guide covers the following topics:

• Basic file sharing.
• Customizing file sharing.
• Sharing removable devices (USB drives.)
• Send files to your host machine via the “Send to” menu.

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