Disable Aero Peek

Am I the only one that get easily annoyed by the Aero Peek feature in Windows 7? It gets pretty bad when you're working with multiple monitors and accidentally hover over a taskbar window icon. Its almost like a miniature light show. :/

Here's how to disable all that craziness:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5473/make-aero-peek-display-instantly-or-disable-it-in-windows-7/

</rant>

Windows 7 Upgrade Scenarios

Microsoft has published the various upgrade paths for Windows 7. Its not as complicated as I expected, but still complicated for the average user. A visual representation here.

BY the way can someone explain to me the difference between “Upgrade to Windows 7” and  “Anytime Upgrade to Windows 7”?

Adding outbound Windows Firewall rules using Powershell

This is something I wrote a while back, thought I’d post it here. It does exactly what the title says. Its basically a port of the following:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364695(VS.85).aspx

Microsoft End of Support Lifecycle Dates

Posting this here hoping that it may save me a few minutes of googling in the future.

Pretty Much all Microsoft Products
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselectindex

Servers - Service Packs
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/LifeSupSps#Servers

Non-Server Windows
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx

Unable to restore Virtual PC Console

Well, I've had this happen to me more than a few occasions now. This is where the console appears to remain minimized. Doesn't seem to affect functionality but can get really annoying. I'm not sure what exactly causes it but I'm going to post the fix here so I don't have to look for it every time happens.

Virutal PC has an aptly named file called options.xml to maintain settings related to the console. Its located here:

C:\Documents and Settings\{windows account name}\Application
Data\Microsoft\Virtual PC\Options.xml

(Replace {windows account name} with your windows account name)

What we're interested is in this set of tags:

<window>
    <console>
        {...snip...}
        <left_position type="integer">0</left_position>
        <top_position type="integer">0</top_position>
        {...snip...}
    </console>
        {...snip...}
</window>

You should have some obscene values for the above keys. Just reset them to 0, restart Virtual PC and you're good to go.

Find the System Uptime of your Windows/Linux Box

Ever wanted to find how long your Windows/Linux Box has been running?

For Windows

The Microsoft site suggests the following methods:

use the net statistics server command. Which can be re-written as net stats srv | Find "Statistics since" so we just get the info we are concerned about.

Or use a UpTime tool which does just that.

And my personal favorite method:

systeminfo | Find "Up Time"

Again, extracting only the information relevant to us.

For Linux

For the Linux environment we have the Uptime command:

uptime gives a one line display of the following information. The current time, how long the system has been running, how many users are currently logged on, and the system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

Development and Vista

Visual Studio vs. Vista: What's going on here?

What's going on here indeed?

I understand that applications/operating systems cannot always have full backward compatibility. But the inability to run their flagship development environment on their (near) future flag ship OS is just insane.

I'm sure that Microsoft will eventually issue some patches/fixes. But until then this is only hurt the adoption rate of Vista by developers and more importantly businesses.