Dave’s Answer:

It’s possible to copy and paste within a Microsoft Windows command prompt, and to copy and paste text to/from other programs, but the commands and keyboard keys to do so are different from most other Windows programs.

Pressing Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V do not work, and selecting text within a command prompt to copy, requires a few more steps.

To paste text within a command prompt that has been copied from another program, is the easiest. Simply copy the text from the other program, then right-click inside the command prompt window and pick “Paste”:

To copy text from a command prompt is a bit more awkward. As you know from using Microsoft Word and many other programs, when you select text on the screen, the selection runs from the first word you selected, to the last word:

Inside a command prompt, on the other hand, the “selected” text doesn’t run from the first selected word, in straight lines from left to right across the command prompt window, to the last selected word. Instead, you can only select text within a command prompt that lies inside a perfect rectangle!

For example, suppose you were trying to type “ipconfig” inside a command prompt, and you accidentally typed “ioconfig” and got this error message:

You want to copy this error message and e-mail it to your friend to ask them what went wrong. To select text within the command prompt window, first right-click anywhere inside the command prompt and pick “Mark”:

Then, to select text, you left-click inside the command prompt window, and drag the mouse pointer to create a rectangle outlining the text that you want to copy:

And then to actually copy the selected text, hit the Enter key. Observe that in this case, the selection really did only include the text inside the rectangle, rather than running to the end of the line, back to the beginning of the next line and so on. So if you paste the selected text into another program, it really will only paste the text that was included in the rectangle:

(It’s a bit difficult to explain why text selection works this way in a command prompt, but it has to do with the history of the command prompt interface, which goes all the way back to DOS, the forerunner of Microsoft Windows from the 1980s. Essentially, the command prompt interface only “knows” that its output consists of a pattern of characters that are displayed in certain fixed positions on the screen, in a grid that happens to be exactly 80 characters wide and 45 lines high. These characters could be text, or graphics from a primitive computer game that displayed graphics by filling the screen with letters in a certain pattern — the command prompt doesn’t “know” that the characters consist of text, and that the user wants to select a block of text that runs to the end of the line, then starts at the beginning of the next line, and so on. Just realize that Microsoft didn’t design the command prompt interface this way just to screw with you.)

So to copy the entire text of the error, you have to click and drag a rectangle around the entire text that you want to select:

and then hit Enter to copy the text to your clipboard. Then you can paste it in an e-mail message to your friend.

Bennett Haselton is a technology and political blogger who writes guest articles for AskDaveTaylor, but his real passion lies elsewhere, like telling people how to bypass 8e6 filtering software.

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Dave’s Answer:

A typical digital camera takes pictures with a file size of about 3 megabytes. This can become inconvenient if you want to e-mail several pictures to a friend or upload a large number of pictures to a photo sharing site like Facebook. Fortunately, it is possible to shrink down the file size of the pictures without changing their appearance.

Confusingly, when you open one of these enormous picture files on Windows, it often opens in a program that shrinks the picture down to fit your screen, which is convenient, but conceals the fact of how large the picture really is.

When I open one of these 3 megabyte pictures in Windows, for example, by default it opens in a program called Windows Picture and Fax Viewer:

In order to shrink down the file size of the picture, you need to open it in a different program called Paint. Right-click on the picture file, and on the right-click menu, pick “Open With >“, and on the sub-menu, pick “Paint” (the list of programs that appears on your sub-menu will be different from the list below, but “Paint” should be listed):

Whoa! When you open the photo in Paint, you may find that the picture is a lot larger than you thought it was. In Paint, my friend’s sleeve takes up more space on the screen than was used to display the entire picture in Picture and Fax Viewer:

To shrink the picture down, go to the “Image” menu, and pick “Stretch/Skew…”. The Stretch and Skew dialog appears:

The default values for “Height” and “Width” are both 100%. If you leave these defaults and click OK, then nothing will change (you’ve told Paint to leave the picture at 100% of its old height and width). Replace both “100″s with “25″ to shrink down the picture to 25% of its old height and width — this is about the right amount of resizing necessary to shrink a 3-megabyte photo down to the standard size that will fit comfortably on a screen — and click OK. Voila, the picture now appears at a manageable size:

Now go to the “File” menu and pick “Save As” to save a copy of the picture in its reduced form. (You’ll probably want to save a copy, rather than overwriting the original file, in case you ever decide you still need the larger original.) If the original picture was about 3 megabytes, then the reduced photo size will be less than 100 kilobytes, a much more manageable size to e-mail to friends and upload to photo sharing sites.

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PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant is available on Laplink’s website with special Windows 7 pre-release pricing of $14.95. This edition of PCmover provides Windows XP users with the ability to upgrade their existing computers to Windows 7 without having to reinstall applications or backup and restore data.

The challenge Windows XP users are facing is becoming widely known, as Microsoft does no support an “in-place upgrade” from XP to Windows 7. Even for Windows Vista users, Microsoft will only allow in-place upgrades to specific versions of Windows Vista.

“The various upgrade scenarios will be very confusing and frustrating for consumers,” said Thomas Koll, Laplink’s CEO.

“And businesses, especially smaller businesses, will also view this negatively. Our objective is to make upgrading to Windows 7 as easy and as simple as possible, so users can get all the benefits of a this new operating system - which is quite good - without all the hassle.”

Potential for upgrade problems is because out of the 66 upgrade scenarios outlined by Microsoft, only 14 are supported by Windows 7 as an in-place upgrade.

“The big issue is XP to Windows 7,” said Koll. “There are many other scenarios - even more than Microsoft has outlined, but the vast majority will be XP to Windows 7. Our estimates are up to 70% of computers are running XP and a majority of those will be upgraded to Windows 7.”

“Without PCmover, the user is forced to copy their data and settings to external media, install Windows 7, install all their applications, and then copy all their data and settings back to their PC. It requires external storage and it’s very time consuming. Plus, the user must find their old CDs and serial numbers to reinstall their applications. It’s not easy and a lot can go wrong.”

Note that you and/or your more youthful pal don’t need to be attending classes five days a week.  What Microsoft’s actually asked is that you supply it with a .edu email address, which is an even lower barrier to entry.

Then the deal will almost be yours.  All you’ll have to do is wait until October 22nd to download the upgrade version of Windows 7, since Microsoft doesn’t intend to give students early access to the operating system.

This offer’s good in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Korea, and Mexico (just be prepared to convert the $30 figure into local currencies).  Also, in the event you’re not ready to make the leap now, the offer’s good through January 3rd in most spots.

Microsoft’s move should help Windows 7 get a firm foothold on college campuses around the world.  It might even earn the corporation a few lifelong customers if people are impressed with its eagerness to help out students.

The new release allows organizations to begin a migration to Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system. In addition, Virtual Computer has integrated NxTop Center, its centralized management console, with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V.

“With the success of Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V evident in our customer base and the launch of Windows 7 just around the corner, Virtual Computer has aligned with Microsoft and its platforms to drive innovation into the desktop virtualization market,” said Virtual Computer president and CEO, Dan McCall.

“Unlike VDI solutions which are difficult to set up and expensive to deploy, NxTop is a breeze to implement using existing infrastructure. And, with NxTop`s ability to simultaneously run two operating systems on the user’s PC, we are lowering the bar for IT departments to roll out Windows 7 across their user base.”

So of the key features NxTop include:

*Utilization of local computing hardware for resource intensive applications and user-attached peripherals. This includes high performance graphics and no discernable change to the user`s computing environment when running as a single virtual machine.

* Support for desktop and laptop computers all running the same master image of the operating system.

* Minimal data-center investment and the ability to run on current PC hardware in the field.

* Smooth scalability curve without significant spikes in data center expenses as user thresholds are exceeded.

Dave’s Answer:

I’m not exactly sure what you’re experiencing that’s not working, but let me tell you how I hook up my HP DV2 Notebook to my Sony HDTV via the HDMI wire.

In three words.

Just Hook It Up.

Oh, wait, that’s four.

I’d suggest you start by unhooking the monitor and rebooting. Then hook it up again. When I plug in the HDMI cable on the HP laptop, I promptly see this:

If I do nothing, the display that’s on the TV is mirroring what’s on the computer screen. (Mirroring means that you get a duplication of every element: what shows up on your screen also shows up on the second screen, including the task bar, desktop icons, warning messages, and everything else)

If you’re not seeing this behavior when you plug in the second monitor, then you might need to have your computer “detect” monitors after you’ve plugged the second screen in. You can do that by following this path:

Get to the Control Panels by clicking on the Windows icon in the lower left corner and picking “Control Panels” from the pop-up menu. Now choose “Appearance and Personalization”:

Step in one more level by clicking on “Personalization”:

Ah, finally, click on “Display Settings” (the bottom option on the list) and you should see:

Here you can see I have a second screen hooked up (screen 1 is always the computer itself) and that the second screen is “to the left” of the main screen (which is important so that I know in what direction I should drag windows to get them to the TV screen).

If you don’t both monitors shown here, click on the “Identify Monitors” button and see what happens. If that doesn’t work either, I suggest you try either using another computer with your TV or a different second monitor, to see if you can isolate the problem.

Good luck!

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I sort of went along with that, after all I was leaving Microsoft partially because I thought that Microsoft didn’t have an interesting product pipeline and wasn’t going to get the Internet for the second time. Only this time I didn’t sense Bill Gates screaming “turn toward the Internet.” For the most part I was right, at least until this year.

Remember, when a blogger says something is “dead” it just means that it isn’t interesting anymore and/or is potentially going to get disrupted. Well, it’s clear that Office DID get disrupted, if you watch today’s videos that I’ve posted about Office 10.

Who disrupted Office? Apple did. Look at the new PowerPoint and you’ll see Microsoft telling Steve Jobs to “stay off our lawn.”

Who else disrupted Office? Google did. Look at the new Web collaboration features and you’ll see Microsoft telling Eric Schmidt to “stay off our lawn.”

What happened in the four years since I left Microsoft?

1. The amount of strategy taxes have gone down. What are strategy taxes? When a Microsoft product team, like Office, needs to support exclusively technology from another product team, like, say, Internet Explorer or Windows. Here they started the demo in Firefox, which tells me that a good chunk of strategy taxes have been thrown out the window.

2. Microsoft is finally figuring out how to deal with Google. Is Microsoft’s strategy perfect? No, but it’s good enough to stop the bleeding in a range of areas like search and, now, office productivity.
3. Innovation is back. I see lots of things that are damn cool in this suite. Think that copy and paste was over? Watch the video about how Microsoft improved copy and paste. Think email couldn’t be improved? Watch the Outlook 10 video and see just how many new features are there.
4. The Web is finally front and center on the Office team’s mind. Are they completely there yet? No. Will Google continue to be interesting for a range of tasks? Yes. But Microsoft just said to the marketplace that they won’t be outplayed on the Web and that’s pretty huge.
5. It’s not Office alone that will rejuvenate Microsoft. Bing is coming on strong. Xbox is rocking and rolling. Windows 7 looks absolutely superb and is blowing holes in Apple’s strategy, especially at the low end of the market which is much more important this year due to the crappy economy. One area where Microsoft still doesn’t look strong? Mobile. But if the Windows Mobile team makes a few more shifts toward the web it will be a key player there, too.
6. Microsoft has the time to turn its big boat that other companies don’t have. Microsoft has 14 — can you count them all? — billion dollar businesses. I don’t know of another company with that luxury.
7. Microsoft’s R&D is resurgent and is feeling its oats. I’ll have more to say about that later when I get a video up I made in Microsoft’s Cambridge R&D lab last week. But I see lots of things in this Office that came out of Microsoft’s R&D department, which has now been in a great new building for more than a year and is expanding world wide.

Anyway, what caught my eye? I will upgrade just for the new Outlook features. Watch that video to see why. Also the new Web features might get me back from Google Docs. That will be a tougher sale, but you can see tons of places where Microsoft has run way ahead of Google and Zoho here.

Keep in mind, though, that Microsoft’s Office never was dead as a business. In fact I’m pretty sure that in dollar volumes Microsoft sells more today than it did four years ago when it got “boring.” This new version looks like it’ll ensure that Microsoft Office is a successful business for years to come. Some things, it won’t be out until first half of 2010, which gives Google time to respond. Other things? We don’t know pricing and haven’t yet seen all the features revealed or demoed.

Here’s the videos I filmed at the press briefing that Chris Bryant, product manager on the Office 10 team, gave me:

Outlook 10 gets new productivity features:

New copy and paste features in Office 10:

Office 10 brings collaboration features to many devices:

More videos are coming shortly (I have five in total that are uploading now) but TechCrunch has a report on Office 10 now.

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The BBC reports

In January 2009, Brussels reached a “preliminary view” that Microsoft was denting the chance for true competition by bundling its browser software in with its operating system.

Microsoft has then taken the step to not offer IE in the Windows 7 operating system release in the EC regions.

“We’re committed to making Windows 7 available in Europe at the same time that it launches in the rest of the world,” Dave Heiner, said Microsoft deputy general counsel in a statement, “but we also must comply with European competition law as we launch the product.”

“We believe that this new approach, while not our first choice, is the best path forward given the ongoing legal case in Europe,” he added.

OK, so it looks like Microsoft is making a gesture toward remedying exactly what they are under scrutiny for. The EC, however, has been pushing for Microsoft to offer a choice of browsers and not eliminate the browser option completely. Hard to argue now however that Microsoft is getting the way of competition since they are offering nothing at all and letting the consumer decide. In addition, the consumer now has to go out and download their own browser to even get on the Internet, which will undoubtedly cause major issues for all. This will then solidify the EC’s attempts to improve commerce by heavily restricting it as being completely, well, clueless. Even in a world where government intervention in business is the ‘in thing’ this is just ridiculous and the EC is getting what it deserves.

John Paczkowski over at AllThingsD wraps up the EC’s bungling of this situation

Well played, Microsoft.

No wonder the EC is already wrinkling its nose at the move. “The commission had suggested to Microsoft that consumers be provided with a choice of web browsers,” the EC said in a statement issued late Thursday. “Instead Microsoft has apparently decided to supply retail consumers with a version of Windows without a web browser at all. Rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less.”

Hmm. Now who was it again that said Microsoft needs to “restore genuine consumer choice and enable competition on its merits?

Isn’t the true market driven choice that of the consumer being able to go anywhere to get the product they want? What if Microsoft doesn’t bundle every browser known to man in its operating system release? Will small niche players have a chance to petition the EC and stop the wheels of progress due to the ‘unfairness of it all”? Where will it end and why is it even an issue anyway? Doesn’t Microsoft shoot itself in the foot enough to allow competition anyway? Has the EC ever heard of Firefox?

Don’t expect the EC to let this one die but do expect that they will make a pathetic spectacle of themselves as they continue to bungle through making the world safer from progress, innovation and opportunity.

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Dave’s Answer:

I so know exactly what you mean and this kind of “friendly user behavior” drives me up the wall too.If I create a file called “foo.bar” then I want it to be shown as just that when I’m poking around on my computer. Both Windows and Mac OS X have this bad habit now of hiding filename suffixes and it just bugs me.

It’s not too incredibly difficult to figure out how to disable this “feature” in Vista, though, so you’re in luck.

The windows are all pretty big, though, so they’ll be scaled down here. Hopefully you can still step along and figure out it on your computer too.

Start out by getting to Control Panels:

There are a bunch of different things you can tweak and change, with handy common shortcuts shown in smaller blue text:

Notice where the cursor is located: “Appearance and Personalization”. That’s what you want, click on the category name.

Now you’ll see that there are subcategories of Appearance and Personalization from which you need to choose what you seek (yes, there are a LOT of ways you can tweak Vista. Probably too many, actually).

Select “Folder Options”:

Almost there. Now you’ll see the “General” Views settings, which have a few things you might want to fiddle with while you’re here:

What we seek, however, is under the “Views” tab along the top. Click on that tab and then look very closely at the many options in the lower scroll box, the advanced settings:

As I have highlighted, one option is “Hide extensions for known file types”. Uncheck that box. Now click on “Apply” and you’re done, it’s all fixed!

While you’re here, though, you might have a glance at the Search tab too, as Vista is, at best, weak in file search, but you can tweak its settings just a bit if you want:

Otherwise, you’re done, and you’re off to the races too!

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Users can search the Netflix library, manage both their instant and DVD queues, and filter searches by titles that are available to watch instantly. Windows Media Center uses the Netflix recommended category lists to make it easier to find the movies and TV shows that users want to watch.

The Netflix instant watching in Windows Media Center is powered by Microsoft Silverlight. The use of Silverlight allows users to have more accessible, discoverable and secure experiences.

“We’re continuing to work with the top content providers today to make watching TV on the PC a mainstream experience for the future,” said Craig Eisler corporate vice president of entertainment client software for the TV, Video and Music Business Group at Microsoft.

“Consumers understand that content is the driving force when it comes to experiences, and with Netflix, we’re underscoring our broader commitment to deliver a rich experience with Windows Media Center.”

The availability of Netflix in Windows Media Center is the second recent content deal for Windows, following the March launch of the Sports Channel, which offers a variety of interactive sports content from CBSSports.com, Fox Sports and MSNBC.com