Dan’s Web Spot

"Smart" phones are cool. Phones like the iPhone or BlackBerry let you install both free and paid applications on them that provide some cool or useful (hopefully both) functionality. Let me point out one of the most popular phrases of 2009 (according to a University of Princeton survey): "There's an app for that" -Apple, referring to their iPhone. And cool it is...

Over the past decade, there have been many technological changes, from the prevalence of PDAs to laptops to Netbooks to Smart Phones. Look out, because I don't think things are done evolving quite yet. There are plans for a multi-touch tablet computer revolution. Could we see an end of the computer "mouse" as we know it?

tether for PC

The topic of this post is about a little slice of technology called cell phone "modem tethering". You may have heard of this but for those that haven't. this is where you use the Internet connection provided by your wireless phone to connect to your PC or laptop. Instead of a WiFi or Ethernet connection to a router, DSL, or even dial-up connection, the cell modem principle allows you to venture off to places where you would not normally have an Internet connection available for e-mail or web browsing. » More...

Bluetooth and the Bluetooth logo are © Bluetooth.com

My Dell Inspiron 9400 originally shipped with Windows XP, but came with a free upgrade to Vista. It also has a built-in Dell TrueMobile 355 Bluetooth + EDR module, so I decided to get a Bluetooth mouse to use with it. One slick advantage of having this built-in Bluetooth adapter is that a Bluetooth mouse can connect to it directly and there is no need to plug in an external USB Bluetooth 'dongle' for the mouse.

My mouse is a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000. Every once in a while, I had to reset the Bluetooth connection to get my mouse to re-connect, or turn the mouse off then back on, but it was never frequent enough to complain about it...

Originally, I decided to wait to upgrade to Vista until SP1 at least came out, but now that SP2 is out, a month ago I upgraded to Vista. Then I began having a problem with my mouse not connecting automatically following a reboot, and disconnecting from my laptop whenever the computer locked, and sometimes when the Vista UAC prompt appeared. It was a very frustrating problem to say the least.

I contacted Dell Support about this, but they instructed me to install the Vista drivers on their website, which I had already done (and did again). The problem still persisted. A Google search revealed Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 970408, which described the problem. There was no 'fix', but the suggested 'workaround' was to disable then enable the Bluetooth radio via a hardware or software switch. Pressing Fn + F2 twice on my laptop brought back the connection, but did not fix the cause of the problem. » More...

Problem:

When you try to delete or rename a file/folder in Windows Vista, you may receive an error message that says:

"Item not found. Could not find this item. This is no longer located in [folder]. Verify the item's location and try again."

But the file is there...

Background: » More...

If you're familiar with Power Toys for Windows XP, you know that if you install the Image Resizer Power Toy, resizing images for the web or email can be accomplished by selecting 'Resize Pictures' in right-click context menu. Not so in Vista. For whatever reason, Microsoft has decided not to include such functionality in the context menu, nor was I able to locate a 'Power Toy' for Vista that did this.

I tried out a few free image resizer tools but really didn't like any of them until I found one called Prish Image Resizer, made by a gentleman named Prish. You can find his Windows Live! blog about this tool here. If you'd prefer to download this cool, free tool directly, you can get the Prish Image Resizer here.

Microsoft still needs to work on getting some XP-equilvalent functionality like these XP-only Power Toys provide into Vista as well. My second favorite Power Toy is the TweakUI for Windows XP Power Toy. With this tool, you can adjust many core and even hidden Windows settings, all from one easy-to-use interface. You can adjust menu pop up speed, the icon overlay image on shortcuts, whether or not to prefix 'Shortcut to' on all shortcuts, and even hide user accounts on the Welcome Screen. You can get TweakUI for Windows XP here.

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