| Windows 7 : Customizing the Start Menu’s Power Button |
| I criticized the Windows 7 shut down procedure earlier, but I’ll admit it’s a bit of an improvement over Vista (which required three clicks to shut down) and it’s a lot better than XP (which required as many as four clicks). |
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| Windows 7 : Setting Up One-Click Restarts and Shutdowns |
| My admittedly obsessive quest to minimize clicks and keystrokes is a quirk, I know, but it’s a defensible one (I keep telling myself). After all, the fewer mouse and keyboard moves you have to make—particularly when you’re doing day-to-day system drudgery—the more time you have for being a productive member of society. |
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| Windows 7 : Useful Windows 7 Logon Strategies |
| The default Windows 7 logon is fine for most users, but there are many ways to change Windows 7’s logon behavior. This section offers up a few tips and techniques for altering the way you log on to Windows 7. |
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| Windows Azure : Queue Service Architecture |
| Even though the Queue service provides a scalable and highly available infrastructure for asynchronous message communications in the cloud, it has some limitations and constraints that are important to understand before diving deep into architecture and programming. |
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| Windows 7 : Customizing Windows 7’s Open With List |
| You’ve used the Open With dialog box a couple of times so far in this article. This is a truly useful dialog box, but you can make it even more useful by customizing it. The rest of this article takes you through various Open With customizations. |
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| Windows 7 : Customizing the New Menu |
| One of Windows 7’s handiest features is the New menu, which enables you to create a new file without working within an application. In Windows Explorer (or on the desktop), right-click an empty part of the folder and then select New |
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| Windows 7 : Creating a New File Type |
| Windows 7 comes with a long list of registered file types, but it can’t account for every extension you’ll face in your computing career. For rare extensions, it’s best just to use the Open With dialog box. However, if you have an unregistered extension that you encounter frequently, you should register that extension by creating a new file type for it. |
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| Windows Vista - Sharing Files and Folders : Standard Sharing |
| Creating and managing a shared folder is a little bit more of a manual process than the public sharing model, but allows you to share any folder on the Windows Vista computer, and it gives you more fine-tuned control over sharing the folders. |
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| Windows Vista - Sharing Files and Folders : Public Folder |
| Windows Vista supports two ways to share folders: public file sharing and standard file sharing. Of these two models, standard file sharing is preferred because it is more secure than public file sharing. However, public folder sharing is designed to enable users to share files and folders from a single location quickly and easily. |
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| Windows 7 : Manage Your Network - Working with a Homegroup |
| A homegroup doesn't have a management interface or require an administrator; it's simply an entity that exists on your network as long as it has at least one member. If all the computers leave the homegroup, it ceases to exist with no negative side eff ects. Any computer user can join the computer to a homegroup by using the homegroup password. |
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| Windows 7 : Manage Your Network - Connecting to a Network |
| A network can be as small as two computers or as large as the Internet. In the context of this book, we primarily use the term network to mean the connection between computers in one physical location that are connected to each other, and to the Internet, through a network router. |
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| Multibooting Windows 7 |
| In today’s world of advanced OSs and low hard-disk prices, it certainly is not unusual for some users to experiment with different OSs. The world of consumer computing is ripe with many options. Along with just plain curiosity and experimentation, here are other good reasons to switch among or between OSs: |
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| Windows 7 Customization : Working with Existing File Types |
| In this section, you’ll learn how to work with Windows 7’s existing file types. I’ll show you how to change the file type description, modify the file type’s actions, associate an extension with another file type, and disassociate a file type and an extension.
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| Windows 7 Customization : Understanding File Types |
| To get the most out of this article, you need to understand some background about what a file type is and how Windows 7 determines and works with file types. The next couple of sections tell you everything you need to know to get you through the rest of the article.
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| Windows Azure Service Life Cycle |
| The objective of Windows Azure is to automate the service life cycle as much as possible. Windows Azure service life cycle has five distinct phases and four different roles.
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| Backing Up and Restoring with ntbackup |
| The ntbackup command activates the ntbackup GUI and, unlike with all other commands covered in this chapter, you cannot select what to back up with the ntbackup command itself.
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| Windows Azure Service Management |
| Unlike on-premise applications, the deployment of a cloud services involves only software provisioning from the developer's perspective. You saw in the earlier examples how hardware provisioning was abstracted from you in the deployment process.
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| Windows Azure : Content Delivery Network |
| Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a Windows Azure blob replication and caching service that makes your blobs available globally at strategic locations closer to the blob consumers. |
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| Windows Azure Storage Services |
| Windows Azure offers four key data services: blobs, tables, queues, and a database. All these services share the characteristics described in the previous section. Let’s take a brief look at three of the four services, as well as a glance at SQL Azure.
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| Windows Azure Storage Characteristics |
| All the storage services can take huge amounts of data. People have been known to store billions of rows in one table in the table service, and to store terabytes of data in the blob service. However, there is not an infinite amount of space available, since Microsoft owns only so many disks. But this is not a limit that you or anyone else will hit. |
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| Windows 7 Customization : Stopping Delete Confirmations |
| My biggest Windows pet peeves center around tasks that require you to jump through extra hoops that are totally unnecessary. In Windows XP, for example, clicking the Shut Down command on the Start menu doesn’t shut down your computer, at least not right away. Instead, a dialog box shows up and you need to click Shut Down yet again
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