How to efficiently work with Multiple Monitors

 

Recent studies revealed that multiple monitor configurations can increase the user productivity and efficiency. Traditionally used in graphic or financial industry as it became more affordable, multi-monitor computing is starting to be very popular in a lot of domains.

Users are given the ability to access more information simultaneously, a more efficient multi-tasking between applications resolving the need to view and process a multitude of information sources at a time – all this can positively impact productivity and morale of the users, making them feel more comfortable and more focused on tasks.

What about the pleasure and convenience of working
with multiple monitors?

In this post I have decided to present some tools that I currently use in parallel with the multi-monitors.

I usually work on my 17’ laptop and my secondary screen is a 24’ screen. The difference between the two screens is big, and adapting from one screen to another can be painful for the eyes.

I had to find a way to split the big screen but not the smaller one. There are a number of applications on the internet serving the purpose of splitting the screen and after testing a number of them, there was one in particular that I considered adapted to my needs and also free: Acer GridVista .
It allows you to allocate the space on each of your monitors and split the workspace in up to 4 sections per screen.

Compared to other tools I found, it had the advantage of allowing the user to choose the grid configuration on each monitor independently, in my case, I chose to split the bigger screen in 4, and deactivate the grid on the smaller one.

Choosing in which section you would like to move the current application is simple. After you defined the grid configuration, just drag and drop the desired application on the grid of the desired screen.

There were a number of things I was not happy about, such as the fact that when you click on the Show Desktop button to minimize all windows, and then you re-click on the same button to restore them, they are not correctly restored as before in grids but in random positions on the screen. So you are forced to reorganize them manually in the defined grids.

The fix for this and also for the fact that there is no simple way to extend the start bar to both screens, was in my case another application – Actual Multiple Monitors .
It comes with a big number of nice features but it is not free, it costs around 30$.

There are also other alternatives to this software such as MultiMon Taskbar which comes in different flavors (TaskBar which is free, and TaskBar Pro) but for me it had some compatibility problems with Windows 7.

A quick-tip for a small visual issue I encountered:
When Acer GridVista is running, it adds to the title bar of each window 3 buttons, allowing setting the transparency, the always on top option and whether the window should be locked to the grid or not. By installing and executing Actual Multiple Monitors, a set of 2 buttons are also added by default to the window’s toolbar (move to monitor, and maximize to desktop, which I personally don’t find useful), that can be disabled from the Configuration menu -> Default settings -> Title Buttons, to prevent the superposition with the previous set of buttons.

Adrian

Backup and Restore computer drivers (Windows Xp, Vista, 7)

When it comes to reinstalling your operating system, and here I am talking about windows, we all agree that it is a real pain. First of all the OS installation, process takes almost always the same amount of time, then the drivers, then your usual programs (all at once or in time as soon as you need them)

In this post I’ll just discuss how you can jump with elegance over the critical step in installing your OS which is installing the drivers.

This can be done by backing-up drivers from the old system, and then restoring them inside the freshly installed system.

From the beginning I have to mention that this migration of drivers works normally when the new installed OS is the same as the old one. Depending on the drivers, driver migration from Vista to 7 and from 7 to Vista may also work.

Double Driver is a free tool that allows you to perform this backup/restore operation for all the drivers. It is the perfect driver manager as it enables you to do a lot of things such as: list your drivers, access full driver details, export and print the list, select exactly which drivers to backup, and how to restore drivers from a previous backup.

Adrian

How to force delete files in Windows 7 & Vista

Have you ever wanted to delete files from a previous windows installation, but you couldn’t because of a permission error.

Most of the times, it is purely a problem of ownership over the files you wish to delete. If you are the administrator of the computer, than there is a quick solution of taking the ownership of the files, adding the Take Ownership in your right click context menu.

How to add this option in the context menu.
You have to download this file: InstallRemoveTakeOwnership.zip

Once you did this, extract the contents in a folder. There are two registry files insinde, one that adds the Take Ownership context menu option, the other that removes it.

Double click InstallTakeOwnershipOption.reg

Now right click the folder you want to delete, then select Take Ownership.

Once the operation is completed, you have the full ownership of the folder, and you can go further deleting the file.

To remove this option from the context menu, just click on the other registry file RemoveTakeOwnershipOption.reg

What if I still cannot delete the file

If the problem still persists, then it is not related just to permissions. We could be talking about a file blocked by the system, a damaged file…

If you are sure about what you want to do, I recommend in this case a more advanced solution, a tool that serves exactly this purpose - the Unlocker.

It can handle very well a number of special cases when it comes to deleting a file such as the Access denied, sharing violations, source in use, file in use, ..and so on.

Adrian

Set active partition in Windows XP, Vista & 7 using command line

Scenario: you have installed an OS such as Mac OS X on a secondary partition, and after restart you can no longer boot-up your system.

Solution: boot using your Windows cd/dvd; get into the command prompt and type diskpart 

 

Type list disk to see the list of disks installed in your system. Type select disk 0, assuming 0 is the number of your disk containing your partitions.

Now that we have selected the disk, type  list partitions to get the list of all partitions on the disk.



To activate the desired partition type select partition n, where n is the partition number. 
Now that we have selected the desired partition, we can mark it as active by typing active

Adrian

Windows 7 build 7048 x86/x64 Leaked

This release labeled Release Candidate 1 can be downloaded on various sources (torrent, rapidshare, megaupload).

Name: 7048_x64_Ultimate_EN_DVD
Size: 3.31 GB
x64

Name: 7048.0.090219-1845_x86fre_client_en-us_Ultimate_EN_DVD
Size: 2.61 GB
x86

Adrian

Microsoft TechDays 09

This week I decided to take the time to participate in some of the conferences that were on the agenda of TechDays 09.
Today was the first of the three days dedicated to the conference.
To enumerate some of the objectives of the sessions I found interesting – Windows 7 and Surface, Cloud Platform “Azure”, WPF, Silverlight & .NET 3.5 SP1, Visual Studio 2010 & C# 4.0, XNA, etc.



To conclude, I had no regrets about participating – the presentations were high level and refreshing regarding the technology.

All the videos are available here (French).

Adrian

Experimenting with experiments...

Today I lost around 3 hour sitting in front of my laptop realizing how I, from time to time (and curiosity) willingly but unconsciously test Microsoft's "masterpiece".

After being a happy tester of the Win 7 pre-build 6950 from October (right, the second leaked version), happy not because of stability reasons but because as an experimented developer that puts first time the hands on something new, I took precautions and until January when the official beta was released, I kept myself from messing too much with the new OS, not to mention never even thinking about really working on it. In January, amazingly and unexpectedly, the official beta 7000 installed flawlessly over the 6950, and I thought I should take things more seriously and start deploying the "laboratory" on it.

I still remember that with the exception of a number of annoying bugs (problems with insomnia, or waking from it, memory leaks, drivers ..), the system was relatively stable (conditioned by a daily bases reboot).

But with the unofficial leak 7022 that was supposed to contain kernel patches for some of those problems, I lost 3 hours today and everything I installed on the ex-win7-system. One and a half hour of updating the system, 20 minutess of updating registry&services, crash, another 20 minutes trying to rollback the old system and that's about it. Not to mention the dead periods of time between.

Surely being too confident in M$ developer's skill is a "must NOT".
I ca still hear from some that build 6956 is the most stable of them all. No problemo, I believe turning back is never an acceptable solution. So .. Tomorrow (night maybe) is a new day and I will try a fresh install of 7022.

Adrian

Windows 7 build 7025 leaked

Apparently the leaked Windows 7 build 7022 is already out there. It was suppozed to be officially available starting from April 08.
The leak is already available for download on various P2P networks.
The build was compiled on 15 January.

Adrian

Windows 7 Secrets

Windows 7 is finally officially released. I laid my hands on it since the pre-beta build (the PDC version leaked October 08) and start drilling into the areas that concentrate most of the new features such as the new taskbar and shell integration, ribbon-based graphical UI, multi-touch and gesture recognition.

In this post I would like to focus a number of features less visible to the user but that prove to be very useful in my opinion - the top 8 "secrets" of Windows 7.

1. Window management - docking a window very fast to the left/right side of the screen or maximizing it can be done very quickly, actions that can be performed using keyboard shortcuts:
   Win+Left Arrow and Win+Right Arrow dock;
   Win+Up Arrow and Win+Down Arrow maximizes and restores / minimizes;
   Win+Shift+Up Arrow and Win+Shift+Down Arrow maximizes and restores the vertical size.
   
   
2. Multi-Monitor Windows Management - dock windows from one monitor to another when using multiple monitors using Win+Shift+Left Arrow and Win+Shift+Right Arrow keeping their relative position on the screen
   
   
3. Minimize non-active Background Windows - pressing once Win+Home minimizes all background windows, and pressing it once again puts them back to the screen
   
   
4. Reordering Taskbar Icons and Running Applications - if you haven't noticed, the pinned icons and running applications are no longer fixed, they can be reordered and starting a new instance of any of the first 5 started application can be done by pressing the Win+1, Win+2, ..
   
   
5. Executing another instance of the same app - just Shift+Click on an icon from the taskbar to execute another instance of the application
   
   
6. Peeking the the Desktop - want to have a look at the desktop without minimizing all windows? Pressing the small square in bottom-right of the screen or the shortcut
   Win+Space enables the user to peek at any icons or gadgets executed on the desktop.
   
   
7. Display Projection - for a quick popup that allows selecting how to extend your screen on a extra connected monitor or projector just hit Win+P
   
   
8. Focus and walk the taskbar - now the taskbar can be focused using the Win+T shortcut and once you are there the arrow keys allows you to select one of the applications or icons which you can activate or executing by pressing Enter

Once again those are the "secrets" that I find the most useful, but to see the full list of secrets just visit Tim Sneath's tip list for Win 7

Adrian