bri's space

Personally, I think one of the coolest tools included in Vista is the Snipping Tool.  It allows you to capture all or part of a screen to email or save to your hard drive.  As an added bonus, you can also copy your "snippets" and paste then right into Windows Live Writer.  As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  In fact, it's how I created this short tutorial.

Finding the Snipping Tool

1. Click the Start icon
2. 
3. Type "snip" into the search bar
4. 
5. The Snipping Tool Should appear Programs 
6.  

Using the Snipping Tool with Windows Live Writer

1. Make sure that Windows Live Writer is open
2. Open the item that you would like to capture for your blog post
3. Open the Snipping Tool (see directions above :))
4. Click on the upper-left of the area that you want to capture, hold the mouse button down and drag to the lower-right of the area you want to capture
5. Release the mouse button and viola, the area is captured
6. Press ctrl+c or click Edit -> Copy
7. Move over to your blog post in Windows Live Writer and press crtl+v or click Edit -> Paste
8. You now have a partial screen capture in your blog post

If you are running Windows Mobile 6.0 or higher (and a data plan!), you can easily upload photos you take on your mobile phone to your Live Space.  Simply browse to the image on your phone then click “Menu” in the lower-right corner and then click “Send to your space”.  It’s that easy!

Bonus tip:  If the upload fails, first login to Messenger on your mobile phone.  (Start –> Programs –> Messenger)

Through a fellow community member I became of a new Messenger plugin called Messenger Plus!  While it does offer some cool features that live Messenger doesn't ship with, performing a full install will place adware on your computer that will popup sponsor ads.  The good news, however, is that it is pretty easy to get rid of.  Patchou wrote a great article on removing just the sponsor portion of the add-on so that you can keep all the good stuff without the annoying pop-ups.  Here article can be found here.

Thanks, Patchou!  Hopefully your great post will help others out as much as they've help me.

With all the viruses running around the Internet these days, you'd think there was some sort of penicillin shot you could get to keep you from getting infected.  But, as every PC owner knows, sooner or later you are going to get infected.  Some of us, not naming any family member names here, get infected more than others.  Unfortunately, for the really nasty ones the only way to be sure your clean is to format the hard drive.

I've had to do this for several of my friends in the last 8 months.  And I learned something very valuable .... They are going to click on some link or email and download some spyware.  This happened with one such friend.  Fortunately, I was smart enough to backup his essential files (family photos, invoices, etc) onto a protected folder in my SkyDrive.  Three months later, when he called and said that his computer was acting up again, I couldn't resist the chance to tease him a little.  I told him that all was lost; there's no saving anything now; it's all gotta go.

After I restored his PC, I logged into my account and restored his key files.  He though I was some sort of wizard!  Of course, I still let him think that.  It comes in handy when we go out for beers.  :)

Anyway, I think that a lot of people overlook the fact that SkyDrive can be used for a lot more than sharing files.  For example, data restore.

Techy B