A fantastic source with service manuals and disassembly instructions for many makes and models of laptop.

This community-driven site geared towards any embedded NAS device or vendor. The wiki is a place for gathering general hacking info for linux based NAS devices so it can be reused more easily.

Rough and ready snippets of information not suitable for the main blog.

Today I had a user call about a problem with iTunes not finding any music after migrating to Vista.  The problem was that they'd not kept all their music in the "iTunes Music" directory and it was spread out all over the "My Documents" directory on the old machine, and the username was also different so the default link that Vista creates (from "Documents and Settings" to "Users") wouldn't work. So instead of recreating the iTunes library from scratch or relocating all the files I remembered that Vista now supports symbolic links, so all that was needed was to create a directory in users with the old username then use MKLINK to create a link from the old location (C:\Documents and Settings\oldusername\My Documents) to the new one (C:\Users\newusername\Documents) and all was well.  

Using MKLINK is fairly easy, but you need to run the command prompt as administrator in order to do it.  To create a symbolic link to a directory you use the /D switch like so :

mklink /d "c:\Documents and Settings\bob\my documents" "c:\users\Robin\Documents" 

Which will link them so when you try to access the old location, it will look in the new path.   Also you can remove a link by removing the directory, if you're unsure then DIR will show you if the directory is a real directory or a symbolic link. 

How do I connect to the console with mstsc now I am using Vista?

The XP Way

Start > Run >  " mstsc /v:machine_name /console "

The Vista Way

Start > Run > " mstsc /v:machine_name /admin "

Access 2007 disables macros by default, and then you have to go through the new "Trust Centre" to find it. Here's the simple procedure to switch it off.