Windows Tools, Help & Guides

In an effort to help you find the kinds of wallpapers you like, I’ve put together 19 collections of wallpapers that cover 15 different genres. This week’s genre is nature themed wallpapers again. If you missed part one of this genre, you can get to it here: nature themed desktop wallpaper collection part 1. If you know of any other wallpapers that fit in this genre, please let me know. Looking for a different genre? Head here to see desktop wallpaper collections organized by genre.

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First off! You know you really ought to upgrade to Service Pack 3. Microsoft ended support for SP2 back in July, and stopped issuing patches for it.

Maybe you’ve had a bad experience with a service pack in the past. Maybe you just don’t like change. Whatever the reason, if you’re stubbornly clinging to SP2, but you need to apply a critical security update that requires SP3, there is a registry edit you can do that will make XP SP2 appear to be an SP3 machine.

Microsoft doesn’t support it, and you do it at your own risk, but here are the steps:

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We are now in an age where we can realistically expect to have access to every: photo we’ve ever taken, song we’ve ever purchased, document we’ve written, and anything else stored on our computer. Many of us have a computer at home (usually an older computer) that we refer to as our server. On or attached to this server is all the media we have to our name. In this guide, we explore top five remote access applications available to help you get to this, and other, information. These applications can be used to:

• Have a multi-PC meeting.
• Have access to your own PCs wherever you are.
• Help a friend with their PC.
• Have desktop access to your PCs on your home network.

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I have earlier told you about PhotoMagician, the program that let you convert pictures “at the drop of a hat”. Now this great tool has become even greater.

One-Click Conversion to Device and Output Format

As before you can predefine  custom settings to suit your needs, but now PhotoMagician also comes with preset settings for the most common devices out there. But the most interesting new functionality is Format to Format Settings.

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This book is a gift from the Windows Phone 7 team at Microsoft to the programming community, and I am proud to have been a part of it. Within the pages that follow, I show you the basics of writing applications for Windows Phone 7 using the C# programming language with the Silverlight and XNA 2D frameworks.

Yes, Programming Windows Phone 7 is truly a free download, but for those readers who still love paper—as I certainly do—this book will also be available (for sale) divided into two fully-indexed print editions: Microsoft Silverlight Programming for Windows Phone 7and Microsoft XNA Framework Programming for Windows Phone 7. [Note from Devon: we should have these ready for order in December 2010.]

The second part of this book focuses entirely on Silverlight, and the third part on XNA 2D. For your convenience, the chapters in each part build upon previous knowledge in a progressive tutorial narrative, and hence are intended to be read sequentially.

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Yesterday we showed you how to create audio files from your documents. If you now have a large collection of somewhat robot sounds audio books or if you’ve encoded some of your audio book CDs, you may want to organize them a little better. In this guide, I’ll show you how to organize your audio book collection with iTunes.

Can’t stand iTunes? Here are seven alternatives to iTunes.

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