Capturing screens Part I

Windows Media Encoder is a nice tool to capture video especially for screencasts.

 

 

Technorati tags: Windows Media Encoder, Screencast

Cleaning up a failed .NET framework 2.0 install

I was trying to install .NET framework 2.0 and it was failing with this error.

Product: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 -- Error 25015.Failed to install assembly 'X:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.VisualBasic.Vsa.dll' because of system error: The device is not ready.

 

After some searches, I came across Aaron Stebner's Weblog which addresses this issue in the post How to manually clean up a failed .NET framework 2.0 install.

Needless to say, the post was very helpful, and running the cleanup tool removed the remnants of earlier installs of .NET 2.0 (needed a couple of runs to really clean my system.)

Get the tool at the cleanup tool at http://astebner.sts.winisp.net/Tools/dotnetfx_cleanup_tool.zip.

I used the version at http://www.cnblogs.com/Files/lovesanni/cleanup_tool.zip (Warning: Use it at your own risk!)

 

Note: The Windows Installer Clean Up Utility was not at all helpful although it works for some.

ZoomIt

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/zoomit.mspx

One of my colleagues was looking for the MS mouse software. When probed he mentioned that the zoom utility that is provided with MS mouse is a neat one, where you can control the zoomed area. Quite useful when you’d want the audience to focus on a specific area on the screen. I was running Vista at the moment and I found that the Magnifier tool in Vista was quite nifty in this regard. The magnifier can be found under Accessibility (Shortcut: ÿ + u)

Since Win2K3 and XP doesn’t have the same magnifier, for those OSs you could use Zoomit.

 

Technorati tags: ZoomIt, Technical Presentation Zoom tool, Zoom tool, Alternative to Magnifier

Tracing tools

http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/archive/2004/08/20/2... has a short list to some useful tracing tools.

tags: Tracing tools, WSE tracing tools, Web services tracing, HTTP tracing, TCP tracing, Fiddler, YATT

50+ keyboard shortcuts for moving faster in Windows XP

Dictionary at your fingertips

For a quick look, I press Ctrl+Alt+W and Wordweb pops up. Neatness quotient: Select the word before pressing the shortcut key and Wordweb shows its meaning.

Wordweb, download from http://wordweb.info/free/

If you are in Microsoft Word, select the word and press Shift+F7

Free screen capture utility

What I liked about ScreenHunter 4.0 Free Version ?
1. Ability to assign a hotkey
2. Save the capture immediately to a BMP/JPG or GIF
3. Timed Capture and
4. The ability to select a specific area of the screen to be captured

My favorites in order
1. Snagit
2. Spy and Capture (Free)
and now
3. Screen Hunter

And, as always, Alt+PrtScrn and PrtScrn are always around ;)