Matt Refghi

Microsoft’s Server operating systems are specifically aligned to offer, above all, top reliability and performance. It is therefore no surprise that Windows Server 2003, at first glance, seems to lack the standard Luna desktop theme that XP users have been accustomed to. Here’s the thing: The feature isn’t missing, it’s just “hidden” by default. Solution Here’s how to enable it: 1) Open the Services Management Console by entering “services.msc” in the Run dialog. To open the Run dialog, click Start > Run, or press Windows Key + R. 2) Locate the Themes service, right-click it, and select Properties. 3) On the General tab, select the Startup Type dropdown, and choose Automatic. 4) Click Apply. 5) Click OK. 6) Right-click the Themes … Read more

When Microsoft announced their new Bing search engine, I was immediately curious about how it compared to Google. I changed Bing to my default search engine, and tried using it daily. Ultimately, I returned to Google, which always seemed to have slightly better search results – in most cases. Despite this fact, I visit Bing it at least once a day  – but not to search. I visit it daily specifically to see the new background image they are using. They change this background image every day, and each one is usually impressive. In fact, in most cases, seeing it actually makes me want to find out more about what I’m seeing. As an example, consider the following screenshot: Great … Read more

Here’s a really quick one: I kept getting this error when I tried to launch my recently purchased copy of Fallout 3. I googled around a bit, and while I found people with the same problem, no fixes were available. Solution While not an actual solution, I’ve been able to circumvent this problem by closing Steam, and re-opening it. This will allow you to launch the game successfully, but only once. If you quit the game, and try to launch it again, it won’t work. To get it to launch again, simply repeat the process – close Steam, re-open it. I’ll try and figure out how to fix this once and for all. See Also Steam Forum Post – Fallout 3 fell over and … Read more

I’m sure most of you have encountered this type of error, at one time or another, while using Windows: It appears when you try to delete a file or folder that is currently in use by an application. To be completely accurate, the file needs to be in use and locked by the application to prevent external edits – the lock is likely the reason we see the error message. Sometimes it is really obvious which application has a locked handle on the file – for example, if it is complaining about a Word document – perhaps the document is still open in Word. Personally, I consider scenarios like that acceptable because they can be solved easily; unfortunately, all too … Read more

Lately, I’ve been getting 2-3 of these errors whenever I try to open Firefox: I tried re-installing it, and also repairing it – but neither solved the problem. After spending some time googling to find a solution, I found a great knowledgebase article from the Mozilla guys themselves. Since it was difficult for me to find, I decided to offer the solution here too. Here’s the description of the problem, from the article: The term chrome has been used in Mozilla development for 10 years, referring to the that part of the Firefox window that lies outside of a window’s content area. Toolbars, menu bars, progress bars, and window title bars are all examples of elements that are typically part … Read more

Last night I set up Subversion on my main development machine, which is running Vista. To do this, I followed the steps outlined by Jeff Atwood on his Coding Horror blog. His article was very helpful – it allowed me to install Subversion rather painlessly, despite the few HTML glitches I encountered in his instructions. This morning, I opened the “Show log” page for a particular file using TortoiseSVN, and noticed one of the revisions I checked in was missing a comment. I right-clicked it, and selected “Edit log message”, wanting to add a comment then and there.  A little text editor popped up, and I typed the message. After I pressed OK, I was hit with this: Solution To … Read more

What I’m going to cover now is a pretty minor feature of Windows. I would of skipped this article, but I encountered a few people that never heard of this trick. I’ve personally found it useful in scenarios where I was working with custom file extensions… for example, I knew that a particular file with the uncommon extension “.def” could be opened in Microsoft Access.  The file extension “.def” is not typically associated with Microsoft Access, but I knew it was a valid file. To explain how the feature works, consider your typical, everyday “Open File” dialog: In this example, the dialog wants you to select a “.torrent” file by default. Because this is the active filter, you only see … Read more

Have you ever been in a situation where you’re not sure why your hard drive is as full as it is, and you wonder what exactly what is taking up the most space? I’m pretty sure most computer users have encountered this before. What I used to do when I hit this problem was look around for big folders on my drive. This ultimately works, but it takes some searching to find the problematic folders – and you’re likely to miss some stuff. Determined to find a better approach, I looked around for an application that could help me, and eventually found one called WinDirStat that utilized a method called treemapping to help users visualize their disk usage. I tried … Read more

When I first tried Steam’s Backup Tool, I was pretty impressed. The tool allows you to backup your games through a Steam interface, and what it does beyond a simple copy-paste is this: it compresses the game files, but also allows you to split the compressed files so that they can fit on multiple CDs or DVDs. It also allows for backing up multiple games in one shot, housing them all within the same set of CDs or DVDs. I liked the concept, and so I backed up my Left 4 Dead files to a DVD using this method. To my surprise, when I tried to restore the game afterwards, I encountered this error message: I executed the “steambackup.exe” file … Read more