PCR's notepad » Microsoft

Preventing MS Office from hiding your menu items

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:00:04 +0000

One of the numerous annoyances with Microsoft Office, apart from the fact that it’s quite often enforced by your boss as THE working standard, is its tendency to make your life harder. To do so, Bill Gates’s minions designed several malicious plans. One of those simply consists in regularly modifying the program’s menu. And to make it harder, they chose to hide only the menu items you most rarely use, i.e. … the ones you find hardest to find!

Windows hides infrequently used items to make it easier for you to find the menu items you use the most [and to make it harder to find the items you use the less].
(source: Working with menus)

So, what can you do to prevent Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others to play with their menus and your nerves? In your MS Office program, go to Tools → Customize → Options, and check “always show full menus”. That’s all folks.

Don’t use Hotmail, it’s a trap!

David Dernoncourt — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:54:42 +0000

A few weeks ago, I created once again a Hotmail/MSN account, as it’s a quite convenient way to get a discardable IM + e-mail account. Then, I eventually found out that I rather liked this account and would like to keep this alias to use it with Gmail.

I thought: no problem, I just need to configure Gmail to allow sending as myaccount@hotmail.com, and to configure hotmail to forward my e-mails to Gmail. Of course, I had naively forgotten that Hotmail is run by Micro$$$$oft. Guess what? My e-mails are trapped, they just can’t get out of Microsoft clusters:

You can forward your mail to one other e-mail address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, or is part of Windows Live Custom Domains.

At this point I knew that the long term result is that I’ll drop this alias. Still, I wanted to know more about this “Windows Live Custom Domains” thing. First, when arriving on their site, I found it’d been renamed:

Windows Live Admin Center
Windows Live Custom Domains is now Windows Live Admin Center

Yeah, apparently, Microsoft aren’t able to update their error messages as fast as they rename their services. But never mind. Willing to make sure this service was free, I tried to open the service for my domain:

Quite funny, Windows Live thinks the name “wiki4games” is inappropriate. On the other side, “patheticcockroach” (which gave me some problems on quite a few sites with misconfigured filters – even, a while ago, on Wikipedia) is appropriate… Whatever…

Does issuing passports make Microsoft a country?

David Dernoncourt — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:49:00 +0000

Just found this article… made me realize that MS passport has been here for some time already… Some interesting stuff about bypassing cookie privacy protection.

Read on

The 5 sins of Vista

David Dernoncourt — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:35:00 +0000

From a fan of Microsoft : the top 5 reasons why Vista is a step backward from previous versions of Windows.

Read on

Despite 100 Million IE 7 Installs, Microsoft’s Browser Still Loses Ground

David Dernoncourt — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:47:00 +0000

Good news for web developpers, according to Net Applications, Internet Explorer accounted for 79.6% of all browsers used in December 2006, a drop from the 80.6% during the previous month. Firefox’s use, meanwhile, measured 14% in December, up from 13.5% in November. Also gaining ground in the last month of 2006 was Apple’s Safari, which climbed to 4.2% from 4%, and Opera, which saw its share increase from 0.7% to 0.9%.

Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 06:23:00 +0000

Just saving this great article here so maybe I’ll stop losing it in my bookmarks
Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

Analysis of Microsoft’s Suicide Note (part 1)

David Dernoncourt — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 23:10:00 +0000

If Windows XP was Microsoft’s attempt to embed a browser into the operating system then Vista is the attempt to embed DRM.
Vista’s target market is content producers and the underlying philosophy of the user experience will be far different than what many consumers expect it will be. Microsoft has attempted to plug the infamous “analog hole” as much as is possible by forcing all data through encryption algorithms. For those unaware of the costs of encryption it is sufficiently high. Pushing HD audio and video content through encryption/decryption routines is a tremendous strain on any system currently available and in the near future.

Read on

BadVista.org: FSF launches campaign against Microsoft Vista

David Dernoncourt — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 06:42:00 +0000

From badvista.org

Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new ‘features’ in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We’ll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care”, said FSF program administrator John Sullivan.

Read on | Digg it

37signals shows how ridiculous it is to install something in Windows Vista

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 06:48:00 +0000

Clocking in at a stunning 35 clicks, the video shows that installing a script debugger in the new operating system is not only not made any easier, but it still takes a series of hoop jumps. They offer the same process in OS X for comparison.

MS Linux and MS Firefox

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 06:19:00 +0000

Check out these new Micro$oft products :
- Firefox 2007
- MS Linux (well, not so new…)