With IIS7's revamped interface, I had a hard time locating how to change the permission on a single file. I could see how to do so at a folder level, but I couldn't see how to do so on a single file (.CFM in this case).

 It turns out, once you hilghted the file you want to change the permission on, you right click and select 'Switch to Features View' - this changes to the features view on that one, single file.  Then you can use the Authentication module to set it up the way you want. You can tell you are changing one file by looking at the breadcrum trail in your address bar.

Constructing a microcontroller cirtuit, i needed to debug over the serial port but guess what? Hyperterminal is missing! Yes, it was removed from Vista.  

You can get it from the original people that Microsoft licensed it from (Hilgraeve) at hilgraeve.com but it's more than $40. A free alternative is the venerable PuTTY which is a versitile hammer anyways.

I was attempting to setup a new Home Theatre PC (HTPC) with Vista Ultimate.  AT&T's U-verse is not available on my block so this is the next best thing.  The setup refused to continue with a "Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation" error. Let me back up...

I originally had 2 drives in the system at first: 16GB (boot/system drive) and 160GB secondary. After using it for a few hours but before activation, I decided that the older 16GB was going to be too noisy.  Plus, I had a 500GB drive that I was going to install.  Since this was going to be a video recorder - I would need tons of disk space. I did a full backup to an external USB drive since the PC was already configured and patched like I wanted. I expected to do a full restore on the 160GB after removing the 16GB.  Make sure your drive you want to install to is the primary one on the bus.  I had only pulled the 16GB primary drive connections off and tried to install with the 160GB drive still as slave.  That helped but now I had a new problem.

I could see my full backup on my USB external drive but when I would try to restore, I would get a 'Element not Found' error.

I could pull the USB drive off and I could do a full install without getting the criteria/volume message but I didn't want to install just to boot and then do a restore.  I should be able to do it in one whack.

Element not found error indicates partition problems. Vista doesn't like the settings for the partitions -evidently 'active'.   Here is how to fix that:

When you boot your Vista DVD, choose repair my computer instead of install. Once it boots up, use the command prompt option to get an old fashioned DOS like box or command prompt.  You will need to use the diskpart command so type diskpart to start it.  You can type help anytime to get a list of your commands available but all you need is list, clean and select.  First list your disks:

list disk

You will get a list of the physical drives. The disk you are probably going to want to fix is disk 0 - if you only have one physical disk, that's all you should have listed. Next:

select disk 0

This command give disk 0 'focus' meaning all the following commands will be applied to it. Next:

clean

Clean will reset your disk back to near factory fresh.  If you really want to erase the whole disk, use clean all which will write zeros to each and every sector on the disk. Next:

create partition primary size=25000

Create will setup a new partition (primary obviously) and set its size to 25000 MB.  If you leave off the size=25000, it will use the entire disk.

list partiton

List partion will show you the new configuration of disk 0

exit

exit

Exit twice to close your command prompt and now you can use the Full PC Restore option.

I probably could have used the active command to clear/set the bit properly but I figured I could change the size of the partition.  It was initially larger but the full restore gave me back a 16GB partion that I had to resize later.

I recently upgraded my TortiseSVN to 1.5.  This usually requires a reboot for the changes to be worked into the explorer shell.  Some say you can use task manager to kill explorer.exe and, while that works, here is the way to restart explorer SAFELY thus saving a reboot:

 XP/2003: click on Start and select Shut Down. The Windows shut down dialog will appear. Next, while holding down the Control, Shift, and Alt keys click the Cancel button on the shut down dialog window. You can tell because you will loose your Start menu, task bar, system tray and desktop icons. Now, press Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Windows task manager. Click File and select New Task (Run…). You want to start explorer.exe so type in explorer.exe to relaunch Windows Explorer.

Vista: click on Start and hold down the Control and Shift and right-click on a blank space in the Start menu. Choose Exit Explorer. Open the Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), navigate to File->Run, enter "explorer.exe" to restart it. I've yet to test this on Windows server 2008 but I would think it would. I've tested this and as expected, this works on on Windows 2008 server too - it make sense since they are both considered 'Windows 6'

Remote Desktop users: since you can't use Ctrl-Alt-Del use Ctrl-Alt-End instead.