Windows 8 Media Center Pack: Don't forget to get it for free until Jan 2013

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/feature-packs
http://windows.microsoft.com/de-DE/windows-8/feature-packs

Excel: pad text column up to a certain amount of characters

Was looking into creating some formula to make sure that a concatenation of texts will always look the same on a switch.

Ended up using A1&REPT(" ", 15-LEN(A1))

This made sure that A1 always ends up being 15 characters long.

Maybe there are better ways?

Windows 8 Pro: worse than Windows 8 Enterprise eval and RC? -Updated

Update: The screen driver came back after 24 hours, the audio driver is still crashing my system. CXT - Network - HDAUDIO Soft Data Fax Modem with SmartCP. Even after the manual removal and reading the machines crashes. Also the SD card slot driver is not installed.

At least for my old Acer the new Windows 8 Pro installation does not really work smooth, every time the notebook goes to sleep it crashes in the aftermath; has to do with the audio chip.

And the graphics card and flash driver are not loaded. With the Windows 8 Enterprise eval and RC all of this were non issues. All worked flawless.

Google datacenter on many peoples background

I just love nice pictures of data centers, that look clean and colorful.

Currently on many people's desktop I see this picture of one of the google data centers:

O boy, I would wish I would be able to go around the world and check on all google datacenters, some kind of Safari, but instead of animals we'll get to see the pulse of the internet. It'll be boring, since we cannot actually have some fun by ripping out a server or storage or so, or go into the tape roboter cage and exchange some cartridges. (Probably more interesting are the offices and the canteen, I would be most interested to work at google and have strong opinionated discussions about the future of knowledge centralization and put the whole wisdom of humanity at the interface (not anymore keyboard, but brain interface, think flower, grass, tree and you'll get all the knowledge and wisdom there is and you'll be instantly able to plant a flower, some grass, even a sequoia and know what's going on and what they need to live for the next 4000 years. Yeah baby, yeah). Zotero is not a bad idea as well as Wikipedia, but they are far from being the real stuff that we need to be able to be efficient and solve real issues.

I only hope that I don't have to near one of those and rip out 300 fiber optic cables as I had to a year or so ago.

BTW: most of the people say they love the blue and dark upper part of the picture and that the rest is so lala.

Windows 8 Pro: run upgrade assistant in Windows 7 compatibility mode

Short: You Windows 8 some version and want to run Windows 8 Upgrade web download, save assistant and set it to Windows 7 compatibility before starting the assistant.

Most of my machines at home run Mac OS X, but I have a quite an old ACER laptop here that I keep in some corner until there's time to test another version of windows. Recently I've been running Windows 8 in different flavors, last one was Windows 8 Enterprise eval.

So today came the offer to upgrade from XP, Vista, Windows 7 to Windows 8 Pro and I chose to do so, since the price seems fair (download price that is). Even though I could not install it up to 5 times as with Mac OS X.

But I could not purchase it, since the upgrade assistant always wanted to make me believe that I cannot buy this in my country/region.

But sometimes the easiest things don't come easily to mind such as saving the assistant and configuring it under the properties to run in windows 7 compatibility mode. And voila, it goes through.

At last I could spend some money on Microsoft products that I have avoided for the last 5 years, but to be fair, my daily work is spent on a company laptop running windows 7 with all of office, i.e. I earn my money working on Windows and I spend the rest of my available time on Mac.

I wish myself a happy installation. Also hope to spend some time with the Office 2013 preview. The only thing missing will be the pen input, but the best in my opinion was/is MotionComputing, but I just could not afford it.

Excel: copy paste of cells with multiline text show up with quotes "

Current workaround is to copy paste into word and then into any editor/terminal of your choice.



Again I have not been able to copy the cells as how they are shown, i.e. not quotes, without going through word. 

Excel: Transpose anyone? Much needed feature easily accessed

I started it all wrong with some excel table and decided I need to switch rows with columns and thought that it takes me some time to actually do it manually or find a feature in excel to do it.

Excel to the rescue: Transpose

Just select the table or rows/columns then CTRL-C, go to a new Sheet or wherever and CTRL-V, then select T or transpose icon. Done.

I just have not been able to do this without choosing another place or Sheet, i.e. no same place transpose? Anyone any idea?

for fun: use beautiful google datacenter pictures as windows 7 login screen image

The process is quite simple but I like this little utility much more:

http://www.julien-manici.com/windows_7_logon_background_changer/



I even did not have to reboot to check out if it works, just used WIN+L and boom there it was

links:
http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-change-windows-7-logon-screen-easily-without-using-hacks-tools/

End of the debate: Microsoft SMB can work over tcp/445 period, over and out.

The many discussions you're facing if you don't want to open ports udp/137, udp/138 and tcp/139 in your firewalls end here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc940063.aspx

Direct hosting over TCP/IP uses TCP port 445 instead of the NetBIOS session TCP port 139.

Direct hosting has been available since Windows 2000!

Ok, but just yesterday we have had a machine that we could not teach to use tcp/445 for SMB it always defaulted to NetBIOS over TCP/IP. Was a W2K8 R2 and has some registry corruption issue that prevented it to connect to any fileshare. Solution to that was to set the server to DHCP and then back to static, but it now only goes over 137-139.

Sony Ericsson T610 reset code: 0000

Excel: row numbering

It took me more than 5 minutes to actually find the right link for my problem to number rows automatically with some correction on where to start.

=ROW()-9

If placed in A10, this will give you 1.

Here's the original article, where I found it from:

http://agsci.psu.edu/it/news/2010/11/automatically-number-rows-in-excel