Windows

HOW TO remap your keys (and their shift-states) by creating a new Keyboard Layout

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 10:09:00 GMT

Yesterday I was reading Jeff Atwood's blog (on Keyboarding) and I thought I´d try one more time to find a nice tool to remap the keyboard.

See, when you use non-english keyboards you tend to start wondering about why would you need to press Ctll-Alt and 2 just to type the @ char, while you have keys mapped to symbols you never use: the spanish keyboard, for example, has keys mapped to º, ª, ç, Ç, and so-called "dead-keys" so you can press them and then type a, e, i, o, u and get the accented version of those chars, THREE of them we never use in spanish: `, ^ and ~; ç and Ç are only used in portuguese!

I always wanted the ability to remap these keys into characters that would be a lot more useful while coding, so I had tried several approachs before, including Chris Sells Scancode Mapper, but those only allow you to remap entire keys, they don't really allow to modify the characters that appear when you 'modify' them with Shift or Ctrl-Alt (AltGr).

Enter the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). KLC allows you to create a new Windows keyboard layout from scratch or customize a preexisting one, and build an MSI installer for it. You can then simply install it and configure Windows to use your custom layout.

The main window presents you with the representation of a standard keyboard (if your keyboard has an L shaped enter key you can change the physical layout so it represents your keyboard in the View... Options menu).

You can then double click any key to enter the new character that should be sent to Windows when it's pressed. If you changed the state by marking "Shift" on the main window, when you do this you'll be changing the character that will be sent when Shift and that key are pressed.

You can either simply enter the new character that should be sent, or enter it's Unicode number (UTF-16 code point).

If you want to go deeper, you can expand the key properties window (by pressing the All... button), so you get access to change the normal, shift, ctrl+alt (AltGr), shift+ctrl+alt, SGCAPS, etc, and to define your own Dead-keys.

Defining a dead key is straight-forward: just enter the normal characters that should be pressed after the dead-key, and the resulting characters that should be sent.

You can preload any installed Windows keyboard layout so you don't don't forget about any essential character.

Once you've defined your own keyboard layout, you can build the installer for it (Project... Build DLL and Setup Package), and proceed to install it.

Once you have it installed, all you need to do is open Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, and configure Windows to use your new layout.

HOWTO Install Windows Media Player 10 on Windows Server 2003

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:21:00 GMT

I'm copypasting this from: http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t245309.html

1. Copy the MP10Setup.exe to the root of your C:\ drive.
2. Go to Start -> Run -> and type in C:\MP10Setup.exe /C /T:C:\TEMP and press enter.
3.Go to C:\TEMP and open file control.xml in notepad.
4. Search for words "oobinf" and change those to "advinf". Then search for words "5.1.2600" and change those to "5.2.3790". Lastly, save control.xml file.
5. Reboot into Safe Mode With Comand Prompt (Press F8 upon booting).
6. Once the Command Prompt has loaded, type C: followed by enter, then type CD TEMP followed by enter.
7. Type setup_wm.exe followed by enter to install Media Player
8. When setup is complete you will get error saying that install failed but it only says that because it couldn't start service called Windows User Mode Framework in services.msc, everything is installed fine and that service loads on reboot. Now Lastly reboot.

That's it enjoy and remember to ZIP C:\TEMP directory so you don't have to do steps 1-4 again.

Windows Media Player 10 Series (for Windows XP) (11.6mb)

Server Performance Advisor

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:18:00 GMT

Server Performance Advisor

"Service Performance Advisor is a server performance diagnostic tool developed to diagnose root causes of performance problems in a Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, particularly performance problems for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 and the Active Directory® directory service. Server Performance Advisor measures the performance and use of resources by your computer to report on the parts that are stressed under workload.

Other server roles include system overview (hot files, hot TCP clients, top CPU consumed), print spooler, context switch data and preliminary File Server trace data."

HOWTO Install ACTIVE DESKTOP for WINDOWS NT4

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 11:05:00 GMT

1. Open the ie4shl95.cab or ie4shlnt.cab file in Winzip or any archiving utility and extract all the files inside onto a temporary folder (for example 'c:tempie4shell').
2. Create a batch file in Notepad with the following lines:

@echo off
start /w RUNDLL32.EXE ADVPACK.DLL,LaunchINFSection ie4shell.inf,DefaultInstall
cls

3. Save the file as an 'install.bat' file and place it onto the temporary folder where you store the IE Desktop Update setup files.
4. Double-click on the INSTALL.BAT file to install the Desktop Update and reboot the computer when setup is done.