The Secret of Setting a Password for an MS Word Document

Invoking Save As (ALT-F-A)

First step is to invoke Save As on the Document.  To initiate this, click on the "Microsoft Office Button". (Note: Another way to get at this feature is ALT-F-A).

Invoke General Options (Note: NOT Save Options)

This is in the bottom right of the Dialog, next to the Save button.  You will then be prompted for a password.

Note: we are interested in General Options, and NOT Save Options (e.g. save as DotX or DocX format).

Run Windows XP Forever!

This is one of the boasts of VMWare Player! (Free for Personal Use).

• You will need the CD for Windows XP
• The VM Ware Authorization Service must be running (Check Administrative Tools->Services)
• You need to be connected to the Internet (VMWare will need to pull in VMWare tools for Windows 2000 and later)

Storage Technology for the Windows Hacker

Programmers have to be hardware geniuses too these days.

If your inner hardware genius needs refreshing here are some of the common terms you will come across when dealing with storage solutions. If you are in charge of hypervisor environments or cloud administration you will certainly need to know these terms as a prerequisite to any technical chats you may have with hardware vendors.

SCSI - SMALL COMPUTER System Interface (sku-zee) - the hard part to remember is the SMALL COMPUTER part of the acronym!

It is basically a set of standards to physically connect peripherals with computers. It's important to know this since many new standards are derived from SCSI.

SCSI was actually derived from another standard known as SASI where SA was "Shugart Associates", a floppy disk drive manufacturer from the 1970s).

SASI was developed around 1978 to provide a communication interface between the low level interface of a hard disk drive and a computer.

The original SCSI standard was published by ANSI in 1986.SCSI-2 was published in 1990.

Virtualization Mumbo Jumbo

Virtualization has its roots with IBM's SIMMON system in the 1960s but the mumbo-jumbo attached to it is definitely a 21st Century phenomenon.

Running a Desktop on a Virtual Machine on Windows

There are a number of options to run a desktop on your local device using a virtual machine. There are a number of good benefits to doing so, but here we focus more on the "how-to". Some examples of products:

• Citrix FlexCast
• VMWare workstation
• Microsoft Hyper-V

Magazines such as Network World have run stories on who has the better platform, including "deep dive" studies. The companies themselves also run "technical blogs" that document experience of using the technology and also play an "evangelical" role in big-upping their respective platforms.

Note: running a desktop on a virtual machine is definitely not the same thing as virtual desktops, a concept very common on Linux environments and making inroads into the Windows world as well!!

What is the Hibernation File Cleaner in Vista?

When doing a Disk Cleanup in Vista you may see a chunk of memory (say 3GB) allocated to a "Hibernation File Cleaner". What on earth is this?

This is the "hibernation file" or hiberfil.sys. If you delete it, it will likely return.  The purpose of the file is to save your desktop state when the computer goes into hibernation mode and the power goes off. Without it, what you were working on will be gone.

Control Panel -> Power Options will give you a console to control what the computer does in certain scenarios. For example, for a laptop, closing the lid may result in sleep whereas hitting the power on button will turn the machine off.

Cleaning up Files

Windows tends to fill your system up with useless files.

These include System Error memory dump files, temporary Internet files, temporary files (filling up the Windows temp directory) and Downloaded Program Files.

Several gigabytes of space can be wasted. To deal with this problem, go to Start Menu -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup.

Another useful tool to analyze where your maximum disk usage is is WinDirStat, based on Stefan Hundhammer's KDE program KDirStat, and is available under GPL v2.