Month: March 2008

So did your OEM vista didn’t come with Vista install media?  Never fear, you can obtain media for free from these sources.

Some claim that if you use your OEM license (say sticker off the bottom of your laptop with Vista Ult 32bit) to do an install, it might not accept, but its worth trying.  The main benefit will be to do a repair install, something you can’t do when you only have OEM image CD’s.

There are whispers that if you have Vista Ultimate 32bit license, you can install 64bit version with the same key but on retail media, not if you have OEM license.

References:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/08/windows-vista-free-direct-download-link/

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/12/22/64-bit-x64-windows-vista-official-direct-download-links/

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/10/how-to-make-vista-bootable-dvd-with-wim-downloaded-files/

Commonly forgotten Windows DOS prompt shortcuts

Key	What it Does
F1	Fills in the letter from last command you entered, one letter at a time.  Useful for fixing a typo on a command you just entered.  For example, if I enter cd "My Docements" which wont work, I can then press F1 10 times (or hold it down) to get cd "My Doc then press the u to correct the typo.  Then hold F1 to get the remaining characters of the last command.  cd "My Documents"
F2	Prompts the user for a letter and fills in the last command up to the letter you entered.  This saves  you holding down the F1 key to get to the dodgy letter. Using the last example again, if I press F2 then press e, the line buffer is filled to cd "My Doc.  You can then enter u and then press F2 followed by " to get to the rest of the entry.  cd "My Documents"
F3	Fill last command from current cursor position to the end of the line. So taking from the previous example, after you enter u, you can press the F3 key to fill in the remainder of the line.
F4	Delete forwards up to a specified character.  With the cursor positioned at the beginning of the line cd "My Documents", pressing F4 then u, will delete up the first few characters, leaving you with a line uments"
F5	Go back through history. Equivalent to the up arrow
F6	????  CTRL+Z
F7	Display the command history, use the cursor keys to navigate and hit enter to reuse the relevant command.
F8	Go back in history
F9	Re-issue a previous command.  Prompts for the command number (from the list that appears when you press F7)

 

References (and some other tips)

http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/useful-keyboard-shortcuts-for-the-dos-command-prompt-in-windows/2629/

Ok, so mklink is now my favourite Vista command line tool.  Well not really, but I’m glad Vista comes with a tool out of the box that allows you to create symlinks.  This includes hard links (links to other things on the same partition), soft links or junctions to anywhere and symbolic links (reparse points) that do the same job but in a different fassion.

References:

http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2006/10/symbolic_links_.html

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/22/create-symbolic-links-hard-links-and-directory-junctions-in-vista-with-mklink/

http://windowsconnected.com/blogs/joshs_blog/archive/2006/09/28/Windows-Vista-Junction-Points.aspx

http://www.svrops.com/svrops/articles/jpoints.htm