The Microsoft  Remote Shutdown Tool can also be used to shutdown or restart a local computer. Creating shortcuts to do this using the various options available enables different user defined alternative shutdown procedures to be defined. Also you can create a shortcut to STOP the shutdown process once started providing this is within the timeout period .

This is certainly not a new tip but a post today on one of my favorite blogs also showed how a GUI can be started, more of this at the bottom of this post. What I thought may be useful would be to give a overview of the available options and how to create the shortcuts to help less experienced readers.

This is a screenshot of three shortcuts I have created to shutdown, restart and stop the shutdown process.

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This post is the result of reading a bit of advice in one of my RSS feeds today from one of the leading and most respected blogs on the Internet. In itself the information could be considered trivial but the potential for career disaster or personal embarrassment for anyone suffering from email overload ( and that must be many of us) was immense. It got me quite incensed, maybe this is the engineer/researcher in my makeup, but everything needs to be considered in the cold light of day for its real worth.

The post in question was quite simply about prioritising email using rules, whether this is an Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or your favorite email program. In this particular instance the advice was that emails sent directly to you are more important than emails sent to a group.

My instant response is why!

The suggestion is that an email sent to you rather than a group can only be answered by you and is therefore more important. That seems to be a blindingly narrow and wrong view of emails in general.

Let me a give a simple example:

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When an application crashes Windows presents you with the option of sending an error report to Microsoft. If the system has become unstable for some reason or a particular program keeps crashing then this can be particularly annoying. Or maybe, like me, you just never send error reports in anyway. They must already be getting millions so why do they need morel. I say "Microsoft, do something with the ones you’ve got!"

Well you can disable or choose which programs will show the error report dialog, here’s how:

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Applications in Windows have a nasty habit of stealing focus from the program you are currently using. Generally this is because the default registry settings have been overwritten by a program installation. It is quite easy to change the settings back to the default either by editing the registry or by using a “Tweak” program such as Microsoft’s TweakUI. This problem has recently been driving me mad, I am not a touch typist so tend to spend a lot of time looking at the keyboard while typing. So, every time a program steals focus I loose the work I am typing and sometimes make changes to the program that stole the focus.

UPDATE – Also see this post DeskPins – Help to Stop Other Windows Stealing Focus

To change settings install TweakUI from here:

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USB flash drives, memory sticks, etc. normally come preformatted as FAT (FAT16). This has four main advantages and one big disadvantage.

FOR:

• FAT16 is quicker than FAT32 or NTFS for writing files to the drive.
• The number of read/writes is less than NTFS for any given set of files actions.*
• Data loss is less likely when unplugged without using “Safe Removal” ** (more…)

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Why You Need Them

No it’s not because your data may be stolen it’s because you may commit the crime of not protecting it!

We all know the importance of a proper strategy for backing up our precious data and how this needs to be done to a regular schedule. Yet, how often do we forget or put off creating the backup until "a bit later". This then becomes days or even weeks and then along comes the PC crash, a powercut an OS glitch, a hard drive failure, the accidental overwriting of a file. Even with a good backup strategy properly implemented he worst of this is that it is often very difficult to tell exactly what you have lost until much later when you can’t find that precious photo or the resume that you spent a day carefully crafting.

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