Microsoft Windows is the world’s most installed operating system, used on desktop computers and servers all over the world. I have been using Windows since the Windows 3.11 days and have worked with most versions (Windows 3.11, Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7).
Although I currently use OSX as my desktop computer I also have Windows 7 desktop and laptop and a Windows XP netbook and also run XP virtualized for testing Internet Explorer.
After adding a new network interface to my Windows XP computer networking stopped working completely. I uninstalled the McAfee Security Center but that didn’t help. This article looks at the steps I did to uninstall and reinstall TCP/IP networking on Windows XP.
To connect to MSN Messenger and ICQ instant messaging servers through a firewall you will need to open up outbound ports to connect to them. This article describes which ports to open and has an example of how to do it using a Dynalink RTA200 ADSL router.
To connect to a remote Windows Virtual Private Network you need to open up TCP port 1723 and IP protocol ID 47. This article explains about this with an example of how to do it using a Dynalink RTA220 ADSL router.
On Windows Vista the hosts file has a higher level of default security than earlier versions of Windows and it cannot be edited by a regular user unless the permissions are changed, or you run your text editor as administrator. This post looks at how to edit the hosts file on Windows Vista using notepad.
I started using an Apple Magic Trackpad yesterday and already far prefer it to a mouse (I’ll do a review of it next week once I’ve used it a bit more). This post has a link to a page which shows how to connect a Magic Trackpad to a Windows machine that’s not on Boot Camp and a few observations I made when attempting to connect.
This article at Digital Inspiration shows how to use a Magic Trackpad with your Windows PC. It has links to the driver files to download from Apple and 7-Zip which you will need to extract the necessary files. You’ll obviously also need to be able to connect to bluetooth devices with your Windows PC. In my case I had a Bluetooh dongle which did the trick nicely.
I had some issues trying to connect the trackpad in the first place but the main issue turned out to be that it was still connected to my Mac, even though it was a floor below where I was and there were a few walls inbetween me and the mac; so you may need to disconnect it from the Mac first.
The other thing I needed to do was keep hitting the on button on the right side; it kept turning itself off after every 5 seconds (or thereabouts) which prevented it from connecting to the Windows PC. This may have been a continuing issue with the Mac being in range and may not affect you.
I only just connected the trackpad to the computer I am writing this on a few minutes before writing this post, so haven’t had much of a chance to play around with it yet, but the following do work:
On the downside, I have found:
I haven’t tried any other gestures yet (and don’t expect them to work anyway) and will update this post if I find anything else useful or interesting.
