Search through your Internet Explorer bookmarks the easy way

Internet Explorer is one of my favorite Web Navigators, but it has always lacked a decent and practical "bookmark manager" like the one that comes with Firefox. However, since IE bookmarks are directly attached to your Windows profile you can easily search through your bookmarks, a task that otherwise can become unwieldy since you can easily accumulate hundreds of bookmarks. To find where your IE bookmarks are located do this: 1) Press the Windows Key (left to the ALT key) and the R key simultaneously, which will open the Run utility; 2) In the text box labeled Open type: %HOMEPATH% and then click OK or hit Enter; 3)This will open the current user profile folder C:\Users\YourUserName\, where you should look for a subfolder called Favorites, where bookmarks are organized into folders and subfolders and each link is a file in the form of an Internet Shortcut (.url). Besides, this allows you to organize and re-organize them to your heart's content. Once you get to the Favorites folder you can search by typing key words into the text box with the grayed text that reads "Search Favorites", on the right-hand side of the window. Bingo! By double-clicking on each one of the results you can jump directly onto that particular Web page you had bookmarked.  A little piece of trivia: the Favorites Bar, the one that includes your most visited Websites, for some reason is stored in your system under the C:\Users\YourUserName\Favorites\Links subfolder but it appears in the File Explorer as Favorites Bar.

Microsoft revives WinHEC, closer to where the action is

In order to bring the hardware engineering community together in one place, providing a unique opportunity to interact with technical and business experts from Microsoft, other partners, and customers, facilitating exchange of ideas, best practices, and opportunities, Microsoft recently announced the return of WinHEC. The Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) used to be held every year in the US, but now it will be an international event, with frequent smaller conferences and updates, where even the name has been changed to the Windows Hardware Engineering COMMUNITY. In this regard the audience will continue to be executives, engineering managers, engineers and technical product managers at hardware OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers), IHVs (Independent Hardware Vendors), and IDHs (Independent Design Houses) but this time it's not just for PC hardware any more, but also smartphone and tablet hardware. The first WinHEC technical conference will be held in Shenzhen, China, on March 2015.. The Shenzhen ecosystem consists of a diverse community of hardware companies covering electrical design, software engineering, integration, manufacturing, and all other aspects of the computing-device supply chain.

Tools for IT professionals: Windows ADK, WPR and WPA

All of the tools that you need to customize, assess, and deploy Windows operating systems to new computers are included in The Windows® Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) and the likely scenarios are: assess quality on one or more computers, deploy Windows to many computers, review application compatibility, migrate user data and manage licenses. The Windows ADK comes with the Windows® Performance Recorder (WPR), which is a performance recording tool that is based on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). It records system events that you can then analyze by using Windows® Performance Analyzer (WPA). The file to be analyzed is a "Event Trace Log" kind of file with the extension .etl, for instance, COMPUTERNAME.09-10-2014.22-22-38.etl . You can download WPR by visiting http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=293840. These are extremely sophisticated tools, a geek's delight. Take a look to WPA in action here.

Posterpedia: the big picture of MS technologies

Posterpedia is an interactive app (for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8) that uses technical posters as a reference for understanding Microsoft technologies. This graphical, easy to understand format, links directly to Microsoft TechNet and Microsoft MSDN content. Remember those huge and neat paper posters that started circulating about a decade ago with Visual Studio and .NET technologies? Well, this is the same proposition in a digital and more manageable format. Visit http://www.serverposterpedia.com/, though you could also get them individually in PDF format. This wonderful and useful collection of posters is broken down by Microsoft products: Windows Server (11 posters), SQL Server (3), Business Intelligence (1), Solutions (15), Exchange Server (5), Lync Server (2), System Center (1), Microsoft Azure (10), Office (2), SharePoint Server (23), etc.

Chocolatey brings you a Linux "apt-get-like" command in Windows

Chocolatey NuGet—as in "chocolate nougat" (!)— is a Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind. NuGet is libraries installed locally for projects, whereas Chocolatey is applications installed globally for your whole system, as Scott Hanselman pointed in his article "Is Windows user ready for apt-get?." I ran into this interesting tool while browsing for help about SysInternals, advanced system utilities and technical information for Windows power users, since 1996 (!). What I found was how to install SysInternals using the OneGet Module in PowerShell version 5.0.9740.0 (as of today). With OneGet you can 1) Manage a list of software repositories in which packages can be searched, acquired, and installed 2) Search and filter your repositories to find the packages you need, and 3) Seamlessly install and uninstall packages from one or more repositories with a single PowerShell command.
First, I had to update PowerShell by installing the Windows Management Framework V5 Preview that includes Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC), and 2 new features in the form of the cmdlets OneGet and NetworkSwitch. Once you install this Framework, in PowerShell type the command $host to verify the version number and other geeky information.

1. Once you installed the PowerShell update, import the module with the command Import-Module -Name OneGet. To list all the commands available with OneGet type Get-Command -Module OneGet. One of them is Find-Package, which will give you a list of packages ready to be installed (it's a long list!). To use the latter again, invoke the former command.
2. However, in this example we just want to install the SysInternals package, which we do with the command Find-Package SysInternals | Install-Package. You may get a message saying "Installing 'SysInternals' from untrusted source". If so, type "y" and then Enter.
3. If you get an error message related to 'running scripts disabled in this system', you have to change the script execution policy to "unrestricted". Obviously, you will do this if you trust the package being installed. Type the command Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser Unrestricted. For security reasons change it back to "Restricted" once you have installed the package. To find out what is the execution policy in place type Get-ExecutionPolicy.
4. To verify the installation type Get-Package SysInternals, which will show version, status ('installed'), source and summary. If you just type Get-Package, you will get a list of all the packages installed using Chocolatey.
5. To use SysInternals, type the command cd c:\tools\sysinternals, which is the default folder where it is installed, then type dir *.exe to get a list of all the programs/tools available.The script (chocolateyInstall.ps1) in charge of the installation can be found at C:\Chocolatey\lib\sysinternals.2014.05.13\tools. All scripts for installed packages will have their own subfolder within the "lib" folder.
6. If you like further explanations, read Mike F. Robbins' how to install Software with the OneGet Module in PowerShell version 5.

It's really easy: Running old screensavers in Windows 8.1

Three of my favorite Windows screensavers.

Two of my favorite screensavers in Windows Vista were Aurora and Windows Energy and later The Matrix, based on the movie, with that impressive and definitely cool introductory screen with characters flowing down the screen, like rain. These three screensavers can be found in three .scr files: Aurora.scr, ssBranded.scr and TheMatrix.scr, respectively. Installing them is quite simple: just copy these files into the C:\Windows\System32 folder. Then, right click on the desktop and select "Personalize" or go directly to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Personalization. You can also find more information here: Windows Vista screensavers in Windows 7 and The Matrix screensaver, a timeless classic.

How to update to Windows Phone 8.1

To install the newest version of Windows Phone 8.1, "a magnificent smartphone platform" according to a rare review by ars technica, requires some steps that at first I couldn't figure out easily. I tried to install it through the free tool Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone, but I was not able to go anywhere (perhaps I was mistaking WP8 with Windows 8.1? I don't know, but it doesn't matter now) yet, I kept trying. Finally, I was able to do it with a free App called Preview for Developers (see icon to the right). Very important to note that "You must meet one of the following three requirements: (a) have an active Windows Phone Dev Center account; (b) have an active App Studio account; OR (c) be running a registered developer device (‘dev unlocked’ phone)" but you should also heed this warning: You CANNOT REVERT to a prior OS version once you have taken an update via this program. Additionally, your phone needs to be connected to a Wi-Fi network and follow, after reading carefully, all the prompts on your phone. The process takes more than an hour (not minutes as indicated!) and a lot of phone restarts. Make sure you don't do it close to midnight if you don't want to stay up late!