Mind Circus

How to disable or turn off the Panning Hand cursor in Outlook 2007

If you’re using Outlook 2007 and you have a mysterious “Panning hand” cursor that won’t let you select text in an email, and want to turn it off, but can’t find the option, here’s how:

1. Click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar pull down:
    
2. Choose “More Commands…”
3. In the next window, click the drop down box and choose “Commands not in the Ribbon”
    
4. Scroll down until you find “Panning Hand” and then click “Add >>”
5. Click OK.
6. The Hand will now appear in the toolbar.
    
7. Click the Hand to disable Panning Hand
8. You can now select/copy/highlight text

Did it work? Leave a comment!

How to remove the harddrive from a Sony Vaio SZ Series notebook.

I kinda figured you’d need to remove half the chassis. Makes me appreciate just how accessible the HDDs are in most Dell laptops

How to force VMWare to regenerate a MAC address for a guest OS.

1. Shut down the Guest OS.
2. Open up the .vmx file.
3. Delete the following lines (that begin with…):

   ethernet0.addressType
   uuid.location =
   uuid.bios =
   ethernet0.generatedAddress =
   ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset =

    

4. Boot up the Guest OS again, and it should generate new details in the vmx file (I’d check afterwards to be doubly sure).

The most common scenario for wanting to do this is if you’ve used a “template” Guest OS and copied it to multiple PCs, but accidentally clicked “I moved this Virtual Machine” rather than “I copied this Virtual Machine” when first booting the Guest OS in something like VMware Player.

If you tell VMware that the Guest OS was copied, it automatically generates new UUID info and MAC addresses. If you tell VMware that you moved the Guest OS, all unique identifiers are left alone (including the MAC address). By performing the steps above, you can get VMware to generate you some new, unique identifiers, and stop weirdness on your network

If you’ve downloaded a .chm file, but on opening it, can’t see anything, I have a solution for you

Ta-da

• Right click on the file > Properties
• Find the “Unblock” button, and click it.
  
• Re-open the .chm and it should now display properly

[Photo by Josh Bancroft, via Flickr]

It’s a problem we all encounter at some point: You’ve just re-installed Windows, and now you need to download your Mainboard drivers. But which motherboard do you have again?

Instead of opening your PC case to find the Motherboard model number, check out CPU-Z

CPU-Z is a free, stand-alone application (no installer) that very quickly lets you know your system’s vital statistics (CPU, Mobo, and RAM), so that you can head off and find the drivers you need, without having to open up the PC.

This is something I come across frequently when I’m performing OS refreshes at DisplayLink. I imagine it’s a common problem in most start-ups (are we still are start-up? haha), where PCs are bought to spec on an ad-hoc basis. Often, the only way of finding out the motherboard number is by opening the case, lifting cables, and poking around the motherboard, in an attempt to find the tiny bit of writing on the PCB that tells you its model number. Hardly ideal!