Friday, June 20, 2008

Open Command Window in explorer

Microsoft powertoys provide a useful tool to open a command prompt windows. But on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, this useful feature is somewhat a hidden feature.

On the right panel of Windows Explorer, hold SHIFT key when you right click on a folder, the "Open Command Window Here" will show as an item in the context menu. While this work, it is not convenient, and the folder has to be on the right panel.

Modifying registry can be used to achieve the same behavior as powertoys:

1. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Classes/Folder/Shell

2. Create a key with the name you want.

3. Create a "command" subkey and set the default value to "cmd.exe /k pushd %1".

All done!

Windows Live Writer on Windows Server 2008

Recently I updated my server to Windows Server 2008 and would like to use Windows Live Writer for blog editing. Unfortunately, the Windows Live Writer (Version 2008) installer does not work under this new environment. I was about to give up on it, then I find that www.live-writer.de provide a msi version. Installation went smoothly!