I've been pondering the merits of the iPad, and I've had a tough time coming up with a compelling use for it. Until now...

I (and several hundred thousand others) work for a large corporation, that has a highly restrictive firewall and "locks down" the software on its laptops and PCs. Fair enough. The LAN and the computers belong to it.

I want to use Remote Desktop to control a PC which is running Windows 7 Home Basic (we'll call this PC 'the host').  Officially, this isn't possible.  Here's my unofficial idea.

1. First, go to the host and enable the Telnet service on the host.  (Yes, it is included with Win 7 HB.)
2. Also at the host, enable Remote Assistance.
3. Still at the host, enable file sharing of C:\temp. (Create it, if the folder doesn't exist.)
   

I wanted Windows to send output to two devices.  Same content.  Just send it to my amplifier (via HDMI) and to a wireless audio transmitter.  Both the HDMI and the analog audio devices are on the Acer Revo motherboard.

Windows 7 insisted that it could send output to one or the other, but not to both at once.  I Googled and Googled, and I found others who wanted to do the same thing, but no one succeeding.

Weather.com stopped showing the live Radar map today.  After tinkering with exception rules, I found that adding a whitelist entry for:

@@|http://www.weather.com/common/a2/OASAdFrame.html?position=PointSpon*

brought back the radar weather map.

From time to time I run into a situation where a Windows program reacts poorly to certain drive classes.  For example:

• A backup program that only backs up fixed, local drives, and I want it to back-up a removable drive or a network drive.
• A program that does something to all fixed, local drives, and I want to prevent it from accessing one of the drives by marking the drive as removable.

I need a way to tell Windows that it should say that the drive is different than it really is. 

I'm running

• Windows 7 Media Center on an

• Acer Revo with

• nVidia ION graphics, hooked to a

• Panasonic 720p TVr via a

• Pioneer VSX-819 A/V amplifier, using