AirV's Blog

Have you ever had a file on a flash drive that you needed to use on a machine that is situated in another building or even halfway across the world? You can do that by plugging it into your local machine and then forwarding the drive through your remote session to that machine. Here’s how to do it.

Press the Windows Key and R to bring up a run box, and type mstsc to launch the Remote Desktop Connection Dialog, or you can just search for Remote Desktop in the Start Menu.

Click on the arrow next to options to see some of the more advanced options.

Once the interface has extended, switch to the Local Resources tab.

Now click on the more button, to see a more extensive list of things that you can forward to the remote machine.

Once you have clicked and expanded the drives, you will see a list of all the devices in your PC, you can forward anything from your CD/DVD drive to a USB drive that you have connected. Check the box next to any of the drive that you want to forward.

Now you can connect to the remote machine as you normally would.

Now if you open explorer on the remote machine you will see you drive, it will appear as if it has been mapped.

Continuing in our series covering how to use Virtual PC, this week we’ll be showing you how to install Windows 7 into a virtual machine. It’s a very simple process, but here’s the step-by-step guide for beginners.

If you haven’t already read it, you should check out our guide on how to create a new virtual machine using Virtual PC.

Creating a Windows 7 Virtual Machine

To see all you can configure in it, you should open your Virtual Machines folder, select your new virtual machine and right click it to select Settings.

Now you will see you have two options to load your Windows 7 installation files.

You can load your installation DVD on your PC and select in the DVD drive menu Access a physical drive as shown in the picture below:

Or you can select Open an ISO image if you have a .iso copy of the installation DVD in your computer:

Once you have selected your installation option, you can double click on the virtual machine and it will start and it will load your installation files.

After loading the installation files, you should configure your language options.

Whenever you click on the virtual machine window, Virtual PC will let you know that the mouse will be captured by the virtual machine and will also show you how to release the mouse to use it on your host operating system again.

You can now click on Install now.

You can select whether you want to make a custom installation or an upgrade. Since you won´t have any previous operating systems installed, you should select Custom.

Select the drive where to install the virtual machine. You can also select Drive options for more advanced configuration settings.

On the Drive options menu, you will see options for formatting the drive, creating or deleting partitions, change the partition size, etc..

Once you click on Next, the installation process will begin.

After the installation has finished, your virtual machine will start for the very first time.

When the operating system has loaded, you will be seeing a toolbar on the upper side of the window. Select Tools and click on Install Integration Components.

It will ask you to install the Integration Components as shown below.

It will open a virtual DVD drive from where you should choose to run the setup file.

This will open the Integration Components wizard that will integrate your virtual machine with your host operating system.

You will see that while it installs the integration components, the virtual pc will begin to recognize your devices and install the drivers.

It will ask you to restart your system for the configuration changes to take effect.

After rebooting, if the Integration Components have not been automatically activated, you can go to Tools and enable them.

After enabling the Integration Components, you will see all the devices connected to your host operating system in the new USB menu from where you can attach them and use them as if they were connected to your virtual machine.

You will also see a new View Full Screen option and you can now enable Aero and other features.

If you want to select what other features you want to integrate between your host computer and your virtual machine, you can go to the virtual machine Settings and select them from the Integration Components menu.

Some applications come with a boatload of keyboard shortcuts; these can make you very fast, but can be difficult to remember, especially if you customized some of them. What if you could have your own little cheat sheet that would pop up next to the application every time your ran it? Read on to see how you can make one.

We’re going to be using an excellent (and free) application called Stickies. If you don’t have it yet, go to the Stickies homepage, download it, and install it.

Creating Your First Cheat Sheet

The first thing we’re going to do is create the sticky note containing whatever info you want to have on hand. With Stickies running, hit Win+S. You should see a blank sticky note, much like the one below.

Yours may not have the current date and time in the caption – that’s a setting you can toggle, but we don’t need it for now.

Next, set the title for your sticky by clicking it and pressing Ctrl+Shift+T. You can also right-click the caption and select Set Title from the context menu.

Now that you’ve set the title (say, Total Commander Tips), fill in the text with whatever you’d like to remember. Use Ctrl + and Ctrl – to increase or decrease the font size, Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+I for italics. You can also select just a portion of the text to make it larger (think subheadings).

With your sticky note all ready, it’s now time to attach it to the window. Make sure the “target application” is running, so we’d have a window to attach the note to. Then, right-click the note’s caption and select Attach.

In the Attach Sticky window, locate your application in the list and click it. You can also toggle the box that says “Only if visible” to have the note visible only when the application window isn’t minimized.

The sticky note you created will now appear whenever you run your application, and disappear when you close the app. If you’d like to make the note always on top, click it and hit Ctrl+T. This way no other windows would cover it. That’s it – you now have a handy application-specific cheat-sheet.