Beta 2 version of Internet Explorer is now available. You can download it from here

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx

There can be multiple reasons if you are unable to access shared folders in a Windows Vista based computer over the network. The following are two common reasons among them.

1) Make sure that File sharing option is turned ON in "Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network and Sharing Center"

2) Make sure that "Guest" user account is disabled. The actual interface to do this would vary depending on the version of Windows Vista you are using. But you should find the user account related settings under "Control Panel\User Accounts\User Accounts"

I have been using ThinkPad T61P for quite some time with Vista Ultimate x64 bit on it. I was impressed with the quality of built-in speakers, but I terribly missed the microphone. Every IM client and voice recording application told me that "No audio devices are installed" whenever I tried to use the microphone. My first assumption was that the driver for microphone is missing. But device manager showed that all the drivers are installed. Then I was told by someone that there is no microphone in professional series laptops like ThinkPad. I somehow believed it as I could not spot the same anywhere on my laptop. But to my surprise; today I saw some of my colleagues using microphone in ThinkPad. This drove me crazy and I decided to get the microphone working in my laptop. And finally I managed to find the microphone in my laptop with five minutes of effort, something which I could not do for past few weeks. All I needed was a bit of determination. And here is what I did.

Control Panel --> Hardware and Sound --> Manage Audio Devices --> Click on "Recording" tab. --> Right click on the white space --> Select "Show Disabled Devices". See the diagram below

Windows engineering team has recently started blogging about their work. It is a welcome move by the senior leaders in the engineering team to share their work and also seek feedback from the community. Here is the blog link http://blogs.msdn.com/e7

An evangelist at Microsoft can never stop working, even when he is away from work at a family reunion :) . I was meeting one of my brothers after a long time. I found him using a laptop with Vista as the operating system and thought of asking him about his experience with Vista. In the next few minutes he poured all the frustration he had with Vista onto me. Contrary to my fear that he would have faced some issues with application & device driver compatibility his major complaint was about the changes in user interface compared to Windows XP. When I dived more deep into his issues I figured out that he has three specific issues that is really causing all the frustrations.

1. The overall appearance of Windows Vista
2. The ability to start command prompt from any folder by a simple right click. He found a work around in Windows XP to do this, but it is not working in Vista.
3. He wants to add a couple of options to the "Send To" menu item when he right clicks on any file. He knows that the way to do this is by adding a shortcut in the "Send To" folder found under user profile. But he is not able to find the "Send To" folder.

Now I have to help him solve his issues especially because I asked him about his experience with Vista. Luckily I could figure out solutions to all these problems and I am sharing the same with all of you as many of you would be facing the same "problems".

1. If you really don't like the new appearance of Windows Vista you can switch that back to classic or standard Windows view by doing the following
   • Right click any empty area (not on any file or folder) on your desktop and choose "Personalize" as shown below
   • The above step should have taken you to Control Panel and you should select "Windows Color and Appearance" as displayed below
   • In the next Window click "Open classic appearance properties for more color options"
   • The window next should provide you various colour schemes and choosing "Windows Standard" or "Windows Classic" would help you get your Windows back to the old style. But personally I love using the "Windows Aero" colour scheme and it's awesome! So give it a try before you switch to classic or standard mode. In some computers "Windows Aero" is not available. In that case "Windows Vista basic" is the best option according to me.
2. Now the command prompt thing. If you want a command window to be started from any folder in Windows Explorer all you need to do is simply press the "Shift" button and right click on that folder, you will get an option to start the command window. See the picture below

3.Customising "Send To" was the next task. The "SendTo" folder is still found under the user profile. But the catch here is that all the user profile information is kept inside the folder "C:\Users" instead of "C:\Documents and Settings". So the "SendTo" folder for any user can be found under C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows. Also as usual "SendTo" is a hidden folder.

Hope this information helps everyone!