Disable Reading Layout View in Office 2003

Have you ever received a Word document as an email attachment? Did it open up in a split page view? That split page view is called "Reading Layout View". Personally, I find Word opening a document in that view annoying. Apparently, so do many of you out there. Some of you may like using Word's "Reading Layout View" and that's great. On a large LCD monitor it does make documents more viewable. But, just in case you don't like it, here's a short video to show you how to keep "Reading Layout View" from hijacking your email attachments. You can read more about "Reading Layout View" at this link.

Try Silverlight

If you've been to any Microsoft web site lately you might have noticed it asking you to install Silverlight. Taken from the Microsoft Silverlight page this is how they describe the browser plug-in.

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Basically, it is meant to be similar to Adobe Flash. The big difference is that Microsoft .Net programmers can use it to program for web sites. If you'd like to see it in action check out the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia page. I used Firefox to view the Silverlight sites that I have visited. It's worked flawlessly so far. Check it out for yourself, let me know what you think.

Removing a Flash Drive Safely

I recently had a client that could not get a flash drive to work on her workstation. However, the same flash drive worked perfectly on her laptop. So, I plugged my flash drive into her workstation. My flash drive was seen by Windows and given a drive letter perfectly. So this told me that the workstations USB ports were working fine. From this information I figured that her flash drive was not getting assigned a drive letter correctly. The drive letter that her flash drive was using on the laptop was already in use on the workstation. Since she was not removing the flash drive properly it was retaining the assigned drive letter from the laptop. Using the "Safely Remove Hardware" wizard prevents data loss and problems like above. She was not present when I figured out the problem. So, instead of writing her instructions I just created a short video showing how to remove a flash drive safely in Windows XP.



This video was done in flash format orginally. Just click here for the flash version of "Safely Remove Flash Drive" video. I hope this helps someone, if it does let me know.