Snipping tool is a cool software in Microsoft Vista for bloggers who are regularly taking screen shots to show software / tool demos in the blog, moreover it will have keen interest for bug reporters. Anyway I am regularly taking screen shots to show software demos in blogs.

The snipping tool can take different types of screen shots viz full screen, rectangular, any window or free form snips. In the free form snips you need to draw the shape with your pencil, it will be grabbed to the clipboard. Just search for “snipping” in the start menu’s search you will get the application. Here is the default interface.

As I mentioned that we can take different type of screen shots. All except Free-form are familiar I guess. So I am going to explain the operations to take a screen shot using Free-form snip. In the Free-form snip we need to highlight parts of the screen shot and draw on it with a free form pen of different colors, thickness and tip styles. Here is the screen shot that taken by using Free-form Snip.

I believe this is the best tool for taking screen shots.

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In one of my previous post I described the workaround for installing Windows XP in your pre-installed Windows Vista computer and the process of partition drive in Windows Vista. But I forgot to mention about the bootloader for Vista. When we have multiple operating system installed in our system we need to choose the operating system to boot while booting your system. So we need to install a bootloader for this.

When we install an Linux or Ubuntu in our system then a bootloader will be installed with the installation process. So we can select which operating system to load during the booting process. But we are installing 2 operating systems, Windows Vista and Windows XP both are Windows. Since the primary operating system is Windows Vista we need to install a Vista booloader. Download and install VistaBootPro.

During the installation of VistaBootPro it will force to install .NET framework 2.0. Open the bootloader application. Select the radio buttons as shown in the figure below.

To add Windows XP bootloader entry, click on the Diagnostics menu item and then choose Run Diagnostics from the menu. This will scan the and find if there is an Windows XP in your system. Click on the “Manage OS Entries” tab and then click in the textbox for Rename OS Entry, and name it something useful like “Windows XP” or “Your Favorite name”.

Click the button Apply Updates and reboot the system. On your next boot process you can see the bootloader with options viz Vista and the Windows XP.

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Now a days new laptops are equipped with Pre-installed Windows Vista. The most annoying thing is that, as the operating system is pre-installed we are not able to install another operating system. The pre-installed operating system take up the entire disk. I use both Ubuntu and Windows now I am not able to install Ubuntu in my laptop. I will explain how to make partition(s) in Windows Vista first and later I will suggest the workaround to install another operating system in your laptop.

Right click on your My computer Icon, click on the Manage menu item. Select the Disk management item from the new Window. This will display disk information on the right side of the window.

Now we can use the Shrink Volume tool for re-partition your drive. Right click on the Vista Preloaded drive displayed there. You can see a menu item called “Shrink Volume” which will assist you for the re-partition. On the next window enter the amount to be partitioned in MB. The amount entered will remain as free space. You can allocate the rest of the free space to one or more drive by creating new volume on the free space. We can assign the drive letters after that. While assigning make sure the drive letter assigned for CD-ROM will not be allocated to the new volume(s). The process of partitioning ends here.

I am going to explain how to install another operating system in this. You can use the same process I described above but after shrinking the drive make the rest of space as free. Reboot your system and make the CD-ROM as the primary bootable device. Insert your bootable Ubuntu or Windows XP CD in your drive and start installation. Select the free space for the new installation. Continue the rest of installation procedure, I guess you might be familiar with operating system installation already. Enjoy reading!!!

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I am using Lenovo laptop with Windows Vista. The wifi access in this laptop is not much user friendly. It is not possible for a novice user to connect a wifi network without much hurdles. The lenovo laptops are packaged with a wireless management tool called Think Vandage. You can see the application when we start lenovo care application. The application is not at all user friendly. But my point of discussion is the process involved in connecting your lenovo system for point to point wifi access.

Where comes point to point wifi access?

This kind of wifi networking can be done with your system or laptop. The only requirement is your system / laptop does have wifi card. We don’t need a separate wifi router to serve content to other system(s). The connection is point to point, that is from one system to other system. You can even share internet connection to nearby device using point to point network.

The process involved in connecting to point to point network.

The first process involved is double click on the computer icon shown on your desktop toolbar.

On the new window which is “Access Connections” click on the Locations menu and select the menu item Create New Profile... New window will open which contain information needed to add new profile.

Enter a name of the location profile(which might be some dummy name like PtoP or Sythoos). Select the network connection type as Wireless LAN 802.11. Click on the next button. On the next window enter Network name (SSID), this is the name of the Point to Point network. Another way to find the SSID is to search network(Click on the Find network button). Select the connection type as Adhoc.

Click on the next button. The next window is the setting window. Click on the TCP/IP setting and add IP address of same class in the Point to Point network. If your network server is something like 192.168.0.1 then you can assign an address 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.255. Enter subnet mask as 255.255.255.0 and default gateway as the IP address of the system that serves internet / main system.

Check out the TCP/IP setting below. Don’t forget to add DNS Server as the system that serves internet.

I know the procedure is not much simple, although we can’t do anything rather than following the procedure. It’s Windows Vista we need to do a lot to configure even simple things.

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