Anyone who has travelled to a foreign country before and used a local PC has probably had that challenge of finding the right characters on the keyboard. The biggest challenge I heard of from people is about the @ sign and the . (dot) character. These are two important characters when entering an e-mail address.

Well there is an easy solution, all you need is to remember two numbers: 46 and 64. When you can’t find the sign on the keyboard you can use the so-called ALT Code to write a character.

To write the @ sign, hold down the "Alt" key to the left of the space bar and enter 64 on the numeric keypad. Don’t release the "Alt" key until after you’ve typed 64. When you release it you should see the @ character.

To write a . (dot) apply the same procedure as described above, but enter 46 instead of 64.

Here are some related sources I found on the Useful Shortcuts web site

Instructions for using Windows Alt Codes

Alt Codes / Alt Key Codes

Complete List of Alt Codes (Free download)

On MAC systems, things seem to be different, at least that is what I got from reading various forums (I don’t have a Mac…….yet)http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/keyboards/charpalosx.html

VLC is available for multiple operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BeOS. If you want to play your different audio and video files with just one player, VLC is a must have. A complete feature overview can found here

Unless you load one of the many available skins, the application by default comes with very lean interface and it’s FREE

You can download the VLC Media Player here

More information about the VLC media player

http://www.videolan.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player
http://wiki.videolan.org/Main_Page

and here’s an article about why the VLC media player has a cone as logo
http://nanocr.eu/2005/06/23/vlc-cone/

I had heard about the My Phone service from Microsoft, a web based solution that allows you to backup and restore your mobile phone data to a secured web site.

So I signed up to http://myphone.microsoft.com. I had all my data synched from my old device to the new device within 15 minutes. This is what i did.

I Installed the MyPhone Beta application on my old device by launching www.myphone.microsoft.com/install. Once installed I had to sign-up with my existing Live-ID account and when logged on I could define the content I wanted to have synchronized.

Once the synchronization was completed, I launched www.myphone.microosft.com and could actually see my uploaded content. So far so good.

I then installed the MyPhone Beta application on my new device, again by launching www.myphone.microsoft.com/install. Once installed and having completed the initial sign-up, i could simply synchronize the previously backed up data to my new device.

I have been switching mobile phones since 1998, but it has never been that easy.

More Information:

www.myphone.microsoft.com
http://sn1-p3.myphone.microsoft.com/mkweb/MoreInfo.po?tsid=1247307256129&mkt=en-US

http://edge.technet.com/Media/Volume-Activation-changes-in-Windows-7/

The download contains two documents:

BETA - AppLocker Frequently Asked Questions.pdf
BETA - Planning and Deploying Windows AppLocker Policies.pdf

Download here

Another great information source I found is the Mac Admin Corner blog.

Download the script from MSDN Code Gallery and run cscript.exe VHDShellExt.vbs /action:setup for installation. More documentation can be found on Ravikanth’s site.

This turned out to be a known issue as documented within the following Microsoft support article. After you create Windows XP Service Pack 3 slipstreamed media, your product key is not accepted.

Bottom line, don’t run the slipstream command on a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 system.