No system is an island - Using Windows And Tech Step By Step

Windows Vista comes with in-built partition creation which makes it possible to make new partitions on fly from Vista.This takes care of basic partitioning needs without purchasing any extra application.

Say if we have Vista installed on a single disk with no partition,we can shrink this single disk so as to have a new partition without the use of any external partition sizing utility.

With administrator privileges,go to Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc



Select the volume that needs to be shrinked (i.e from which a new partition needs to be created).
Right click and select Shrink Volume.



Specify the size (this will be restricted based on the current disk space utilised on current volume and also size of paging file and other system parameters in case the system volume is to be shrinked).




Select Shrink.
Once complete,there will be a unformatted volume created,format it as per choice (NTFS/FAT32) and label it.

All done.

Some things are addictive no matter how old they get,like playing DOS based games for instance.

Have you ever wondered how will good old DOS run in Windows XP/Vista boxes?
There is a cool free utility that allows you to do just that.It is an emulator of sorts which provides you all the retro DOS features in your shiny new Windows.

It is named DOSBox and the best thing it does is the ability to run really nice DOS games under Windows,all that for free.Let's take a look on how to go about installing and configuring it.

Download it from here first.

Run the setup with administrator privileges,installation is quite visual.Once installed,you can see a desktop icon like this :



Double click to run the application,there will be a familiar good old DOS console :



To run any DOS application,first we need to mount a drive in DOSBox which contains the executables.The following command gives the correct syntax to do that :

intro mount



Here,I am mounting a folder which has Mortal_Kombat arcade game as a drive in DOSBox.
The game folder resides on D Drive on my Vista machine,I am assigning it drive letter G in DOSBox,the full command looks like this :

mount g d:\Arcade\Mortal_Kombat

I will verify that the G drive is listed correctly with the specific folder :



All done,now just like in good old DOS days,type the executable file name to launch the program in full glory of DOS by navigating to the mounted drive - g: in this case.

To quit DOSBox,simply type "quit" to close the shell.

Playing DOS based games kind of brings back old memories,doesn't it?

Peace.

To fix an error,you should first know the error and then find out what causes this error.

System errors in Windows occur all the time(the pretty blue screens of death).The default settings Vista (or even XP) is configured with is to simply restart on own.

While this is a common way of troubleshooting errors,not all system errors can be fixed by a simple reboot.It is important to get details of errors when they happen so they can be analyzed.

To prevent Vista from auto-rebooting whenever a system error happens,navigate to Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Advanced Settings.





Select the Startup and Recovery tab and uncheck the automatically restart option.Click OK to save the changes.

Doing this will ensure that Vista in event of a critical system error will come to a halt which in turn helps in seeing the error (error codes/description in case of blue screen).

Hope this has been an informative post.