Run as different user, in Windows 7

Here's a little gem from a friend of mine. In Windows 7 we all know how to right click and "Run as administrator". But how do you run a program as a different user, perhaps as an administrator on a different domain? The answer: when you Shift + Right click, you get an additional "Run as different user" option.

Thanks, Microsoft, for hiding stuff from us. You really know all about usability.

Working with Windows

Here are a few links I found useful when messing with Windows:

• Create or delete a service in Windows XP
• How to bring back the missing Security tab in Windows XP
• How to show Quick Launch in Windows 7
• Startup folder locations in Windows 7
• How to enable ping response in windows 7

defrag interface: one year later

In my first post to this blog last year, I showed the difference between the Windows Disk Defragmenter on Windows XP and that on Windows Vista. The bottom line was that the Vista version lost the graphical interface and the user has no idea what is going on in the background.

With the release of Windows 7, one would hope that this annoyance has been taken care of. Sadly, this is not the case. The interface does give some information on what it is doing, but the user gets no idea of how much progress has been made, and the graphical display we have come to love in XP is long gone.


Fortunately, the good folks at Piriform have created a defragmentation utility called Defraggler that shows the defragmentation operations on the hard disk in real-time. This is even better than XP's defrag utility. The visual display is, of course, only one of the great features of this utility. I only gave it a quick try (and loved the Quick Defrag option), but the interface was enough to amend the sorrows caused by Vista and Windows 7.

Early Sierra games playable online

Some interesting stuff that surfaced between yesterday and today:

• Old Sierra Games Playable In Browser Through Open Source Game Engine - a great piece of work at Sarien.net.
• Microsoft Suffers Leaks, Lagging Sales Numbers As They Look Forward To Windows 8 - article about the leak of Windows 7 Release Candidate, and the fact that Microsoft are already beginning to plan Windows 8.
• My thesis is going through a public evaluation beta this week - check out the chatbot evaluation page.