Last month I released the Time Lapse Tool (free and open source) which builds time lapse movies from JPG images that you provide. Start the tool, set some options, browse to add your image files and let it do it’s thing. Presto! You have a time lapse movie.

There are some things in Exchange that you just need to use PowerShell for. If you use Exchange Online or Office 365, the web portal exposes a lot of the admin functionality that you might need, but there are certain actions that require PowerShell. Accessing the Exchange PowerShell cmdlets on a local server is one thing, but accessing those cmdlets in a hosted environment can be a little trickier. After I had to type these a half-dozen times, my brain wasn’t getting it quite yet, so I build a little script that covers what you need to need to establish a connection to the remote Exchange environment.

Easy code snippet on how to retrieve the BIOS version with PowerShell. Get-WmiObject win32_bios This will output the BIOS version, manufacturer, name, and serial number.

I actually stumbled across this setting recently, and it reminded me of a Windows “throwback”. It seems to simple, but I forgot that things actually used to be like this. Somewhere along the way, probably with Windows 7, Microsoft started to try to utilize the taskbar space more efficiently. With that, you saw the use of combined taskbar icons, meaning that if you had three separate documents opened in Word, you’d see a single Word icon in the taskbar, but see that there were icons/instances “combined” underneath it and also the text label for the icon was hidden or collapsed. This saves screen real estate, but can make it harder to know what is open at a glance.

It’s amazing the amount of stuff on a hard drive that can be overlooked, until you run out of space. The Disk Cleanup tool that is built into Windows can help keep your machine extra tidy, but can also be a powerful tool when you’re in a space crunch. Think of the Disk Cleanup tool’s basic functionality as a “squeegee”. But it has a mode that deals with system level files and more important stuff; think of that as the “power washer”. In “power washer” mode, I was able to free up almost an additional 29GB of disk space. A lot of this was due in part to the recent upgrade to Windows 10 that was performed on this machine. And there’s more to be saved too. More on that later. I’ll walk you through the basics of how to use the Disk Cleanup tool. It’s pretty powerful, so if…