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DiffMerge is an application to visually compare and merge files within Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

• Graphically shows the changes between two files. Includes intra-line highlighting and full support for editing.
• Graphically shows the changes between 3 files. Allows automatic merging (when safe to do so) and full control over editing the resulting file.
• Performs a side-by-side comparison of 2 folders, showing which files are only present in one file or the other, as well as file pairs which are identical or different.
• Right-click on any two files in Windows Explorer to diff them immediately.
• Rulesets and options provide for customized appearance and behavior.
• Compatible with 42 different character encodings.
• Identical feature set on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

"The Porting Team is a small community that specializes in porting Windows games and applications to the Mac with some tools we like to call wrappers (Cider, CrossOver, Wine)."

"Wineskin is a tool used to make ports of Windows software to Mac OS X. The ports are in the form of normal Mac application bundle wrappers. It works like a wrapper around the Windows software, and you can share just the wrappers if you choose. Best of all, its free! Make ports/wrappers to share with others, make ports of your own open source, free, or commercial software, or just make a port for yourself! Why install and use Windows if you don’t need to?"

It seems that Windows by default caches the result of failed (aka. negative) DNS lookups for 6 minutes! If you're using dynamic DNS in your company, this can be pretty upsetting. Imagine: you try to check whether a virtual machine is up and running by pinging it's FQDN (eg. virtual12.example.com). Since you use dynamic DNS registration, the ping request will tell you that the DNS request failed. What you probably don't know is that the "DNS Client" Windows service will cache this reply for you for 6 minutes! You start the virtual machine and expect to be able to ping it in a few seconds. Wrong! You're DNS client won't find the IP for the virtual machine (even though the VM already registered the hostname with the company DNS server) for another 6 minutes.

On linux you can set protocol handlers (eg. for http and https) to various apps via the network.protocol-handler.expose.* preferences. On Windows Thunderbird does not honor these, so you've to do it a little differently.

I used to set the F12 key in Ubuntu as the global hotkey to play/pause the current song in my music player (since my keyboard does not have media keys). Very useful since it's a key that is easy to find and press (eg. pressing a key that is surrounded by other keys requires a lot more attention/concentration from you). However in Windows F12 does not work as a hotkey (by default). If an app tries to register F12 as a global hotkey, it'll get an error.

"After you move the Microsoft Windows XP system (boot) disk to a backup computer, you may receive the following Stop error when you try to start the Windows XP-based backup computer:

STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF741B84C,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

There're several methods for granting rights on Windows services to users. One of the "popular" ones is using SubInACL. The steps are simple.

The problem is well known: you enter a number in a cell (or import it or copy&paste it from somewhere else into a spreadsheet) and Excel decides to format ii differently than what you want/expect. Even if you set the cell format to text. Well, there's Excel's "smart" automation at work behind the scenes.

Unfortunately the bad news is this is quite application specific. An application can have it's own dialog implementations for both "Open" and "Save as". Of course there's a system default in every Windows version, but not even Microsoft products are consistent in using the same dialogs. Eg. if you install Office 2007 on a Windows XP (SP3), the office "Open" and "Save as" dialogs will be quite different from the ones built into XP (more specifically XP's Windows Explorer).