I was making chicken roulades stuffed with smoked pork loin and Gouda this week and was concerned with them keeping their shape.  I pounded out the chicken breasts between pieces of plastic wrap until they were quite thin, then put the ham and cheese inside and rolled them.  I then wrapped each roulade in the same plastic wrap and made a tight bundle by twisting the ends, then chilled in the refrigerator for a few hours.

After unwrapping them and breading in flour, egg and panko bread crumbs they cooked in …

You’re copying data over and don’t want to delete any existing: of course the dialog box doesn’t have a “no to all” button, so you click no about a thousand times.  Or follow this trick: hold down SHIFT and click no: now no existing files will be overwritten.

I’m from an admin background and love the granular control of shares and security that come with Windows Server products and Windows 2000 Professional.  In Windows XP Microsoft wanted to simplify the process with Simple File Sharing.  To turn this rubbish off:

Open My Computer
Pull down the Tools menu, click Folder Options, and then click the View tab
Navigate to the Advanced Settings section, and uncheck Use Simple File Sharing
Click OK

Here’s a great site that provides keyboard shortcuts for a ton of applications.  I’m a DOS user from way back and enjoy keyboarding instead of pointing and clicking.  A simple and to the point web site.
KeyXL Keyboard Shortcuts

I have that wonderful WD Passport drive and use it for shuffling files between work and home.  I was copying a directory over and it was telling me the destination was full and couldn’t copy a 6 GB ISO image.  Not exactly sure what the issue was but guessed it was related to the file system when I saw the WD Passport used FAT32.  I know why WD would use FAT32 since it would work well with most versions of Windows, Linux and OS X, but I like NTFS since …

I’ve mentioned GParted before as an excellent free partition manager.  HowToForge.com has posted an excellent walk through to get the hesitant started.
Modify your partitions with GParted without losing data

This one comes from my friend J:
I figured out how to sort the start menu alphabetically all the time.
In regedit go to:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\
MenuOrder]
Right click Menu Order and select Permissions
Select Advanced Uncheck “Inherit from parent the permission…”
Click “Copy” when the dialog box appears
Click “Ok” to return to “Permissions for Menu Order” for all Group or User Names, uncheck “Allow” for the “Full Control” permission (leaving only Read selected to Allow).
Click “Ok”
After a restart, the Start Menu will be sorted with folders first and then alphabetically. Nicey nice.

Some of you may be Excel gurus, slicing and dicing your way across cells, but most of us just try and get by.  Microsoft has a nice page of 56 commonly used formulas, starting from the basics and moving up a few rungs.  I was finally able to click YES at the bottom on a Microsoft web page when it asked me it I found it useful.
Examples of commonly used Excel formulas

PC Magazine underwent a major design overhaul this year: I love it but there are some detractors.  They began a “Do It Yourself” section that details some nice projects: luckily they’ve collected them online.  Check it out and I’m sure you’ll find one that tugs at you.
PC Magazine DIY

This is a top of the line gaming machine, pure and simple. We gather the best pieces within a $3000 framework and build the best. This used to be a $5000 machine but it’s amazing what can be had within the lowered budget.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
This is the fastest quad core CPU with a reasonable price: after this comes the extreme units with crazy prices. The Q9450 has four cores running at 2.66 GHz on a 1333 MHz bus. Yes that’s basically the same as …