To open the Windows 7 certificate manager: press the Windows icon, then enter " certmgr.msc " in the "Search programs and files" box.

When a certificate is "untrusted" by IE (such as a self-signed certificate), it displays a "Certificate error" icon next to the address bar. It used to be that you can click on that icon, "View certificates", then install it. On Windows 7, because of UAC , the "Install Certificate..." button is no longer displayed. In order to see the button, you have to start IE9 with administrator privileges: right click on the IE9 shortcut icon and select " Run as administrator... ". To save the certificate to a file, click the Details tab on the Certificate dialog, then click " Copy to File... ".

Microsoft provides free downloadable Windows images to support IE browser compatibility testing, just google Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image . These VMs run on Microsoft's Windows Virtual PC . According to MS: You can technically have a base image which never expires although you will never be able to permanently save any changes on these images for longer than 90 days.

IE9 has pretty good developer tools support - similar to that of Firebug, though not as good (under the Tools icon pick F12 Developer Tools , or hit F12 directly.). It also allows you to test compatibility with older browsers like IE8: Bring up Developer Tools with F12. pick IE8 in Browser Mode and IE8 standards in Document Mode .

My Dell laptop wasn't able to use an external monitor after a week's vacation. The symptoms were: No response when pressing Fn+F8 to swtich displays. "No signal" on external monitor. Bring up "Screen Resolution" dialog, only one monitor is avaiable. Click "Advanced settings" in "Screen Resolution" dialog, Adapter Type displays "VgaSave". There's no "Display adapters" section in Device Manager . Solution: re-install the video display driver. My laptop came with Nvidia GPU so I reinstalled the Nvidia driver. Download the driver pack from Dell. The Windows 7 CAB file is about 1GB, which indludes all kinds of drivers.

Use the expand command to extract files from a .cab file: expand [-r] source [destination] [-d source.cab ... Option Description [-r] Renames expanded files. [destination] Specifies where files are to be expanded. If source is multiple files and -r is not specified, destination must be a directory. destination can consist of a drive letter and colon, a directory name, a file name, or a combination of any of these. [-d source.cab] Displays a list of files in the source location. Does not expand or extract the files. [-f:files] Specifies the files in a cabinet (.cab) file that you intend to expand. You can use wildcards (* and ?). source.cab Specifies the files to expand. source can consist of a drive letter and colon, a directory...

To identify the display driver info with the DirectX Diagnostic Tool included in Widnows 7 and Vista: Bring up the "Run" dialog with the Win button Type dxdiag and press Enter. Click the Diaplay tab.

VMWare Tools must be installed in the guest OS for shared folders to work. Configure the shared folder: Virtual Machine -> Virtual Machine Settings -> Options -> Shared Folders . Click the Add button to add a share. The share maps a host path to a name in the guest. If the guest system is Linux, the shared folder is available under /mnt/hgfs . If the guest system is Windows, the shared folder is available as \\.host\Shared Folders\<share_name>

Run gpedit.msc Find Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Terminal Services -> Limit Maximum color depth. Right click on "Limit maximum color depth", click "Properties", then select "Client Compatible". Update: for Windows 7 the color depth policy was moved to Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Remote Desktop Services -> Remote Desktop Session Host -> Remote Session Environment

Bring up the Control Panel system page (shortcut: Win+Pause, Win+Fn+Insert/Pause for laptop): Click "Remote settings" on the left Check "Remote Desktop" -> "Allow connection..."