There are some really good (technical) webcasts from TechEd Europe online and I’ve just watched The case of the Unexplained – a very interestng and useful presentation by Mark Russinovich of Microsoft/Sysinternals on analyzing dump files, processes and hanging systems. I’m sure this will come in very handy. One of the tips I learnt was that you can actually use process explorer as a taskmgr replacement by going to options/replace task manager (or restore if you want to put it back again)
A highly recommended presentation if you do any troubleshooting of user desktops (or servers). Note it is pretty long – 74 minutes, and as it is in silverlight I don’t think it’s possible to download for offline viewing and the navigation to skip to a certain part of the clip sucks big time. There is no slider so you have to click randomly in a grey bar (that obscures part of the screen) to guess where you will end up.
From Lifehacker I was pointed to a free utility called Wink which records screen, mouse and keyboard and saves them as a flash or an exe file for tutorials. In common with other software I’ve tried before, in the autorecord mode where it automatically takes screen captures on a mouse and keyboard press, the screen capture takes place after the screen has refreshed from the mouse click. So what you tend to end up with is the mouse moving to a certain location on screen 1 which doesn’t make sense. Then the screen refreshes and the mouse is at a sensible location for screen 2.
To get round this problem, just make sure you screen capture before and after every click of the mouse and then the cursor seems to move to sensible places.
I’ve used it this morning to upload about 3 tutorials on using Mambo (the incredibly powerful but too confusing cms). One of them was to use with the podcasting capabilities of MamboPodcast so that the website can now have mp3 downloads and podcasts too.
I can’t link to the tutorials as it contains urls that I don’t want public – yet.
Update Other (free) products that do something similar are Camstudio and Bulent’s Screen Recorder, the latter I’m sure I’ve used before.