Image: Screen grab by Jason Bean

I just found out about a little feature of Microsoft Word that I never knew before today.

Where you aware of a feature and file type called a "scrap"?

The file doesn’t even have an extension. It’s just part of the shell command features.

What it lets you do though is highlight a portion of text in your Word document and drag it to the Desktop like a shortcut. You can then, drag it back into another place on your document later when you need. It’s kind of like an extended, persistent clipboard feature.

Might be interested to have a folder of little scraps of things you find yourself repeating a lot in documents. There are other 3rd party applications that extend your clipboard type functionality as well, which may be what you should look for if you’re on Vista.

The developers took the scraps feature out of Vista due potential exploits by malware software and hackers.

Always learning something new though. I thought it was pretty cool.

Image: Screen Grab of Desktop by Jason Bean

I was reminded today of a feature I’d long forgotten about in Windows. The ability to place "active" content that was regularly updated via the Internet. When the feature first came out I guess you could call it the grandfather of what we now called widgets and sidebars, except before you could just put stuff wherever you wanted on your desktop, not just docked to a side of the screen.

Anyway, I was reminded of it today when I was checking some of my desktop settings to see if I could enlarge the icons on my desktop. Mainly to test a new icon file I had created, because I really abhor large icons most of the time.

I checked on the option to set my existing homepage as my desktop active item and BAM!, there’s my iGoogle homepage sitting on my Desktop. Everything is active on it like a webpage, but I can drag my icons on top of it wherever I want as well. I’m still intrigued by how that can happen and not interfere with each other, but they figured it out.

Does anyone use Active Desktop now?

My question is, does anyone still use this? How do you use it? Do you just have one web page being displayed? What page do you use?

Would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this topic.

What kind of development and functionality can you imagine being done if this type of “physics” and thought were combined with the Microsoft Surface functionality (official Microsoft Surface site).

This will sound really weird, but one of my favorite little things about Windows is the way the desktop grays out after certain events occur with the operating system.

I realize that the amount of intelligence and programming it took to make that happen is probably less than it takes to operate my Texas Instruments calculator back in high school.

I don’t really know why I like it so much, I just do. There’s no real functionality in it, I just like it.

What are some of the unsung features you love in Windows that nobody else on Earth probably even realizes exists? But for you, if it weren’t there, there would be a little binary hole somewhere in your life?

I’ve thought of another feature I wish existed for a laptop. I frequently work on people’s computers for them. If I have them bring me their desktop machine I tell them to unplug everything and don’t worry about bringing me the monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. I’ve got all of these things at my house that I can hook up if I need.

Map Laptop Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor to Desktop Machine

The problem is that I’d like to be able to sit the CPU down next to me on the couch and then sit on the couch with my laptop and review their system. I’d like to somehow be able to plug-in the desktop to my laptop and be able to map my laptop’s keyboard, mouse and monitor to the desktop.

I know you could kind of accomplish this with Microsoft Remote Terminal Services client, but that’s kind of hard to initially setup at your first boot-up of the machine. But even then there’s challenges if it’s not on your network or is having Ethernet problems.

Does this type of functionality exist somehow? Let me know!