UPDATE: Microsoft Offers Full Refund To Overcharged XBOX Live Member

[QUOTE]
XBOX Live member ForceTrainer writes in with an update about his issue with Microsoft. In our last episode, ForceTrainer has been charged $50 for 2 months of a XBOX Live gold membership-- the price of a year of service.

"I spoke with James in their escalated support for about 20 minutes. Right off the bat he explained to me what MS would be able to do, and I was offered the option of a full refund of the amount that I paid or they would provide me with a 12-month XBOX Live Gold membership code that I could redeem. I opted for the full refund since all I wanted originally was to downgrade to a Silver membership.

After getting that cleared up, James asked me to explain the entire situation to him, and I gave him the story pretty much verbatim from what I sent to the Consumerist. When I finished James apologized for the confusion that occurred, and he explained a few things including why he thinks the situation occurred:
- His first comment was that I was absolutely right that I should have received a full credit for the time paid for (vindication!).
- My case should have been escalated by default when I first spoke to billing because my request and situation were non-standard. My account was in a decline state which the billing department can handle, but since I wanted to downgrade to a Silver account while in a decline state I should have been escalated immediately.
- James believes that the major confusion occurred because my annual account was in a decline state, and that it is very rare for a billing CSR to deal see. Decline states are common with accounts paid on a monthly basis (which makes sense), and the CSR treated my annual account like it was a month-to-month. With month-to-month billing if you get declined your payment to bring your account current gets you paid for that month. Basically you're just paying for time that you've already used. However, with the annual membership, when you pay your balance there is time that is owed to you. The CSR that I spoke with just pretty much screwed this part up."
[/QUOTE]

Full Story: consumerist.com

Tricks to get indexed fast by Search Engines, FAST and FREE

We will make use of two popular sites here, Blogger.com and My Yahoo!. First part is link to your new website from Blogger.com blog. Second part is add blog feed content into My Yahoo!.

1. After you have done your(or others?) new website, login Blogger.com and create a blog there. Don’t need to be serious about this blog, you just make use of it for your new website.
2. Start a new post with link to your website in Blogger.com account. Don’t need to write full page long, just few keyword text with links are enough.
3. Publish the post. An atom.xml file is generated as well.
4. The path of your atom.xml is http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Note the path.
5. Here is Second Part. Login My Yahoo!, click the “+ Add content” link, which located under the search field.
6. At “Find Content” bar, click “Add RSS by URL”
7. At new page, paste your blogger.com atom feed URL into the URL field, and click “Add” button
8. The feed will be displayed in My Yahoo! page, and you are done!

How does it works?
Search engine bots like to visit high ranking websites and follow their links. The trick here is to add your website link into popular websites for free. Yahoo! and Blogger.com are two very popular websites. Plus, Blogger.com is owned by Google and My Yahoo! is Yahoo!’s site.

Add LOCALAPPDATA Environment Variable in Windows XP

LOCALAPPDATA is one of the new new environment variables included in Windows Vista, which points to the folder that stores the data for local (non-roaming) applications. To access the folder, run the command %LOCALAPPDATA% from Start, Search box in Windows Vista. This variable does not exist in earlier Windows Operating Systems. If you access this folder frequently in your Windows XP system, you may add the LOCALAPPDATA variable using the steps below.

Note: Alternately, you can open the Local Application Data folder in Windows XP and Windows Vista by running the command shell:Local AppData.

Add LOCALAPPDATA variable in Windows XP

Right-click on the My Computer icon and choose Properties

Click Advanced

Click Environment Variables

Under User variables section, click New

In the Variable name: field, type LOCALAPPDATA

In the Variable value: field, type %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data

Click OK, OK, OK to close the dialog boxes.

The LOCALAPPDATA environment variable is now added. See if you can access the Local Application Data folder by running the command %LOCALAPPDATA% from Start, Run dialog. You can use this environment variable in Scripts and Batch files, as well.

note: You can add or remove environment variables from command-line using Setx.exe, a Windows 2000 Resource Kit tool.

source:tweakxp.com

Automatically Backup your Windows Vista Registry daily using ERUNT

ERUNT is an excellent Registry Backup and Restore Utility for Windows NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista. This program backs up the DEFAULT, SAM, SECURITY, SOFTWARE, SYSTEM hives and also the per-user registry hives namely NTUSER.DAT & USRCLASS.DAT.

ERUNT works fine in Windows Vista if run under elevated privileges. To run the application elevated, right-click the file ERUNT.EXE which is located in "C:\Program Files\ERUNT" and choose Run as Administrator. Additional instructions are available in article Take a complete registry backup using ERUNT.

Note: Running ERUNT in a non-elevated mode would display the following error:

RegCreateKeyEx: 5 - Access is denied.

Create Automatic Registry Backups at Vista Startup

Using Task Scheduler, you can configure ERUNT to backup the registry at Startup (Note that ERUNT does not create a new backup if one already exists for the current day.) Follow these instructions:

1. Open Task Scheduler from Control Panel or by running the command control schedtasks from Start, Search box.

2. In the Actions pane on the right, click Create Task…

3. Type a name for the task that you want to create (for example, ERUNT), and optionally assign a descriptive text.

4. Click Change User or Group… button

5. Type SYSTEM and click OK

6. Enable the option Run with highest privileges. This is an important step.

7. Select the Triggers tab, and click New

8. In the Begin the task drop-down box, select At startup, and click OK

9. Select the Action tab, and click New

8. In the Program/script: text box, type the following (including the quotes):

"C:\Program Files\ERUNT\AUTOBACK.EXE"

9. In the Add arguments (optional) text box, type the following:

(Hint: Read ERUNT’s documentation to know the command line arguments supported.)

10. Click OK, OK.

You’ve now created a new task to backup the registry at every Startup. To verify if the task works, restart Windows and check the C:\Windows\ERDNT\AutoBackup folder.