How to install Windows 7 from a .iso without burning onto a DVD

Windows 7 doesnot allow you to install off the same Hard Disk. But if you didn't want to burn the .iso image of Windows 7 that you downloaded to a new DVD - you can still install it off the .iso file by using the method below.

You will need a portable hard disk / pen drive though.

Incase, you have a portable hard disk or a pen drive - do the following :

1. Get WinRar (www.rarlabs.com) and install the software on your machine. WinRar is similar to winzip but supports many other formats including .iso.

2. Extract the .iso of Win7 to your pen drive / portable hard disk. Place the extracted files into the root of the drive - your other data can be put into folders.

3. Restart your laptop and hold F9 / F2 to enter into boot-menu which gives you a choice to load from. Here select your pen-drive / portable hard disk - usually a USB device.

Done - that's all it takes. You can now go ahead with the normal install process.

How to find large e-mails/attachments in GMail and delete them easily?

Many a times, you are struck with a scenario that only a last few % of free space is avilable in Gmail. Though GMail has been growing everyday (or every 2 seconds) in increasing your online storage space - but yet for a person like me who has been using GMail for more than 5 years now as a primary e-mail account, it does become full at many a times.

Today my Gmail account read as "You are currently using 6538 MB (88%) of your 7429 MB.". Now that was a bit worrying for me and decided to bring it down atleast by 5% and here's what I did for it.

Head over to the search bar on top of your Gmail account and type as "has:attachment (*.mov || *.mp3 || *.wm || *.avi || *.wmv )" and the results you get could be the large file attachments that are sitting in your GMail account and making it bulky. Evaluate if you need it else you can select them and delete.

To find large zipped attachments use this search option.

has:attachment (*.zip || *.rar || *.7z )

To find large pdf / doc / xls / ppt / docx / pptx / xlsx attachments use this search option.

has:attachment (*.pdf || *.doc || *.docx || *.xls || *.xlsx || *.ppt || *.pptx )

Usually ppt / pptx are large culprits too.

P.S: After you delete the mail and attachment, it still remains in your GMail Trash folder. So go over to that folder and hit "Empty Trash". Now you can finally see some very good increase in the storage area of your Gmail account.

As for me, it went upto "You are currently using 6138 MB (82%) of your 7429 MB." which was a pretty good increase for me.