Symbolic Links (Junctions) for NTFS
This isn't anything new, but Sysinternals (now owned by Microsoft) released a tool called junction that allows creation of symbolic links in NTFS. If you aren't familiar with symbolic links, they are a Unix concept that makes a file or directory look like it resides in one place on the file system, when it really is someplace else. This in itself isn't worth a blog post, but I think one thing that I recently did with it was pretty neat and wanted to write it up.
I regularly use about 3 different computers. Because of differences in hardware configuration the drive letter for my flash is different at each location. So I created a new directory - C:\flash\ - and then created a junction (symbolic link) pointing that directory to drive letter of my flash. I see two benefits here. One is that I don't have to remember what system I am on, and can just hit C:\flash whenever I need something from my drive. The second advantage is that any programs I run from my flash can have a absolute path to C:\flash for any data they need.
I have also added C:\flash\bin to my profile PATH so any utilities I have saved to my flash are only a <windows key>+r away.
Next up is moving C:\Documents and Settings\ to another drive and creating a junction to point to it so I can blow away my install drive whenever I want and not worry about loosing any data.