Have you ever tried going through all of the menus required to delete the Recent Items in the XP Start Menu? It takes forever, especially when you want to hide whatever you shouldn’t have been doing. As usual, there’s a simpler way to do it.
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
One of the features in Vista Ultimate is Complete PC Backup and Restore. This allows for easier system backup of your hard disk, essentially making a clone or image of the current state of the hard drive. This feature is available in Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions of Vista.
If you’ve used Windows for any length of time, you’ve likely tried to open a file with an unknown extension. Instead of getting a list of programs to open the file with, you get an annoying dialog asking you to use a web service to find a program. So how do we change this?
A friend of mine sent me a link to this site from albinoblacksheep.com. This is a flashed based spoof on Windows XP. You can play around with it and get some pretty hilarious messages. I thought the one on the image below about Quicktime was pretty funny. Who knows … this one might be old news to some of you, but for those who have not seen this … it’s worth wasting time on for a good laugh.
Today I ran into a new version of CC Cleaner v 2.06 which includes the Yahoo Toolbar with the installation. According to the instructions this allows you to use CC Cleaner from your browsers toolbar. It seems there are a lot of companies trying to sneak their software into various popular freeware applications lately. I covered one of them in a previous post.
So you try to middle click on a link on a page and miss the link… then the round “Auto Scroll” icon shows up and suddenly the page is moving around and scrolling all by itself. It drives me crazy, so when it was mentioned in the latest Coding Horror article I figured I would write it up in case anybody else wants to disable it.
Last week I wrote about the hassles I experienced with installing Internet Explorer 8 on my XP machine at work. Overall I have not had too many problems with it … mainly because my default browser is Firefox! However I did run into an annoyance with this beta I would like to point out.
I am starting off a series of articles today to show you how to get the extra functionality of Windows Vista Ultimate without spending the outrageous cost of $399. In fact we are not going to spend one cent more in currency, the only thing we will have to spend is some time. Hopefully through this series you will be able to spend as little of your own time as necessary by using my easy to follow tutorials.
If you are a frequent reader of this site, you’ve seen your share of registry hacks. Today I’m going to detail how you can easily find the registry keys we mention, and even create a shortcut or hotkey to immediately drill down to the correct key by copying it to the clipboard.
Are you sick and tired of Windows trying to save you from yourself by asking you far too many times “Are You Sure You Want To Do That?” I think this is one of the more prominent annoyances of any Windows operating system. Thankfully, there is a small utility out there which allows the dialog boxes to be automatically closed. I have been using this program for several years and thought I should write about it in case you are unfamiliar.
One of the reasons that I love Firefox is the dozens of extensions that I have installed to customize the browser, but it seems like every extension includes another icon or widget, and by this point the status bar looks like an instrument panel… so how can I make them hide until I need them?
Miro is a wonderful open source video player. Miro is the new name for the same project entitled Democracy Player. The last version of Democracy Player was 0.9.6 – Now with a new name, logo, and interface Miro is definitely ready for prime time. Miro is available on Windows, Apple, and Linux platforms.
Have you ever wondered how to change the default Windows XP logon screen? Today I got the crazy idea to figure out how to make it look like Windows Vista instead, so I’m writing that up for you.
ClamWin is a very cool lightweight open source anti-virus program. This may not be the best anti-virus solution for beginners, but experienced PC power users should check this out. The download size of this application is around 15 MB. I really like that this application is so light weight and uses little system resources. One downside (if you can call it one) is this development does not yet support real time scanning. You can schedule automatic updates and scans though. ClamWin also creates nifty reports on your updates and scans. You can use it to scan individual files and it also integrates seamlessly with Outlook.
Here is a quick and handy tip to add a toolbar to any directory in Windows on the taskbar.
Windows Vista restricts network traffic to 10 packets per millisecond while playing multimedia to prevent skipping. Unfortunately this causes network speed to be pitiful on a gigabit network, especially during file copies over the network.
So you are reading instructions on some article that tells you to reboot into Safe mode. You ask how you do that, and are told to use the F8 key when the computer boots up. But you just can’t seem to get the F8 key to work… so how do you boot into Safe mode?
One of the more popular open source IM clients is Pidgin (formerly GAIM). This client works with pretty much all chat services including the majors MSN, Google Talk, AIM, and Yahoo! Pidgin works with Linux, Windows, BSD, and other Unix distributions. If you’re a real minimalist you can even get a text based version. It is very customizable and there is a lot of open source plug ins for it as well. Pidgin supports pictures, emoticons, and fonts. Very customizable IM alternative!
VLC is probably the most popular open source media player out there. VLC plays basically any type of media file you can imagine. It has a very trim lined interface. The program is very light on system resources as well. Not only is it an incredible media player, it is also a server and a client to stream media across your network or the Internet. Various tweaks in video and audio are limitless. VLC is completely open source and available on Windows, OS X, and pretty much every flavor of Linux and Unix.
After writing articles about how to open the Safely Remove dialog as well as eject a specific USB drive, some readers contacted me asking me to write about how to eject a CD or DVD drive instead, so I’m covering that here.
I recently installed Windows XP 64 on one of my machines the other day. On that … I have to say my reviews so far are mixed. I love the fact it recognizes my 4GB of RAM and so far the performance is tight. I have had a few driver issues … but have a good handle on it.
RSSOwl is a multi platform open source RSS Reader. The overall feel and navigation is just like a web browser. The RSSOwl user interface is very customizable. You will notice there are a lot of feeds already entered by default which includes many categories. Select feeds open up as HTML inside RSSOwl. As with a browser you can bookmark you favorites as well. To be honest I just started using this application a day ago and so far am very impressed! If any of you are experienced RSSOwl users please feel free to comment.
You’ve already heard the news: Microsoft released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 yesterday. So what does that mean for me, and how do I install it again?
Portable Apps is a remarkable portable application suite which runs off your USB flash drive. You can carry around all of your favorite open source applications with this utility.
