If you can’t figure out how to turn on the Details or Preview panes in Windows Vista Explorer, you aren’t alone. This question popped up on the forum the other day, so I decided to write up the answer for everybody’s benefit.
I have decided that J River’s Media Jukebox is now my music player of choice. I did an initial review in a previous post. Now let’s cover the various features included in this application. Today I will cover how to rip you CD’s into your favorite format.
I was browsing our forum earlier today when I noticed a question from a reader asking how to select a date range when searching for files in advanced search. This is something that was extremely easy in XP, but seems to be much less intuitive in Vista.
In my IT experience I have noticed that sometimes Remote Desktop can run painfully slow. Here are a couple tricks to speed up the process. We will change the display settings first. Sure it won’t look as fancy, but when working on computers remotely, you just need the functionality.
This article was written by our very own whs, one of the most helpful forum members.
One of our favorite readers wrote in today asking how to tell if his Word 2007 installation was running Service Pack 1, since he couldn’t find the About dialog, which got me thinking… I bet most people don’t know where it is!
If you’ve used Windows Vista for any length of time, you probably already know that using the Win + Space key combination will bring the Sidebar and all the gadgets to the front… but how do you send it back behind your open windows?
Well … I am not surprised about this Microsoft KB article. They admit their latest greatest Service Pack 1 for Vista indeed breaks various programs some of which are security programs.
I experienced an issue the other day at work in regards to Trend Micro’s PC-Cillin. A colleague brought in their laptop complaining about a slowness issue. While checking out Task Manager I noticed a CPU spike of 50%. Turns out the culprit was a process called PcScnSrv.exe which allows PC-Cillin to scan activity on your computer for malware. So any time you open any application or any type of computer activity PcScnSrv.exe scans and monitors every action. This causes a major spike in CPU activity. Sure my initial reaction was to remove Trend and put on a free alternative such as AVG or Avast Home Edition but my colleague just spent $60 to renew his license so I came up with a work around of sorts. I have not seen any patch on Trend’s site that addresses this issue yet, so here is what I did.
I guess I will continue this week’s theme of media players by introducing you to J River Media Jukebox. I have to say I am quite impressed so far with this player.
After installing Windows Live Messenger, I noticed a really annoying addition to My Computer… a new icon called “My Sharing Folders”. So how exactly do I remove this icon I’ll never use?
After installing a bunch of software required for work, I noticed that I had a new icon under “My” Computer that I hadn’t noticed before. What is this Web Folders icon, and how do I get rid of it?
A reader wrote in this week asking why his folder pane in Windows XP wasn’t working… it didn’t display anything other than a gray background with nothing else. This is actually a common problem that I’ve personally experienced before, which I luckily knew the solution to.
I’ve always wondered why Windows doesn’t allow you to set an arbitrary size for the filesystem cache. What if you have a slow hard drive in your laptop, but loads of available system memory? Shouldn’t you be able to maximize that memory in order to speed up hard drive access?
As many of you know, after my iTunes rant, I have been trying out all sorts of new media players. I guess I still have not found an “ultimate player” that I am completely satisfied with yet. Each player seems to have its positive and negative points for me. The trusty standby has been VLC although Spider Player and Foobar2000 come in close for my audio only needs.
So you login to your computer every single day, but there’s more than one account to choose from… either because you got the computer from somebody else, or some software package added a user account that you really don’t want to see. So how do we hide that other account from the login screen?
NOTE: You shouldn’t disable your page file unless you really really know what you are doing.
Normally we try and focus on articles about how to customize your computer, but today we’ll take a break from that and do a book review. This is something I’ve not done before, so any suggestions or questions will be welcomed in the comments.
If you want to test an explorer shell plugin or registry hack without having to log off, more technical users will usually just kill the explorer.exe process in Task Manager. Windows Vista has another way to do the same thing that you might not be aware of.
If you are a Microsoft Outlook user that regularly uses iGoogle as your dashboard, have you ever thought about combining the two? It’s nearly trivial to add your iGoogle page to Outlook and make it the startup page.
If you like the look and feel of Vista but don’t want to deal with the headache of swapping Operating Systems, Vista Inspirat from the folks at Crystal XP might be worth considering. Unlike an application such as Window Blinds … Vista Inspirat is completely free (although they do encourage donations). With this program you aren’t going to have the Areo Glass effects, but it still is pretty neat.
If you are the type of person that never uses any applications in the system tray, you might be interested in this registry hack to turn it off entirely. I can’t imagine using my own system this way, but we’re all about providing information.
In the never-ending quest to rid your computer of unnecessary bloat, Windows Vista has a lot less options than prior versions, but you can still get rid of some of the extra Windows components that you don’t need.
Do you ever find it frustrating that you can’t make changes to the auto-complete entries in Microsoft Outlook? Even more annoying is the fact that items in your address book aren’t immediately added to the autocomplete list.
