How-To Geek

It seems like everybody uses the free PuTTY client for accessing SSH from Windows, but the lack of a tabbed interface has kept me using the commercial SecureCRT application for years… until now.

If you’ve ever worked on a document originally created by somebody else, you’ll most likely immediately be frustrated by their horrible choice of fonts and formatting. What you might not realize is that the search and replace functionality in Word allows you to replace more than just text.

Have you ever wondered why Windows XP had such terribly ugly wallpapers to choose from? On top of that, there’s no way to easily change the list of backgrounds to a folder you might actually use… like your My Pictures folder.

If there’s one thing that drives me crazy about using multiple operating systems, it’s the inconsistency in keyboard shortcuts… when you hit the backspace key in Firefox on Windows it normally goes back to the previous page, but it doesn’t on Ubuntu Linux.

One of the most irritating “features” in Windows XP is the popup balloon dialog that tells you to clean your desktop. I booted up an old virtual machine a few minutes ago and encountered it again, so I decided to write up how to turn it off.

The SuperFetch service in Windows Vista preloads your system’s memory with the applications that you use most often. This makes launching of those applications much faster, but it might be an unwanted behavior for system tweakers or gamers.

I am not a fan of the delay that can occur between clicking the start menu and waiting for it to display.  Here is a quick Registry tweak that will allow for the start menu to display more quickly

If you have an issue with your system clock losing time, you’ve probably had to go and re-sync your clock with the internet time servers. The problem is that there are just way too many clicks required to get to the right screen, so the command line is much simpler.

You are no doubt reading this article because you are wondering why on earth there are nearly a dozen processes running with the name svchost.exe. You can’t kill them, and you don’t remember starting them… so what are they?

When it comes to Internet Freedom I believe the candidate with the best position is Ron Paul.  You can check it out in his own words.

If you are a fan of the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox you might wonder how to change the script editor/viewer as there is no option for this in the UI. It’s even worse when you download scripts from some website and the line endings don’t work in the inferior default editor.

For anyone even semi-familiar with the Internet I am sure you are aware of the Ron Paul Revolution.  His name currently is the #1 googled subject right now.  The Ron Paul presidential campaign has basically taken over YouTube and his support has gained reputable positions on popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.  Although this is not a political site, I thought I would share a few tech related issues which relate to the Ron Paul campaign. 

As a programmer and a fairly terrible web designer, I often need to select a color from an image somewhere on the screen, and it gets really tiring to take a screenshot, paste into Photoshop and use the eyedropper there.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes Firefox isn’t very responsive while loading a page? As a frequent StumbleUpon user, this behavior grates on my nerves so I went looking for a solution.

If there’s one thing that annoys me in Internet Explorer more than anything else, it’s that there is no way to re-open a tab once you’ve closed it. It’s especially annoying when you’ve done a lot of browsing so you have to sift through your history to find the link for the page you closed.

If you’ve switched from Yahoo! over to Gmail because you prefer to read your email in a desktop client such as Thunderbird, you probably are wondering how you can do the same thing with Yahoo! for free.

If you are the type of person that restarts your computer all the time, you are probably really worried about speeding up your bootup time. Unless you get paid to watch the Windows boot screen. I wonder how well that would pay…

Let’s face it, not everybody is an ubergeek, so there are many times that you’ll need to ask somebody for help. They always seem to ask you to type things into the command prompt and then tell them the results… but how do you copy that text to the clipboard so you can email it to them?

You might be concerned with squeezing every last bit of performance out of your machine, or may have compatibility problems between Aero and an application that you are running. Either way you are looking for the simplest way to disable Aero while running that application, and this is it.

This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.

The Windows command prompt (cmd.exe) has always been known for being underpowered compared to Linux, but have you ever noticed that to view the output of a long command you have to resort to the mouse to scroll?

This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.

One of the most annoying pop up balloons I see when working on other peoples computers is the Desktop Cleanup Wizard in XP.  I really see no reason for this feature to be enabled by default.  Here is how to disable the annoyance.

In the interests of exposing all of the secrets in Windows Vista, I’ve decided to explain how to create a shortcut that turns on or off the transparency in Windows Vista. I don’t find this especially useful, but I’m sure it will be relevant to at least one of the readers.

Microsoft Word is a behemoth of formatting options only fully understood by a select few… for the rest of us it’s just plain confusing and often frustrating to deal with. I noticed a neat trick for selecting columns and felt the need to share it with everybody else.