I’ve been getting emails left and right from readers complaining that their Music folder icon has turned from the default shiny icon into the generic yellow folder icon. After doing some research I finally have a workaround for this issue.
Driver problems are a source of never-ending issues in the Windows world. Often you’ll have a working driver on another machine, but don’t have the installation cd anymore to install on the new computer.
I’ve received a number of emails from readers telling me that their computer has no option for “Show Hidden Files and Folders” in the Folder Options dialog. The question even showed up on the forum, where Scott promptly found a registry tweak which I’m sharing with everybody.
If you are running Ubuntu and want to use the Tomcat servlet container, you should not use the version from the repositories as it just doesn’t work correctly. Instead you’ll need to use the manual installation process that I’m outlining here.
Has this ever happened to you? I created a new virtual machine running Ubuntu on my VMware server before I left home, but forgot to install the ssh server… so I couldn’t get to that machine at all from my remote location. Rather than driving back home I decided to find a solution.
Just about everybody knows about the hidden administrator C$ share that is always built into Windows file sharing, but you might have wondered why you can’t use that in Windows 7 or Vista.
A couple of weeks ago when I posted the last Great Geek Sites roundup I had included Jatecblog, a great new blog covering Linux and open source topics. Since that time their blog went down because of hosting problems.
One of the ancillary benefits of our Vista Gadget breaking and my email filling up with complaints was that I learned how to debug a Vista Gadget in Visual Studio, so I’m sharing the wealth with everybody.
Some time ago I received an email from a reader curious why their Task Manager option was grayed out on the taskbar right-click menu. After a bit of research his problem was solved, and now I’m sharing the solution with everybody.
Yesterday was just unlucky. Not only did a server crash at work, but the How-To Geek Vista gadget just stopped working. After learning how to debug sidebar gadgets (more on that later) I finally found the problem: Our gadget had been blocked by Feedburner.
Spybot Search and Destroy seems to be getting a bad rap in the press lately, which I wrote about in July. Then I read an article in PC World last month and they were also slamming this free application. Well, the heck with them! Let’s take a look at the new version of Spybot 1.5
If you’ve ever tried to move your Windows Live Writer settings from one computer to another you’ll know what a royal pain that can turn out to be. Sure, you can backup the registry and all the files in your application data directory, but it just turns out to be a mess.
While working on the instructions for compiling MonoDevelop from source, I relied heavily on the dpkg and apt-cache commands to tell me what was already installed vs what packages were available in the repository. After completing that article it occurred to me that I should explain how to show what packages are currently installed… so here we are.
After reading a post from my friend Daniel about the new release of MonoDevelop, I decided to try and install it… which is when I realized that the installation from source is so painful I’d better figure it out and share it with everybody else.
The common Open/Save dialogs are so prevalent in Windows applications that each little annoyance ends up driving us crazy after a while. The most frustrating thing for me is that you can’t save your view mode, so every time I have to switch it back to details mode.
When I wrote the article a few days ago celebrating the first year of How-To Geek, I had originally included a section called “Things I’ve Learned”, but it made the article far too long… so I’m posting that here just in case I didn’t bore you enough with the first article.
One of the biggest security holes you could open on your server is to allow directly logging in as root through ssh, because any cracker can attempt to brute force your root password and potentially get access to your system if they can figure out your password.
If you like to have your entire computing experience within your Firefox window, you might be interested in accessing your POP email accounts directly in Firefox. The Simple Mail extension gives you this functionality, and true to the name it’s very simple.
Ah, the Recycle Bin … it always sits on the desktop waiting for your old files. Don’t ask me why but I think the Recycle Bin deserves more attention. I don’t know how many times I have helped end users recover files from the trash. Often used but misunderstood … Here I will demonstrate a few easy tips to customize the Recycle Bin in Vista.
You are no doubt reading this article because you are frustrated with the ctfmon.exe process that just won’t stop opening no matter what you do. You remove it from the startup items and it just magically reappears. So what is it?
When you are working on increasing the speed of your website, a very important piece is making sure you get every last drop of performance out of your database server. Unfortunately, for most of us that aren’t normally database administrators this can be a difficult proposition.
If you use Microsoft Outlook as the center for all your communications, you might be interested in integrating Twitter directly into Outlook so you never have to leave the comfort of your inbox to read about the daily minutia of your twitter friends.
Many of you know I am a musician and huge music fan. I am always trying out new music players, different compression formats, home recording software, etc. I have used Last.FM but quickly grew tired of it. However I have found one cool web based player that really rocks. Anywhere FM which is currently in beta allows you to listen to your music collection anywhere you have a web connection. Creating an account is extremely easy and once you have done that begin uploading your tunes to the player.
If you’ve got a home computer that you put into sleep mode, you might be irritated that you have to enter your password every time it wakes up. In most cases you could just remove or not use a password, but if you are doing file sharing a password is required. So how to resolve this?
How many times have you sent out an email only to realize you forgot to include the attachment, or really shouldn’t have sent a response to the entire company? If you are using Outlook in an Exchange environment you can attempt to recall the message.
