The disk defrag utility included in XP is painfully slow and the one in Vista is atrocious. Sure sure they will do the job, but why wait around and deal with Windows’ clunky utility when you can download Auslogics Disk Defrag for free.
The same programmer that created yesterday’s Tabbed Explorer plugin also has another add-in that will give you Vista-style breadcrumbs in Windows XP. This application should be really helpful for those of you that aren’t ready to switch to Windows Vista yet, but want to get some of the new features.
A popular feature in previous versions of Windows was the ability to dock a toolbar to the side of the desktop. Most people used this for an auto-hiding quick launch or address toolbar, or both.
One of my immediate thoughts when I used a Mac for the first time was: How do I add icons to the top menu? After doing some digging, I found a great application that lets you not only add icons to the menu bar, but also assign hotkeys and even run scripts.
Most of us already know to update Windows OS’s on a regular basis, either manually or by turning on Automatic Updates. One of the more overlooked Microsoft updates however is Office. One way to do this easily from an Office 2007 Word document is to click on the Office Button Word Options.
This isn’t exactly an easter egg, because it’s actually documented in Microsoft’s knowledge base, but it’s one of those features that you just weren’t expecting so it still qualifies.
I’ve been hoping for a Tabbed explorer add-on to Windows Vista ever since I made the switch, but what most of you have been talking about is the lack of an Up button like XP used to have. Reader Shawn wrote in with a solution for both of our problems: QTTabBar, an add-on for Explorer that gives you a ton of functionality for either Vista or XP.
One of the most popular topics among our readers is installing Windows XP on your new Windows Vista computer – sometimes for compatibility reasons, but also because a lot of people just don’t like Vista very much.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could add search plugins for any search form to the Firefox Search Bar, instead of having to create the plugin yourself or wait for the site owner to stop being lazy and make one?
In part one of this tutorial we stored our files and settings on a network drive. Now let me show you how to transfer them to your new computer.
If you don’t use the built-in Windows Calendar or use it to display your Google calendar, you might be interested in removing the application from Windows Vista.
If you frequently download files from suspicious sites, it’s probably worth it to check for viruses Before you download, instead of waiting to see if your regular anti-virus software will catch it after you download.
A reader on the forum asked yesterday why his password kept expiring on his Windows Vista installation, so here’s the answer for everybody: Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate all have a built-in feature to allow user accounts to have a password expiration.
As you know I am a huge fan of Spybot Search and Destroy as I mentioned in a previous post. However, like everything there is always annoyances involved. The biggest annoyance to me is when running Spybot and getting results back saying Windows firewall, security center, etc.
If you’ve declined to use a service like FeedBurner to handle your RSS feeds, you might wonder how many subscribers you actually have. This also works well for finding subscriber counts to specific categories or comment posts on your site, which you typically wouldn’t run through FeedBurner.
As an avid user of the Sleep function on my laptop, I’ve been more than irritated with Windows 7 or Vista’s habit of changing the Sleep/Shutdown button into an “Install Updates and Shut Down” button whenever there are updates from Windows Update.
My favorite application to burn ISO images is ISO Recorder V2. I have been using this application for a couple of years and like it because it is so simple and free (although donations are gladly accepted).
Instead of using the Google Talk client embedded in Gmail, why not use it in your sidebar instead? Thanks to the gTalk sidebar extension, we can do just that.
Virtualization Technology (VT) is a set of enhancements to newer processors that improve performance for running a virtual machine by offloading some of the work to the new cpu extensions. Both AMD and Intel have processors that support this technology, but how do you tell if your system can handle it?
After reformatting your computer’s hard drive and doing clean install of Windows XP, using the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard utility built into XP makes the process easy. Also, if you have purchased a new computer you can transfer your files and settings to the new machine. In Part 1 I will go through saving your files and settings from your old machine.
The calculator options on Linux just blows the Windows calculator away. Imagine a calculator where you can solve extremely complicated expressions, or just convert between different measurements, and you’ve got Qalculate.
In prior versions of Windows before Vista, you could always open control panel items by passing control.exe the name of the *.cpl file that represented the item you were trying to open. For instance, if you wanted to open the display properties you could run the command “control.exe desk.cpl”.
Instead of re-typing long, painful error messages whenever you are trying to Google for a solution, did you know you can simply use Ctrl+C to copy the text of the message to the clipboard?
The Scheduled Tasks feature of XP and Vista often seems to be overlooked. This is a great tool to use for Automating Maintenance tasks for the OS. There are a lot of things you can do with this handy utility. In the following shots I demonstrate scheduling a Disk Cleanup in Windows XP. Later this week I will feature the extra settings and features included in Task Scheduler in Vista.
I have barely given this application justice with this post. If you are a music connoisseur or looking for an easy way to convert your home recording files to mp3 you should download dBpoweramp! dBpoweramp works great on both XP and Vista. I look forward to hearing your experiences!
