How-To Geek

Taking ownership of system files or folders in Windows 7 or Vista is not a simple task. Whether you use the GUI or the command line, it takes far too many steps.

So you’re in the middle of doing something important on your computer when the “Restart your computer to finish installing important updates” dialog comes up, and asks you to restart your computer.

When you administrate servers running Windows Server 2000 or 2003, one of the most frustrating experiences is when sessions get cut off but the server still thinks they are active. You’ll get this error message, which you are sure to encounter at some point:

If you are running a web application using the original ASP technology on Windows Server 2003, you might get this error message once you upgrade to Service Pack 2: “New transaction cannot enlist in the specified transaction coordinator. [-2147168246]“.

If you are the creative type that likes to use custom fonts in your documents or PowerPoint presentations, here is a cool tip to ensure that the readers of your document see the document with the fonts intact, just the way you want it to.

The comment tool in Word 2007 is a great way to proof-read a report or thesis paper and make notes to yourself instead of writing them onto a sheet of paper.

I’ve received a number of emails asking where we got the sweet black theme for Windows XP in most of the screenshots. It’s the Zune theme from Microsoft, which you can get directly from their download site:

We’ve all seen misspelled article titles (especially on Digg.com) Doesn’t Firefox have built-in spell checking?

As a command line junkie, I end up doing almost everything from a command prompt. The problem is that Windows Vista doesn’t have a built-in command to launch an application in administrator mode.

If you use UltraEdit as your text editor and edit a lot of Linux/Unix files, you’ve no doubt encountered the “File is probably not DOS format” message every single time you open a file. So irritating…

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use Windows Movie Maker (a highly video-editing software in Windows Vista) to edit and create movies.

If you’ve got a directory with dozens of zipped or rar’d files, you can run a single command to unzip them all in one step, thanks to the power of the bash shell.

Google Calendar is a phenomenal web application for managing your calendars, but so many of us are still forced to use Outlook at work. The good thing is you can have the best of both worlds by subscribing to your Google Calendar from Outlook.

Nothing equals Excel for crunching of numbers, but what if your data isn’t already in an Excel spreadsheet? It’s as simple as using the Text Import Wizard.

The Research Pane in Word 2007 can help you easily translate text into other languages, using bilingual dictionaries powered by WordLingo.com.

Nobody is asking why you want to clear the recent documents from your XP start menu, but we’ll show you how to do it anyway.

Are you sick of looking at the Windows XP logo when you boot up your computer?  Here is a quick tip on how to disable it. 

You’ve got a production database server, and you can’t enable query logging… so how do you see the queries being executed against the database?

So you’ve got a bunch of .OGM video files and they won’t play in Windows Vista… relax, you just need to install the right codecs in order to play them from within Windows Media Player.

If you’ve ever wondered how best to kill a few hours, I have the answer. (Yes, I realize this is completely off-topic)

Although it’s unlikely that you’ll ever hit the maximum Access database size of 2GB, it’s still good to know that you can set your database to automatically compact or shrink the file size. This is especially true for databases where you are adding and removing a lot of data each time.

One of the biggest new changes in Office 2007 is the new mini toolbar that pops up when you highlight text and either right-click or move your mouse up.

If you have a lot of Word documents and are not sure which one contains the information you need, Microsoft Word 2007 allows you to preview a document within Word without having to open each document.

AutoRecover is a Microsoft Office feature that will keep you from losing work in the event of a system crash or power outage by automatically saving your document at certain time intervals.

The Ribbon feature in Microsoft Office 2007 is full of features that make it easier to navigate through options, but it takes up a lot of space. If you think the Ribbon is too big, you can put it into a pseudo “auto-hide” mode and still retain all the functionality, but with a much smaller footprint.