How-To Geek

In my latest article on Lifehacker, I examined some of the most offensive myths out there regarding PC performance tweaking, and debunk them once and for all:

So far we have covered ways to monitor and protect children with the PC and while online using Windows Vista.  In coming features in this series we will look at what we can use to get similar results in XP as well as other precautions to take using 3rd party applications and services.

This article was written by Leon Steadman, the same helpful reader that showed us how to Use a Custom Theme for the XP Classic Logon Screen.

While you child is logged into their account there will be an icon in the lower right corner by the clock showing Parental Controls are enabled.  Also, as the time gets closer for them to get off the computer, balloon notifications will appear in periodically telling them how much time is left.

If you’ve ever saved a password when connecting to a website that requires authentication, for a remote desktop session or a mapped drive, you might have wondered where those passwords are saved. If you are a long time reader, you already know where, but you might be interested in how to create a shortcut directly to the dialog where you can manage those logons.

You are no doubt reading this article because you’ve looked in task manager and wondered what on earth all those rundll32.exe processes are, and why they are running… So what are they?

Windows Vista has some new tools to help in diagnosing problems with your system.  Yes there are still the familiar ones such as Event Viewer, Task Manager, and Performance Monitor, but Vista has improved upon these standards and added new diagnostic tools as well.  One very cool on was previously covered by The Geek which is the Memory Diagnostics Tool.  Here I am going to cover an often overlooked but extremely convenient tool which is generating a System Health Report.

Have you ever noticed that the File Types option was completely removed from Vista, and there’s no built-in way to change the editor for many file types? Sure, you can change the default application used to open the file, but you can’t change what happens when you right-click / edit.

Download EncryptOnClick

After writing the article yesterday about how to run CCleaner silently through a shortcut or a hotkey, many people expressed to me that they’d like to know how to run it every single night on a schedule, so I’m writing that up for everybody’s benefit.

CCleaner is one of the most popular freeware applications to clean up your computer, and with good reason – the application is powerful and easy to use. So how do we make a shortcut that runs it in silent mode like the “Run CCleaner” option on the Recycle Bin?

One of our readers wrote in yesterday asking about how to set Windows 7 or Vista to open files and folders with a single click, and I realized that was something I’d never written about before, so I figured I’d write it up.

After writing up the method for searching your Internet Explorer Favorites with Vista’s built-in search engine, another one of our great forum users pointed out a freeware utility that will let you search your IE favorites right from within the browser itself.

One of our great forum members asked yesterday how to search through your Internet Explorer Favorites, which got me thinking… if you are using Windows 7 or Vista, it’s as simple as creating a saved search folder.

Have you ever wondered how to remove “Shared Documents” from your My Computer window in Windows XP? If you don’t use that feature, it seems rather silly to have it wasting space on the screen when all you really want to do is open up your hard drive or flash drive.

The problem gets worse… if you try and drag/copy files out of the folder you’ll get the error “Do you want to move or copy files from this zone?”

If you’ve ever asked for help with your Windows computer that won’t boot anymore, you’ve probably been told to “Backup all your data and then reinstall”… but if you can’t boot, how can you get to your data? That’s the question we’ll be answering today.

This article is part of Mysticgeek’s IT blog, a How-To Geek blog focused on IT geekery.

This is a guest post by Abhishek Bhatnagar from www.technixupdate.com, a blog covering Computer tips and tricks.

Have you ever wondered how many times per day you check your email? For many of us, it’s far too often… and if every single time you have to click on a little icon in the tray, or find the Outlook button in the taskbar, it can get a little annoying. Instead of that, what I do is assign a hotkey to switch to my already open Outlook window.

Have Fun!  Please share any funny stories you might have with this one!

I was printing off receipts from Newegg and other sites where I’ve purchased things from when the thought occurred to me: It would save a lot of paper if I could just print all of them to a PDF file instead, which I could then store in nicely organized folders instead of having paper copies everywhere. So how exactly do we print to a PDF in Vista?

One of the unwelcome changes that Microsoft introduced in Service Pack 1 was the removal of some of the easy ways to get to the Search screen: the start menu button and folder context menu item. Thankfully we can easily add the “Search…” item back to the context menu with a simple registry tweak.

Have you ever wondered how to open up Task Manager with the “All Users” view instead of just your own processes? One of our readers wrote in with this same question, so I’m writing it up for everybody.