Category: Windows 7

Incoming Gadget – Google Chromecast

Another short and sweet update. I missed out on the initial release but I have placed an order for Google’s new Chromecast product. In a nutshell, it’s a dongle that you plug into your television in a spare USB socket for power as well as an HDMI socket to send video and audio to the …

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Checking TRIM is Enabled Under Windows 7 or Windows 8

Another quick tip regarding TRIM which has been mentioned a few times on the blog recently. If you’ve got an SSD you might want to double check that TRIM is enabled to ensure that the garbage collection processes can run and keep your SSD in peak performance. Usually, Windows 7 and Windows 8 will set …

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Quickly Minimise All But One Window

Here’s a quick tip for Windows users. You might rarely require this tip but it’s a feature in more recent versions of Windows that could come in handy one day. If you want to minimise all but one particular window you don’t have to go through each and every window and click the minimise button. …

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How to Install Telnet on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8

I am going old school for a bit but hopefully this article and a future article on how to deal with mail on a mail server via telnet could come in handy. Anyway, on more recent versions of Windows (from Vista onwards) this isn’t included by default. Fortunately, you can install it quite easily as follows: …

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Bitlocker Chewing Up Hard Drive Space

For whatever reason, you may want to enable Bitlocker on the internal drives on one or more computers to prevent others from getting access to your data should they attempt to read those drives on other computers. This isn’t such a bad idea if you use a laptop for business use. However, once you kick …

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Shortcuts to Restart, Hibernate, Standby or Shutdown Your Computer

Here’s a tip that might be handy for those using Windows 8 or most other recent versions of Windows. If using the charms bar in Windows 8 makes your head explode then you might fancy creating a shortcut to restart, hibernate, standby or shutdown your computer. It’s very easy to do as follows: Right click …

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Boost Windows Security With EMET 3.0

Thanks to John Tomic for this tip. While Microsoft does a reasonable job keeping on top of the various security vulnerabilities found in its software your system will still be exposed to threats between the time they are identified (if at all) and the time when the patch is successfully installed. Like insurance, it can …

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COM Surrogate Process and High CPU Usage

Just an observation on Windows 8 that I wanted to share which may also help others using Windows Vista and 7. Recently, I was seeing some graphical glitches occur under Windows 8 as well as CPU usage getting stuck at 25% for unusually long periods of time on my quad-core i7 desktop. This meant that …

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Middle Click – The Unknown Shortcuts

For those on Windows 7 and Windows 8 you may not have known about the special functionality provided by middle clicking (or pressing down on the scroll wheel). If you want to open a new instance of an application, then do the following: hover your mouse cursor over the application on the taskbar, middle click. …

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Life in the Start Menu and the Start Screen

Even after the launch of Windows 8 for MSDN and TechNet members the complaints about the Start Screen still persist along with calls for the Start Menu of old to return for better or for worse. We’re still seeing various pieces of software coming out to mimic the functionality or presence of the old Start …

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