Tag: Windows 7

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 …

Continue reading

Sharing Wi-Fi Via Your Microsoft Surface

One of the biggest gripes that people may have is the lack of 3G/4G/LTE connectivity on both versions of the Microsoft Surface. Of course, on Surface Pro you can plug in a dongle and add such connectivity but it can become cumbersome to have a USB device protruding from the tablet or a dongle hanging off …

Continue reading

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: …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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. …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

Test Your Media Before Upgrading

In my haste to upgrade to Windows 8 I forgot to test my USB installation drive and it wasn’t until it was too late that I had already wiped my SSD (and Windows 7) leaving the Windows 8 ISO stranded on the hard drive. It seems that my motherboard just doesn’t want to boot off …

Continue reading

Upgrades Aren’t Always Painless

Just a quick update for today. With the impending release of Windows 8 it’s a good time to remind people that upgrades (be it hardware or software) aren’t always seamless or painless. Whilst there isn’t an expected problem with people upgrading to Windows 8 from Windows 7 or even Windows Vista you should always prepare …

Continue reading