Category: Microsoft

Feb 17 2011

Mount Your ISOs Quickly with MagicDisc

If you download a lot of software (legally, mind you) sometimes they will come in the form of an ISO file which is basically an image of an optical disc (be it a CD, DVD or Blu-ray disc). Normally, these files had to be burnt to a physical disc before you could actually start installing …

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Feb 16 2011

Capture a Disk Image Quickly with DriveImage XML

DriveImage XML - Backup Wizard

From time to time I help people undertake the often laborious task of doing a clean installation of Windows on a computer. The installation itself is fairly painless but there are other tasks involved that can take up a considerable amount of time, including: backing up the existing data (although I recommend people have regular …

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Feb 13 2011

Drive Extender Alternatives for Windows Home Server 2011

Last year, I covered the shock announcement that Microsoft was dropping the Drive Extender (DE) technology from its second version of Windows Home Server (formerly codenamed “Vail” but now dubbed Windows Home Server 2011). In a nutshell, DE provided some critical functionality including: storage pooling (the ability to combine multiple drives into one large storage …

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Feb 12 2011

Did You Know About Triple Clicking?

Another quick tip for the night. It would be fair to say that most people know about the concept of the single click normally used for selecting objects on the screen, dragging objects to other places or clicking hyperlinks. Similarly, people know about double clicking to open applications or documents (although I find it annoying …

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Feb 09 2011

Nokia Wises Up to Their Shrinking Market

For many years it has been widely acknowledged that Nokia, once the world leader in mobile phones and technology, has become nothing more than a random handset generator that uses a combination of numbers and letters to label its phones (possibly using a random alphanumeric value generator). Whilst there are Nokia handsets that are fit …

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Feb 06 2011

Make the Time and Date Visible on Your Windows Taskbar

Here’s a quick tip for those of you who may rummage around and/or curse when you need to find the date quickly and have a terrible time trying to remember. For users of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, all you need to do is the following: Right click on the taskbar, If there …

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Feb 04 2011

Why You Shouldn’t Install Third Party Codecs on Windows 7

Another quick update for this evening. What many people may not know but Windows 7 actually supports a wider range of codecs (i.e. COmpression / DECompression software) compared to Windows XP and Vista, specifically: H.264 (popular for Apple devices and web streaming), AAC (a popular audio format also preferred by Apple), DivX, Xvid. As a …

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Jan 31 2011

Visually Track Hard Drive Space with WinDirStat

WinDirStat - Folder Summary Screen (Completed)

Here’s a quick tip for this evening. If there is one thing that Windows has lacked all of these years it is a way to quickly assess from a macro level which folders are taking up the most space without having to take a “divide and conquer” approach by right clicking each folder, going to …

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Jan 26 2011

The 2TB Barrier – What Does it Mean for You?

Throughout last year I made a couple of mentions of the 2TB (two terabyte) barrier for physical storage in modern computers but didn’t take the opportunity to flesh out exactly what it means for the regular consumer out there. In this article I am going to explain why this is important and what you need …

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Jan 25 2011

Change Your Windows 7 Logon Screen Wallpaper

Another short and sweet tip for today. While some of us tend to leave many of the presentation features in Windows at their defaults some of us like to customise things to suit our taste. One such element of customisation is the wallpaper at the logon screen. Unfortunately, this has always been something fiddly to configure all …

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