Category: Windows Vista

Stop Windows Update Taking Over the Shutdown Button

Shut down and install updates button

Another quick tip for tonight. Sometimes, when you want to shutdown your computer you might notice that the shutdown button looks like this in Windows 7: When pressed, this button will finish the installation of pending updates for Windows and then shutdown the computer. Sometimes, this isn’t convenient and if you have a habit of …

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Recover Heavily Infected Computers with Microsoft Standaline System Sweeper

Here’s a quick tip for tonight. Microsoft has quietly developed a tool for use in situations where a computer just won’t start due to the number and/or severity of infections riddling it. Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper (MSSS) is not a replacement for a traditional antivirus which is designed continuously in the background checking for nasty …

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ARM CPUs and Windows 8 – What Does it Mean?

It’s no secret now that Windows 8 is going to be compatible with ARM CPUs. This is an interesting move as the general belief in the technical ranks was that Microsoft would scale up Windows Phone to the tablet form factor rather than have another tilt at shoehorning its desktop operating system into low powered …

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Easily Resize Images Under Windows Vista and Windows 7

Another quick tip for tonight. Under Windows XP you could install a variety of “Powertoys” that would add extra functionality to the operating system that was missing out of the bo. One such function was the ability to quickly and easily resize images which relied upon a third party solution unless you installed the Powertoy. Unfortunately, since …

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Keep Track of Multiple Timezones in Windows Vista and Windows 7

Additional Clocks Tab in Date and Time

Here’s a quick tip for those of you who regularly interact with people in other timezones. If you want to get a quick glance at one or two timezones other than the one you’re in then you can add this fairly easily to the “Date and Time” section in Windows. Just click on the time …

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Adjust the Maximum Size of the Recycle Bin in Windows

Leading on from yesterday’s blog entry regarding the practice of emptying the Recycle Bin (or Trash in Mac OS X) I thought it was worth covering how to set the maximum size of the Recycle Bin in Windows to prevent it from growing too large. This is of particular importance on smaller drives in netbooks or more …

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Reclaim Space by Emptying the Recycling Bin or Trash

Here’s a quick tip. While some of us may think this is a very obvious tip others may not have any idea about the concept of the Recycle Bin (or simply “Trash” in Mac OS X) and the fact that stuff that’s in there still chews up hard drive space. Sure, these days with drive …

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Diagnose Dataflow Problems: Potential Issues on the Local Computer

Leading on from the last couple of posts outlining how to do a ping test and a traceroute to attempt to troubleshoot dataflow issues there are also some other things to look out for as common offenders on your own computer. These may or may not apply in all situations nor is this an exhaustive …

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Diagnose Dataflow Problems: The Traceroute

Traceroute with Unresponsive Hop

Leading on from yesterday’s post about how to do a ping test we move on to another test which might uncover more information about where dataflow problems may be occurring. In a nutshell, a traceroute shows you all of the various entities (also known as “hops”) on the Internet that sit between you and a …

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Use the Character Map to Find Unusual & Lesser Used Symbols

Character Map

Here’s a quick tip for tonight. Sometimes we need to get a hold of certain symbols like the copyright symbol (i.e. ©) when we don’t know the keyboard shortcut (Alt + 0169) or we want to preview a whole stack of characters at the same time for unusual fonts like Wingdings and Webdings. Sure, for …

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