Category: Operating Systems

Apr 01 2011

Calibrate Your Screen with the Display Colour Configuration Wizard

Display Colour Configuration Wizard

Here’s a quick tip for this evening. A lesser known feature of Windows 7 is an included wizard that will help you adjust the settings on your screen to obtain the most accurate colour reproduction possible. Not all screens are made identically and there are differences between display technologies which means that images can look …

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Mar 30 2011

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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Mar 29 2011

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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Mar 27 2011

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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Mar 26 2011

Windows 8: Potential System Reset Functionality

Windows 8 might be a little while away (perhaps with a release some time next year) but one thing that caught my eye browsing the web today was the potential new feature being the concept of the “system reset”. Granted, this was shown off in a leaked image but it’s interesting to see what might …

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Mar 25 2011

BlackBerry PlayBook: RIM Apps or Android Apps?

As the tablet wars start to heat up there was an interesting teaser from RIM about the ability to run Android apps on their new PlayBook tablet. While the details are still a bit murky as to how this will work (either through emulation, “Just in Time” compilation or some other means) it does give …

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Mar 23 2011

Attack of the Tablets

If you have been following the tech news today, details about two of the more significant tablets come to surface today in the form of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the BlackBerry PlayBook. The timing was good as the international pricing for the Apple iPad 2 was also released. As far as Australia goes, …

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Mar 21 2011

Facebook for Android: No Longer Screws Up Your Photos

Just a heads up for all of those Android users out there that have put up with the Facebook app buggering up photos shot in portrait orientation. For those who don’t know, portrait photos ended up being rotated into landscape orientation requiring manual correction via the Facebook website. Version 1.5.2 of Facebook for Android now corrects this …

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Mar 19 2011

Pep Up Your Laptop Speed by Checking the Power Management Settings

A quick tip for this evening. Many of us have laptops and we do need to use them away from a power point when required. However, this often means that your laptop is running in a low power consumption mode designed to prolong battery life at the expense of performance. This can be a pain …

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Mar 06 2011

Microsoft Wants to Say Goodbye to Internet Explorer 6

It might be hard to believe but Internet Explorer 6 is still alive and kicking ten years after it was released. Whilst IE has come a long way in terms of speed and standards compliance particularly in IE9 previous version left a lot to be desired. Needless to say, hanging on to decrepit software and forcing websites …

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