Tag: Microsoft

Automatically Reinstall Common Applications After a Format with Ninite

Ninite Website

If you have been following the blog you might be aware that I undertook a clean install of Windows 7 on a laptop. Of course, there’s a process to go through in order to backup existing data, reinstall Windows and then copy back the required data from the backup. However, some of that data is …

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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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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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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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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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Microsoft Adding H.264 Back into Google Chrome

If the title of this article made you rub your eyes and gave you cause to double check to make sure you were reading what you thought you had read then I don’t blame you. Under normal circumstances you certainly wouldn’t expect Microsoft to develop or enhance a competing product. Unless of course there was …

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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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Reclaim Space – Remove an Unnecessary Windows Hibernation File

Yesterday, I wrote an article about a great little utility called WinDirStat and its ability to create a bitmap of what files and folders are consuming the most space on your drives. One thing I did discover was a huge 9GB hiberfil.sys file on my C: partition that was serving no real purpose as I …

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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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Boydo’s Tech Talk – The First Year

Perhaps hard to believe but the blog has been up and running for a full year and many things have happened over the course of the last twelve months. At times, it has been a bit of a challenge to do a daily entry particularly with the demands of full time work as well as …

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