Tag: Windows

Always Eject External Drives Before Removal

Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media

Over the course of my career where USB flash drives and external flash drives have become more commonplace (compared to the 1990s where floppy disks and compact discs were king) I have been shocked by the number of people that simply pull out a drive without first ejecting it. In some cases, this has lead …

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When All Else Fails, Use Malwarebytes

Today, a work colleague and friend of mine had an issue with her computer being overcome by a nasty piece of malware formally known as PolyCrypt and commonly disguised as “Security Master AV” (which looks a lot like the Windows Security Centre). The computer was still operational and remote accessible via LogMeIn (which I have …

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Windows Shortcuts Are Your Friend

With the advent of the mouse and the GUI (Graphical User Interfaces) many years ago, the vast majority of people may relegate the humble keyboard for menial tasks such as word processing, playing games, entering URLs as well as login credentials. What people may not realise is that there is a whole myriad of shortcuts …

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Keep Your Computer Clean With CCleaner

CCleaner (Registry Integrity)

Like a car, computers require maintenance (both hardware and software) and unsurprisingly a lot of people don’t understand how to keep their computers in good condition. As a result, people may result for expensive and bloated utility software that does little more when compared to free alternatives. With hard drive sizes soaring into the stratosphere, …

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Hard Drive Capacities – Know What You Are Getting!

Windows 7 - Disk Management

Over the years, you may have wondered whether or not you have been duped when you bought a new computer with a hard drive of a higher capacity that your current computer or maybe when you just buy a new drive to put into your existing computer. The shop of manufacturer may advertising one capacity …

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Parted Magic – Disk Partitioning Made Easy

Once in a blue moon, you might find yourself in the situation where you need to slice up that huge hard drive (or maybe a smaller  solid state drive) into multiple partitions. Partitions can make your data easier to manage by keeping logical types of data separate. For example, my computer is setup as follows: …

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AirVideo – Media Streaming for iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad

AirVideo (Streaming)

In anticipation of our iPads arriving on Friday (although I am predicting a Thursday release so Apple gets the hop on the media), I have been looking for a media streaming solution to counteract the 16GB capacity of our purchased iPads. If we are at home, having to sync media for an impulse viewing is …

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Skype Beta – Five-Way Video Calling Released

A little while back, I wrote about Skype and how it is great for free, high quality voice and video calls to other people that also use the Skype service. This week, Skype released a beta version of Skype into the wild that is capable of five-way video calling which is up from the usual …

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Handy Tip – No Dataflow and Pings Respond with “oy”

Bit of a strange one today (perhaps a bit dry) but I was out fixing a problem with a computer at For Dogs’ Sake this evening fixing a computer that had been infected with some malware. The computer had no dataflow through a web browser (which would promptly crash) but ping tests would work albeit …

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MS Courier & HP Slate – iPad Killers Being Killed Off Themselves

Over the course of this week, there have been some shock announcements regarding potential competitors to the Apple iPad, specifically the Microsoft Courier and the HP Slate. On Thursday, Gizmodo reported that Microsoft had summarily pulled the Courier out of the incubator and tossed it in the bin. Certainly, in my opinion, the Courier looked …

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