Tag: Windows

How to Fix Windows Activation Error 0x80072F8F

The last thing you want to see during a Windows installation is an error message and particularly one which might not give you any helpful information on how to correct it (and not many Windows errors fall into that bucket). Anyway, this is a simple yet frustrating problem that I came across recently and I …

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Beware of NTFS USB Drives and Encrypted Files

Perhaps an edge case for a lot of people out there but perhaps something worth considering if you have formatted your USB stick with NTFS rather than FAT or FAT32 or you use portable hard drives formatted with NTFS. Some corporations will enforce the use of folder encryption on your computer (rather than whole disk …

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Make a Regular Computer an AirPlay Receiver for Free

AirPlay is one of those Apple standards that is beneficial when you have a lot of Apple kit but can be less convenient when you have a heterogeneous environment (so a mix of Apple and either Windows or Linux computers). This can be problematic if you want to use something like AirPlay to view content …

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BitLocker and iPods – Will They Blend?

Leading on from yesterday’s article about BitLocker and the unfortunate situation that Mac OS X users find themselves in when BitLocker to Go is enforced at work when using USB devices we should also consider one popular USB device, the iPod. It may be a lesser known fact that iPods will use either HFS+ or …

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BitLocker Drive Encryption and Mac OS X

Earlier in the week, a colleague of mine had his work laptop upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows XP. To many of us this would seem to be a welcome change but for some this could actually be a complication. As part of the changeover, “BitLocker to Go” drive encryption is enforced on USB drives as …

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Fix Choppy Audio in VLC Player

Update: If this doesn’t work for you then read this post. For a long time, VLC has been one of the well regarded media players with its ability to play almost any audio and video format without having to install special codec packs. It’s relatively small size in terms of disk space consumption and memory …

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Another Way to Close Windows in Windows

Here’s a quick tip for tonight for Windows users. Back in Windows 3.1 there wasn’t a dedicated button to close a window so instead you had to double click the menu button in the top left corner. It wasn’t until Windows 95 that a dedicated close button made its appearance in the top right corner …

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Change the DirectX Level in Team Fortress 2

Perhaps a niche piece of knowledge but one that will come in handy when troubleshooting graphics issues in Team Fortress 2. If, for whatever reason, you’ve set the game to use a lower version of DirectX to correct a graphical glitch and you want to revert back to a higher DirectX level then this is …

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Retrieve Missing Task Manager Menus

Task Manager - Processes

Here’s a quick tip for today. On the rare occasion you might find yourself looking at Task Manager in Windows and it is completely devoid of the usual menu options and tabs at the top of the window, resulting in something like this: … or this: What’s the solution? Just double click on the blank …

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Stabilisation Tips for Your Gaming Rig

GPU Temp Readout

For about a month now my desktop computer has been working fine after I had dropped in the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 solid state drive but since then I have experienced some instability when playing games on it (particularly Team Fortress 2 or TF2 for short). The system wouldn’t crash but the screen would go blank …

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