by David Hakala
Suppose you are shopping for a car. You know your budget and you have an idea what interest rate you will have to pay. You want to play around with some “what if” scenarios to see what your monthly payments may be. This is where Excel’s interest calculation functions come in.
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by David Hakala
Fonts are fun. Fonts can give that special, unique touch to your greeting cards, business cards, CD covers, and any document. Windows comes with many different fonts, but there is always room for more.
There are many sites on the Web that offer “free fonts”; just Google that term. Often, the free fonts are free samples designed to entice you into buying a full package of several thousand fonts. It may be awkward and tedious to find and download one free font; that’s to keep people from downloading many fonts at once and to make the package deal more attractive. But with a bit of patience you can find the perfect font for free.
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by David Hakala
Sharing files and printers is one of the main benefits of having a network at home or office. A Windows network lets you easily share selected files and printers. This tutorial for Windows XP Pro assumes you have already set up your network and enabled file and printer sharing during the setup process. Now we will see how to share specific files, folders, and printers.
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by David Hakala
What is Windows Safe Mode and what good is it? It looks awful with its too-small desktop and crude graphics. Much of the software you use isn’t available in Safe Mode. Sometimes you can’t even access the Internet in Safe Mode. Why bother with Safe Mode?
Safe Mode is useful for diagnosing system configuration problems and removing some types of malware or malfunctioning legitimate software that cannot be removed in Windows normal mode.
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by Tina Gasperson
Your computer is running slowly, freezing, stalling, and generally making a nuisance out of itself. The worst part is, you just got done giving it a complete “tune up” and things were fine for a short period of time. What’s going on? There’s a good chance there is an application or a process running that is using up all the available computing power your system’s CPU can provide. The good news is that there is an easy way to find out what’s hogging all the power. It’s called the Windows Task Manager.
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by Tina Gasperson
Once you’ve shot all that great video on your DV recorder, what’s next? If you want to do more than just store the tape away or replay it on your video camera, you’ll need to upload the video to your hard drive. Digital video cameras come equipped with USB or Firewire connections that make it easy to transfer files. Follow the instructions for your particular camera, then open up your video editing software and get ready to become a movie producer.
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by Gabe Goldberg
The Windows mouse is a mixed blessing. It does things – such as highlighting and dragging text — that would be tough to do with a keyboard. And yet moving one’s hand between mouse and keyboard is a major distraction and time waster; even accomplished touch typists lose keyboard focus when mousing.
So it’s worth exploring how Windows’ flexibility, providing multiple ways to do things, lets keyboard shortcuts replace many common mouse functions. First, remember that many tasks are standardized across Windows applications, so learning them once helps early and often. And while they’ll become second nature as you practice them, don’t be overwhelmed by their number — notice a few that will be most helpful and consciously use them instead of mouse clicks. When they’re automatic for your hands, pick a few more. You’ll soon amaze colleagues and friends with your dexterity.
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by David Hakala
When you start a large program, such as Microsoft Office components including Word, Excel, or Outlook, you may experience very slow startup of the program, a thrashing sound from your hard drive; and the following message:
Your system is low on virtual memory. To ensure that Windows runs properly, increase the size of your virtual memory paging file. For more information, see Help.
After you click “OK”, you may see this further information:
Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file. During this process, memory requests for some applications may be denied. For more information, see Help.
We don’t want to see Help for more information; we want our program to load faster and our hard drive to stop tearing itself apart. So let’s quickly summarize what Help would tell us and get on with the fix.
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by David Hakala
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. One such intention is to get rid of the frivolous games in your Windows installation CD. So you create a customized installation CD using the freeware program NLite. You omit the games when compiling the new installation CD.
Later, you arrive at Hell when you open “Add or Remove Programs,” click on “Add/Remove Windows Components”, and get the following error message:
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by David Hakala
Whoever at Microsoft thought I wanted animated comic book pages on my desktop was nuts. I’m talking about those annoying balloon tips that pop up every time something happens in Windows XP or Vista, even something trivial like “LiveUpdate is up to date.” Fortunately, balloon tips can be disabled everywhere in a single operation under XP or Vista. Both techniques are covered here.
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