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:
(more…)
by David Hakala
The Active Desktop feature, available in Windows since Windows 98, allows the use of many kinds of files as the desktop background. Before Active Desktop, only static bitmap (BMP) images could be used as desktop backgrounds. Now your background can be a live Web page constantly updated with news, weather, and sports; a movie file; or just about anything you can display.
But who stares at their desktop background all day? Most users find a static image is all the diversion they need or have time to glance at in between opening and closing application windows.
(more…)
by David Hakala
You may have any reason to change the way Windows XP starts. Perhaps you want to shorten the countdown pause. You might desire to see Recovery Console as an option. You may have added another operating system, such as Linux or Vista, and want to choose which OS to load upon startup. The boot.ini file is the key to making such changes.
(more…)
Ross M. Greenberg
Out-of-the-box Vista is an extraordinarily easy system on which to base your home network. My setup here is with a high-speed DSL, wired to my Vista Ultimate with wireless connections to my son’s Vista Home Premium and my wife’s XP Media Center.
The first thing to do is to make sure that the XP machine is using the NTFS file system. This is the newer file system that allows for more granular file permissions – permissions can be set to deny or allow remote file access to directories, shares, individual files and so forth. This is based upon the credentials a remote user or a remote machine uses to access another on the network. To offer a full transparency of access it is vital that the users of one machine have the same login ID and password on each machine on the network. Secure information, such as the password, does not have to be visible in plain text or accessible to other users.
(more…)
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.
(more…)
by Gabe Goldberg
Which Beatles song describes an under-used PC resource for solving problems and answering questions? It’s not “Ask Me Why?” or “Do You Want to Know a Secret.” It’s “Help”!
Since Windows’ early days, Windows itself and most applications have included information on setting configuration options, usage, and problem determination. Being able to access this material lets you deal with problems whenever they occur, rather than waiting to call an expensive or frustrating support line during working hours. It leads to better productivity, can be faster than Google searching or pestering friends, is available when you’re offline, and it can even make PC use more enjoyable by revealing techniques which impress those around you.
(more…)
by David Hakala
First there was spam to exploit your email inbox. Then there came pop-up ads on Web sites to make browsing a nightmare. Then marketers figured out how to use a built-in Windows 2000 and XP service to zap their wares directly to your desktop. So did distributors of virii and other malware.
Windows Messenger is a Microsoft-proprietary instant messaging client that is enabled by default. So is its 2005 successor, Windows Live Messenger. Both IM clients have legitimate uses, primarily in corporate and online gaming environments. But most home and small business users don’t need to leave this back door open for bad things to enter.
(more…)
by David Hakala
It’s frustrating to get an error message when you try to burn files to a new, blank CD or DVD disc: “There is no disc in the drive. Please insert a writable CD into drive.” You know your drive writes and you know the disc is good. Why Windows doesn’t “get it” sometimes is a mystery. But the fix is here.
The problem is mistaken identity. When your writable drive was installed, Windows created a registry entry noting, “This drive is writable.” Or maybe it didn’t, or the entry got corrupted somehow, or Windows is misreading the entry. In any case, you need to edit that entry so Windows recognizes your drive as writable. Here is how to do it:
(more…)
Powered by WordPress