Entries Categorized as 'Windows'
May 7, 2008
Last night, as I was about to log off the computer, the Windows Update logo pinged on the XP status bar to inform me that there was an urgent update to be downloaded. My heart sank because a) it was close to 3.00am and I wanted to get to bed and secondly I knew what the update was. Sure enough, when I checked, it was Windows Service Pack 3, the Romper Stomper Patch from Redmond.
Lifehacker did a nice summary of the technical advantages of SP3 (which I can barely get my head around). But on the surface, you’ll notice no changes whatsoever really. I don’t understand why people are having multiple orgasms over it, I really don’t. Especially when this morning, when I switched the computer on, Windows tried to revert all my settings back to Windows again. “We notice you’re using Winamp instead of Windows Media Player! Would you like to change back?!”
NO I F**KING DON’T!!!!!
Technorati Tags Microsoft, service pack 3, Windows
Posted in Microsoft, Patches, Security, Windows 
No Comments »
April 17, 2008
April 2, 2008
photo credit: maury.mccown
Lifehacker outlines how to rip all the crapware out of your XP installation, and its so easy! Perfect for use as Virtual Machines and for Vista users who want to dual-boot into XP for better, faster gaming experiences.
read more | digg story
Technorati Tags hack, Lifehacker, virtual, Vista, Windows, XP
Posted in Digg stories, Lifehacker, Windows No Comments »
March 20, 2008
We’re going to look at some useful keyboard shortcuts and commands that will help you personalize the MS-DOS Command Prompt Window without using the mouse.
You will also learn about hotkeys for executing DOS commands more quickly. The keyboard shortcuts are known to work in Windows Vista and XP command prompt.
read more | digg story
Technorati Tags command, Digg, DOS, Microsoft, prompt, shortcuts, Vista, Windows, XP
Posted in Digg stories, Microsoft, Productivity, Windows, shortcuts No Comments »
March 19, 2008
photo credit: mangee
Countless books have been written on how to shortcut your way around Windows to your advantage. But in the last part of my shortcuts series, I am going to do you a big favour and only tell you a few shortcuts that I use on a daily basis to speed up my travelling around Windows XP (most should work on Vista as well).
read more | digg story
Technorati Tags Digg, shortcuts, Windows, XP
Posted in Digg stories, Published Work, Tutorials, Windows, shortcuts No Comments »
March 14, 2008
Say you’re still using your Windows XP taskbar, but wouldn’t it be cool if it had even more features and was more flexible? Welcome to the fourth post in our desktop enhancement series in which I will focus on - you guessed it - the Windows XP taskbar.
read more | digg story
Technorati Tags desktop, Digg, enhancement, features, taskbar, Windows, XP
Posted in Digg stories, Microsoft, Windows, desktop No Comments »
March 14, 2008
This pack is designed to bring a Windows XP CD with SP2 integrated fully up to date with all of the latest hotfixes released by Microsoft since SP2’s release. It accomplishes this task via direct integration, where files on the CD are directly overwritten by the updated files.
read more | digg story
Technorati Tags backup, Windows, XP
Posted in Digg stories, Windows, backup No Comments »
February 22, 2008
This is a test post using Windows Live Writer. I just want to see how it turns out. Just ignore this.
Nothing to see here people, move along to the next post! 
Posted in Microsoft, Windows, blogging, desktop No Comments »
February 20, 2008
Last week I re-installed Firefox from the German version to the English version and suddenly all my file associations were gone. This was a big deal for me as I do a lot of networking and negotiations over instant messaging programs and this involves clicking on a lot of weblinks. Suddenly, whenever I clicked on a weblink sent to me via IM, Pidgin was coming out with the error message :
“FIREFOX DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO OPEN THIS ADDRESS BECAUSE THE PROTOCOL ISN’T ASSOCIATED WITH ANY PROGRAM”
So basically it was telling me that it didn’t know how to open a weblink because I hadn’t specified that Firefox was to be used to open URL’s.
This was a big problem that took me over a week to figure out and today I finally solved it. Which is just as well because I was about to blow a gasket. I wasn’t sure if it was Firefox’s fault (requiring a change to the “about:config” page), a problem with Pidgin or a problem with Windows. Since the problems started when I re-installed Firefox, I was inclined to think that it was Firefox causing the problems. But it seems now that the offender was Windows!
What you have to do to fix this issue is change the Windows registry to let it know what you want done with weblinks. So open up a text editor and type in the following :
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http]
@=”URL:http Protocol”
“URL Protocol”=”"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\command]
@=”\”I:\\Programme\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe\” \”%1\”"
Save the file as protocol.reg to your desktop. But make sure that you first change the path to your browser. My Firefox browser is at “I:\\Programme\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe\ but yours may be somewhere totally different. You may also use a different browser altogether. So make sure that last line corresponds to where the default browser is located on your PC.
Once you have the “protocol.reg” file on your desktop, double-click on it, say yes to the boxes that pop up and the necessary changes will be made to your registry. You should now be able to open weblinks with Firefox.
The above script is also the one to use if you want to set a particular action with a particular program. So if you have a preferred program for opening photos for example, you would replace the http with say jpg and the last line would contain the path to your preferred program.
If you’re not entirely sure what you’re doing though, I strongly recommend you make a backup of the registry before changing anything. If you totally mess up your registry without a backup to save you then you’re totally screwed.
Technorati Tags Firefox, Mozilla, program, protocol, registry, script, URL, Windows
Posted in Firefox, Tips, Windows No Comments »
February 10, 2008
If you burn a lot of photos onto disks, it can be difficult to tell which photo is on which disk (especially if the photo name is RIMG0263.jpg). That’s where XP’s Thumbnails feature comes into play to save the day.
When you have the photos burned onto a disk, run the disk on your PC and when the pictures appear in Windows Explorer, go to “thumbnails” view in the “View” menu. You will then have thumbnails of each photo along with the photo name underneath. Then open up a screen capture program such as SnagIt or IrfanView , make a screen capture and print out the page.
Give the disk a reference number then write the reference number on the printed sheet of thumbnails. You now have a reference guide as to which photo is on which disk.
Technorati Tags computer, photos, Windows
Posted in Productivity, Tips, Windows, photos No Comments »
January 17, 2008
I was reading the blog of fellow Make Use Of writer Karl Gechlik today and he profiled a really great tool that is now on my PC. I was looking for something that would activate my screensaver at a moment’s notice. I normally have the screensaver switched off by default as it irritates me when it kicks in without warning. But then again, I want to be able to have it on standby in case someone comes to the front door. You can see the monitor screen from the front door and if I am working on my money-laundering spreadsheets or hacking into the CIA computers, I want to be able to cover it up at a moment’s notice, if the Feds are coming to kick down the door.
So enters Tooler which does exactly that and more. This is an executable standalone program which means you click it and it runs right away. No installation is needed on your PC so you can easily carry this about on your USB stick.
The menu gives you a variety of shortcut options :
Just choose your shortcut location (the desktop is normally a good place), choose the action of the shortcut and then press zee little button to generate zee little shortcut.
The standard icons for the shortcuts are pretty boring so you can spice up your icons by using IconsExtract which finds all the icons on your computer so you can use them for other purposes. To change the icon, just right-click on the shortcut you just made, choose “properties” then “other symbol” then navigate to the new icon’s location. Choose the new icon and save everything.
One note though. The “Eject CD-ROM tray” and the “Close CD-ROM tray” didn’t work for me because my initial CD-ROM drive broke and when I bought a new one, I changed the location of it in my hard-drive. Tooler doesn’t seem to be able to find the new CD-ROM drive location and instead it tried to open an old CD-ROM drive that was no longer there. I tried changing the location of the CD-ROM drive in the target box of the shortcut but it wouldn’t let me. So it looks like I need to keep bending down to manually open and close the CD drive instead of having a lazy shortcut to do it for me!
One feature I found really useful though was the ability to add keyboard commands to the Tooler shortcuts. So I can either activate the screensaver by clicking on the icon, or I can do CTRL + ALT + S instead. Works perfectly.
Technorati Tags desktop, Freeware, icons, iconsextract, screensaver, shortcut, Software, tooler, Windows
Posted in Freeware, Software, Windows 1 Comment »
November 11, 2007
The past week has been a bit of a bummer for me computer-wise. Just when I thought that the computer would be all super turbo-charged with a new installation of Windows XP, we now have the next problem - the computer shuts down or re-boots. And when it shuts down, it refuses to start up again. When it re-boots, it does so every 2 - 3 minutes.
I suppose it is probably to do with over-use and old age. We bought the computer in 2004 and it’s on for 12-14 hours a day, every day. So we do tend to kind of run the computer into the ground. But nevertheless, it is breaking down at inopportune moments, such as when I am trying to post to this blog or post to other blogs. 95% of my paid work is based online so a constantly available computer with net access is an absolute must for me.
But yesterday we got a potential breakthrough (or it got worse, depending on your point of view). We got a blue screen. What’s good about this is that we finally got an error message and we were able to Google this error message (when the computer was working) to see what it meant.
“IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL”
According to a PC World forum, this message means the RAM and / or the board sockets are faulty. It could also mean that the graphics card driver is out of date and needs updating. So this morning, my girlfriend’s brother and I started moving the RAM about inside the hard-drive and lo and behold, the computer started working again! But this may just be a temporary fix. Yesterday the computer was on for 9 hours before it finally crashed. Today it has only been on for 6 hours so far. So we’ll see what happens at 9pm tonight.
But I have noticed something interesting in all the webpages I have visited regarding this issue - everyone seems to blame the NVIDIA graphics card driver to a certain degree. No-one seems to have any good things to say about it.
Do you use NVIDIA? If so, what do you think of it? And has anyone ever encountered this blue screen error message before? If so, how did you deal with it?
Technorati Tags drivers, IRQL not less or equal, NVIDIA, RAM, XP
Posted in Error messages, Windows No Comments »
November 6, 2007
This is a good site which was passed onto me. If you are missing any DLL files on your computer then here is a website where you can download new copies. Very useful.
afreeDLL
Technorati Tags DLL, download, Microsoft, Windows
Posted in Microsoft, Windows No Comments »
November 2, 2007
I’ve been away the past couple of days re-installing Windows XP on my computer which, as anyone else who has done it will testify, is a huge task. Not only do you have to re-install Windows but you also have to re-install the browsers, the drivers, the printer, scanner, USB devices and software. So this blog had to be put to one side for a couple of days.
I’ve known for a while that I had to do a XP re-install but I thought I could wait a bit while I caught up with the multitude of other tasks clogging up my to-do list. But the other day, while I was having my fifth cup of tea of the day, the computer did a Borg on me. It started deactivating all my sound drivers and printer drivers. The start menu preferences were all changed and programs started booting up and shutting down, and then XP started shutting down. I half expected the speakers to start droning “we are the Borg….put down your cup of tea and prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile!”
So to quote Tom Hanks - “Houston, we have a problem!”. Time to re-install! 
But everything seems to be OK now. It’s times like these that you realise how valuable Google is in your life. Without Google, I would never have found the right driver for my old antique deskjet printer or how to re-install the sound driver.
I have a huge backlog of stories I want to get through here. I’ll be back later with the first of them.
Technorati Tags borg, driver, Microsoft, windows XP, XP
Posted in Google, Microsoft, Windows 1 Comment »
