October 19th, 2007
It’s Friday and you don’t know what that means - it’s Pimping Bookmarks day! It’s that special day of the week where I compile some great links to articles, tools, and other digital trinkets that will definitely pimp your work. Of course, readers are encouraged to contribute links that I’ll probably miss. You can submit these links throughout the span of the week and send them to my email (celineroque AT b5media DOT com).
So here’s this week’s list:
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Pimping Bookmarks Windows XPShare This
By Celine -- 0 comments
May 28th, 2007
Happened to you too? It was the darnedest thing. And the funny part was that the Sleep feature worked for a little while after I ran disk clean up then stopped. So, what happened?
Okay as you might remember I did a nice clean install of Vista recently. One of the nice benefits of this route is that the files from the old install are both saved for you and can be cleaned up with Disk Cleanup. Spiffy.
Okay so I open Disk Cleanup, but think, hmm I’ll wait a little while longer before I dump all this stuff (about 13 gigs, btw), but I did toast my temp files and … my Hibernation data file.
Yeah that was the bit I shouldn’t have done. File under learn for the next time.
Good thing is that I’m not the only one who has done this little oops. In fact Microsoft has a couple great articles on this, one about problems with Sleep and Hibernation and one on Hibernation specifically. The best part is that you can fix it with one stupid command (powercfg -h on) at the command prompt (running as Administrator of course).
I also think that USB devices plugged in might cause this problem as well. So … I’ve gotten it to work today once, after the powercfg has been run, but I’m still tweaking.
Gotta love Vista.
Tags: Vista, Vista laptop tips, Vista laptops, Vista tips, Vista troubleshooting, Vista tweaks, Vista sleep problem, Vista hibernate problems
Vista WindowsShare This
By Tris Hussey -- 0 comments
April 26th, 2007
This is more of a tip for those of us who work at home so we manage our own networks and routers and were brave enough to leap to Vista already.
Many of you have read that the whole TCP/IP and networking stack for Vista was re-written from the ground up and because of this there are significant performance gains to be had with it. I have seen for myself that this is more that true. I’m getting much faster sustained download speeds under Vista than I was under XP.
Now your laptop or desktop machine is, often, only half of the equation. If you’re like most of us and have a router at home. Whether it’s to connect multiple computers to the network to share a connection or just use WiFi, a router is between you and the Internet. A poorly configured or just plain inefficient router can really hamstring you and cause a ton of frustration.
I’m not going to get into all the steps you can take to configure or troubleshoot your router, but I will point you at Microsoft’s Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool . This handy online tool just tests to see if your router is configured to take advantage of all the improved networking power Vista has to offer.
I ran the check and my router passed. What about yours? Are you missing out?
IE and Firefox Internet tips Vista WindowsShare This
By Tris Hussey -- 1 comment
April 26th, 2007
Diana Huggins who contributes to Lockgnome’s Windows Fanatics blog always seems to have those tips and how tos that people need. Whether it’s watermarks in Word or new lines in Excel cells, Diana has posted them.
Sure, you might think they are simple, if you’ve already spent time trying to figure out how to do it through trial and error and Office help, but lots of people haven’t.
Instead of just posting every day her latest tip, just save us both some time and subscribe to the blog and get them via RSS.
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Office 2007Share This
By Tris Hussey -- 0 comments
March 18th, 2007
I seem to be tech guy du jour lately. I’ve been working on machines left, right, centre, up and down. If it isn’t the computer from the garage it’s a friend’s. Often what I need is a rescue CD to help things along. This boot CD has a lot of power tools for the uber-geek
You need the Ultimate Boot CD if you want to:
- Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run diagnostic tools on them.
- Free yourself from the slow loading speed of the floppy drive. Even if you do have a floppy drive, it is still much much faster to run your diagnostic tools from the CDROM drive, rather than wait for the tool to load from the floppy drive.
- Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Wouldn’t you like to avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD? Then the Ultimate Boot CD is for you!
- New! Run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that supports booting from USB devices. You can access the same tools as you would from the CD version.
When you boot up from the CD, a text-based menu will be displayed, and you will be able to select the tool you want to run. The selected tool actually boots off a virtual floppy disk created in memory.
Source: Ultimate Boot CD - Overview
I tried this CD yesterday and figured out that I really need to make sure I read the directions for each of the tools. These aren’t the nice, user-friendly tools like Norton and such. These are power tools (read no wizards or step-by-step things). I have to say, however, one of my standard things to do to help a Windows machine along is to boot into Safe Mode (press F8 at boot) and run chkdsk /f from the command prompt. Of course, when you’re in Windows it can’t fix anything, but it will ask you if you want to run the check and fix at the next reboot (yes is the correct answer here). Often, that’s just the thing you need to get stuff working again.
Cool downloads Cool tools Vista Windows XPShare This
By Tris Hussey -- 1 comment
March 14th, 2007
PYW friend Amit blogged a free tool from Microsoft that lets you quickly see what time it is in five different time zones. Since the U.S. & Canada have thrown the world a curve ball by starting daylight savings time this past Sunday, remember what time it is in the rest of the world is just a bit more complicated.
This free tool called Microsoft Time Zone runs as a tiny icon in your system tray and allows you to watch the current date and time of upto 5 cities around the world simultaneously.
Source: A World Time Clock for your System Tray from Microsoft at Digital Inspiration
If you’re using Vista you can display two additional timezones to your own without any extras. Why, pray tell, more folks haven’t pointed this out is beyond me, but it’s so, so easy.
- Right-click on the status bar and select Adjust Date/Time
- Click the Additional Clocks tab
- Click the tick boxes for “Show this clock”, select timezone, and name it.
- Click okay
Now when you mouse over the time your time, the date, and these additional clocks will appear. Pretty spiffy, eh?
Cool downloads Cool tools Vista Windows XPShare This
By Tris Hussey -- 0 comments
March 11th, 2007
Yeah I’m one of those folks who likes to tweak my machine a bit. Nothing really serious, just tips here and there to make the whole computing experience a bit better. Everton Blair seems like the same kind of guy.
One of my goals over the weekend was to get under the bonnet of Vista and do some tweaking and to try and fix some bugs. The most annoying bugs that I have currently are that my TV Card still isn’t working as Hauppauge still haven’t released working drivers and my network card randomly stops working every now and then, and I have to reboot.
Source: Windows Vista Tweaks And Tips | Connected Internet
Me, my big thing is to try to squeeze every once of speed out of my Net connection. Always looking for tweaks to make TCP/IP just a bit faster and efficient. Vista, I’ve noticed, is a heck of a lot better in this respect than XP. In fact it was one of the first things I noticed about Vista.
Anyway via Everton’s blog I found some nice documents for tweaking XP and Vista. I skimmed through the Vista guide for a bit. Picked up a few things. I’m not one to monkey with my registry unless required, but there are some really simple things you can do. Turning off un-needed Windows services is a huge one. I’ve got a “real” laptop, not a tablet, so why should I have all the pen-based and tablet stuff loaded? Yeah, exactly.
One thing I will say, read the docs carefully and if you’re not sure about a tweak, don’t. If you’d like my opinion, for what it’s worth, feel free to ask.
Good reading in any case.
Software tips Vista Windows XPShare This
By Tris Hussey -- 0 comments
February 26th, 2007
You know somethings are so easy you just smack your head and say “Why didn’t I try that!”. This tip for renaming files (it is shown in XP, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it might work in Vista too) is just so simple:
Highlight the files you want to rename. (Use Ctrl or Shift to highlight multiple files at once)
Right-Click the first file in the series, click Rename.
Only the file you’ve right clicked will be highlighted. That’s OK. Change the file name, the extension will be kept.
Hit the enter key to commit your change. Your files will be named “file (1).jpg”, “file (2).jpg”, etc..
Source: Rename multiple files at once in Windows XP - Download Squad
Well, that was easy.
Vista Windows XPShare This
By Tris Hussey -- 3 comments
February 26th, 2007
I’ve always used lots of keyboard shortcuts and I’m kinda narked when one doesn’t exist or is inconvenient (the Control-F4 for closing windows is one that I think is a pain). I’m surprised how often people don’t use shortcuts in their day to day work. It really speeds up tasks (like writing) if you just hit cntrl-i for italics, cntrl-b for bold, etc. And of course, cntrl-s for save.
Steven Mack of TiVo has launched a new blog called Windows Keyboard Shortcu of the Day, which should get you on your way to useing the mouse less and keyboard more (which is better for your hands, etc).
Hat tip to DownloadSquad for this one.
Software tips Vista Windows XPShare This
By Tris Hussey -- 0 comments
February 25th, 2007
Okay the saga of Lorraine’s boss’ computer continues. Thought I had it set. Nope, couldn’t get the spiffy LCD monitor to work (worked great on my machine, including doing the extended desktop thing, which is tre cool), but I thought I had it licked. Yeah, right. Yep Blue Screen of Death coming back. Random shutoffs and reboots still there. Sigh. Most of you would say, “Just wipe the bugger and start fresh.”, yeah well that isn’t always a good option. They’ve got accounting software on there, who knows when the last time they backed up was, you get the idea.
There is hope and it is the semi-secret non-destructive reinstall of XP option. I actually tried this yesterday, but it didn’t look like it would work. In hindsight, I think I needed an XP SP1 CD not SP2 to make it work. Since I finally got SP2 on the bugger yesterday, my handy SP2 CD is doing its job, yeah after two tries.
This is one sick machine. From this experience I have another tip, a very important tip: never, ever, ever throw away the original CDs that come with your machine. Why? Because if you need to start fresh those are your salvation. That’s your copy of Windows and even other drivers you need. For example both my HP and Dell machines need an additional driver install CD to make it play nice again after a clean install. No CD, buddy you’re downloading. A lot. No Windows CD? You’re going to be hoping your geek or a friend has a CD you can borrow to use.
Why am I saying this? Well, you probably guessed, I called this morning to find the original CDs for this poor machine. “Oh we threw them away I think.” Yeah, great.
I’m on somethng like hour 8 with this bugger. No install CDs means I’m going to be hunting for drivers once I get this fresh copy of XP updated.
Related to this is that I had to reinstall Vista last night. No big problem, I just ran into the problem of the Vista partion running out of space. Yes, I had plenty of space on the XP side, but really that was going to wind up being a pain. So, a quick boot from my Vista DVD, reparition, reformat, install, ta da! Took me maybe an hour. Carbonite is updating my files for me as I write this. Had to bring Outlook back from a backup I made just before I did the reinstall, no biggie.
See the difference? I have files backed up. I have CDs handy with drivers (okay I had to re-download the flash card reader drivers). I could back up important files. Easy. Now I’m a one OS machine again. Nice.
Oh, one more thing to add to my fun. Lorraine brought her old machine home from her sister’s place. Yep, another machine to connect to the network, copy files to from the other machine, update with patches, etc.
Man, what a weekend!
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By Tris Hussey -- 2 comments
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