For some time everyone thought that it was only possible to use a Vista update DVD from within Windows XP to update to the latest operating system. The Windows XP key would become invalid and the Vista installation could commence. DailyTech posted a workaround which makes it possible to install Windows Vista using a Vista update DVD without XP.

To summarize the procedure. You load the Vista DVD, choose not to enter a product key when it prompts for one and continue the installation by choosing the right Vista edition. This will install a 30 day trial version of Vista. Run the setup again, this time from the now fully working Vista.

continue reading "Make Clean Installs with Vista Update DVDs"

If you ever wanted to download all the troubleshooting applications from sysinternals at once you can do so by downloading the Sysinternals suite right from Microsoft. The suite contains all troubleshooting applications that made sysinternal famous, 67 utilities in total which make it easy to troubleshoot Windows problems. This suite is not for you if you already have most of the utilities installed.

Some of the applications that are included in the Sysinternals suite should be installed on every computer such as Rootkit Revealer, Autoruns, Process Explorer and Regmon. This collection might confuse inexperienced users due to the sheer amount of exectuables that are listed in the main directory. It is difficulty to find out what some of the executables are doing, do you know for instance what psfile.exe will do ?

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Have you ever tried to manually check a image collection for duplicates ? It would take ages to find the duplicates in my image collection and I was looking for another program that would specially work with images only. Similar Images was mentioned in my article that was describing a program that was finding all duplicate files and I decided to give it a try by letting it scan my image collection.

Similar Images scanned my collection of 75000 files in three hours and displayed all the supposed duplicate images that it could find next to each other. Both similar images are displayed next to each other with information about file size and resolution and you have the option to delete either of them or none.

continue reading "Find and remove duplicate images"

A long timer reader asked in the forum if I knew of a program that would be able to join mp4 files. I was not able to give the answer immediately but after a short research I found a program called Yamb which is able to join, split and create mp4, mov and 3gp files. You do need the mpeg 4 converter mp4 box because Yamb uses it for the conversions.  Yamb is mainly a gui for mp4 box, the hardcore users could simply use the command line to work with mp4 box, all others should better use Yamb.You

need to add the path to mp4 box in the settings before you proceed to use some of the options that yamb offers. You may choose the creation or edition tab to use Yamb afterwards. The creation tab lets you create mp4 and 3gp files by adding other movie files such as divx ones. Created files can be further customized by splitting the output files for instance.

continue reading "How to join, split and create mp4, mov and 3gp files"

Normally you do not see which devices have been connected to your computer in the past. It could be interesting to say the least to find out if someone else connected a device to your computer in your absence. You have to change a value in windows using the command prompt.

Open the command prompt by pressing Windows + R, typing cmd and hitting enter. Type the following line and hit enter at the end:  set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 ; Once this is done open your device manager from the control panel and enable the option to view hidden devices in the View tab.

continue reading "Find out which devices have been connected to your pc"