SmartScreen Filter is a security module that is integrated into several Microsoft products such as Internet Explorer or Windows Live Messenger. It basically warns users if they are about to open a potentially dangerous website or file. A warning is displayed and it is up to the user to continue or stop at this point. [...]

As we all use computers over more and more years we become comfortable with software that “just works” and we want to continue using it for as long as possible.  This causes problems though as Microsoft develop new versions of Windows as, no matter how well each version of Windows is supposed to be compatible [...]

For many years now the famous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) has been the ultimate indication that something disastrous has happened to make your computer die, but how useful is the information in the BSoD and the respective crash dump file that Windows produces? The best article I ever found explaining the BSoD in depth [...]

A judge recently ordered a US citizen to decrypt storage space on a computer so that police forces could analyze protected files on the system. In this particular case, the defendant was ordered to decrypt the hard drive of her Toshiba notebook no later than February 21, or face the consequences “including contempt of court”. [...]

The Windows Event Viewer in one of the most useful, yet most under used features of the operating system.  Accessed by typing event into the Start Menu search box, or through the Computer Management Console it logs everything that happens in the OS, including warnings, errors and critical failures (sudden power losses or immediate restarts [...]

When something goes wrong with Windows it can be very difficult to diagnose or repair, and there are times when booting your computer into Safe Mode just isn’t good enough.  Safe Mode, a special diagnostic mode built into Windows strips the OS of all drivers and start-up software and presents you with a very limited [...]

Outlook is not my main email client and I never really used it that much. Still, I have it installed as a part of my Office 2010 installation, and I tend to use it sometimes to test a new plug-in or feature that I would like to write about. For the past month or so [...]

The popular Bittorrent indexer The Piratebay announced yesterday that they would switch the position of torrent and magnet link download links on the website in order to save bandwidth. Many media sites reported that The Piratebay would be dropping torrents altogether, but that is not true. While it is still possible to download torrent files [...]

Sometimes I’m searching on Google to copy the search results link into another application. This is an extremely frustrating experience as links are manipulated by Google. When you copy a link in Google’s search results you’ll notice that the link target are displayed correctly when you hover the mouse cursor over the link, but when [...]

If you are a regular on YouTube you probably know that Google has recently redesigned the page completely, turning pretty much everything up side down. The new design has received quite the criticism, for instance for the centered fixed width layout, or the larger frame at the top of the YouTube home page. Most YouTube [...]

The Disk Cleanup tool offers a great way to quickly free up some disk space by deleting temporary files that are no longer needed. It is in no way as complete or thorough as third party tools like CCleaner, but it gets the job done and does not require you to install another software on [...]

If you are an Internet regular you have probably heard about the Wadsworth Constant, an Internet meme that has come to some fame at the end of last year. A user named Wadsworth mentioned that he skipped 30% ahead of every YouTube he was viewing on the Internet. This spread quickly throughout the geeky parts [...]

When you are moving from one PC to the other, or are making use of multiple devices running Windows, you probably want to have data available on all the PCs. This can be personal files like documents or music, but also configuration settings for the Windows Firewall. If you are connecting to the Internet via [...]

The topic of dual booting operating systems has been covered in a few ways on this site, but here is a primer to provide you with some important information before attempting any dual boot. More users today are becoming aware of how useful and practical the Linux operating system is, in all its shapes and [...]

Windows Remote Assistance is a tool that Microsoft has integrated into the Windows 7 operating system. It is in many regards similar to popular remote access applications like Teamviewer, as it allows Windows 7 users to ask someone else to take a look at their computer system over a local area network or the Internet. [...]

Hard drive partitioning is useful for creating virtual drives and creating disk volumes that can be used for storing particular file types. For example, if you did not want to keep all of your media and documents on Drive (C:), you can create a hard drive partition that will be a new volume separate from [...]

I have been using the cloud storage and file synchronization service Dropbox more frequently lately. You can read more about that here and here. You probably know that Dropbox keeps track of all file changes automatically, with options to restore a previous version of the file. While looking at that I noticed that it is [...]

With Christmas only ten days away you might well be lucky enough to receive a new PC or laptop as a present, or you may be giving one as a gift.  New computers are fantastic, exciting, invigorating and more.  That is once you get past the trial software, the excess software bloat, the slowdowns, the [...]

Some Windows users who are connecting via wireless lan to the Internet may have noticed regular ping spikes and sometimes even disconnects due to an automated background scan. Especially Windows Vista users have been plagued by this issue, but it has also been reported by users running Windows XP or Windows 7. You can test [...]

Outlook stores your email in a PST file. PST stands for personal storage table. Outlook uses this file format to store your data including emails, contacts, calendars, etc. Depending on your settings, you may need to use your password to open them and they may or may not be encrypted. Most likely, if you did [...]

Files in standard folders can be sorted and displayed in a number of ways. When it comes to sorting, users have options to display files in list form or as thumbnails. The sorting options allow them to sort files and folders by name, or other parameters such as file size or modification date. Library and [...]

You may come upon torrents that you’d like to download when you are out of house. Maybe you are at a friend’s house, at work, or in a foreign country. The problem that you’ll encounter is always the same. How do you get the torrent from the computer to your home computer running uTorrent? You [...]

I have to admit that I’m not making full use of Windows 7′s library feature. Libraries are basically used to consolidate, or virtually merge, directories. The operating system ships with libraries for photos, music, documents and videos. Windows 7 users can add folders to existing libraries, so that their contents are displayed in the selected [...]

Some folders in Windows Explorer show a single preview picture embedded in the folder icon. It seems as if the selected image is picked randomly from the available images in the folder. This guide will show you how to change the default folder picture in Windows Explorer. When you use Windows Explorer in thumbnail view [...]

Tis the season for people to buy you all manner of new technological goodies; at least you hope so.  I’m running a special pre-Christmas webcast on Tuesday December 13th on the subject of Setting up and Configuring a new PC.  The webcast is free for everybody and you can book your place on the O’Reilly [...]

Microsoft’s Technet site is a huge documentation repository for all things Microsoft. The library on Technet offers technical documentation for Microsoft products and technologies. Sometimes you may want to save documents to your local computer system, for instance to access the documents when no Internet connection is available or to include documents in learning materials. [...]

Hard drives, like other electronic devices, have temperature thresholds that they need to run in. Manufacturers like Western Digital or Seagate inform their customers about those thresholds. But how can the customers make sure that the temperature does not jump over those limits? And what are the possible consequences if a drive operates outside of [...]

The playlist (.pls) file format is without doubt one of the most popular formats when it comes to Internet radio stations. All it takes to tune into a radio station is to open the .pls file in a compatible player. Whenever I try to load a playlist file on my system Windows makes the suggestion [...]

RSSOwl, my feed reader of choice, offers several interesting features that are not apparent on first glance. You may now that I ended up with this Java based feed reader after using online tools such as Google Reader and offline apps like Feed Demon before. The feature that I want to talk about today is [...]

A few days ago I wrote a brief tutorial about downloading and installing Office Starter 2010 from Microsoft. One of the “side-effects” of installing Microsoft Office Starter on the system is the creation of a virtual drive on the system. This drive is visible in Windows Explorer, usually mapped to letter q or r, but [...]

Windows Live Mesh is a great little program that can synchronise your files across multiple PCs. laptops and tablets as well as creating an online backup of up to 5Gb using Microsoft’s SkyDrive service.  It’s not without its flaws though and can fill up your hard disk with useless temporary files that it can forget to [...]

iOS devices are a wonder. This article is being typed on one right now. Sometimes, however, these robust and snappy little things go “boink.” One of the more common issues a user will perhaps encounter is when the iOS device (iPad, iTouch, iPhone) gets stuck in recovery mode. If you are reading this article, you [...]

It is good that Microsoft offers a 60 day trial of Office 2010, but once it expires and you try to open Word or Excel Files, you will get an error message stating that it cannot be opened because the file is not a valid Win32 application. Sure, you can rearm the Office 2010 trial [...]

Search in Windows 7 can be difficult and awkward to use as in order to use it properly you have to remember a lot of, sometimes very obscure commands including  size:gigantic to find the files you’re after.  I even released the chapters on Windows 7 search from my free Windows 7 Power Users Guide as [...]

When I was working in IT I sometimes dealt with support requests that involved the caps lock key. Users were complaining that they could not enter their password, or that they locked their account even though they were sure that they had entered the right password, or that their username was displayed in upper case [...]

The Internet offers many different options for users to increase their song collection. Among the options are to record Internet radio with tools like Streamwriter or Stream Harvester, or to download and convert Youtube videos to do the same. This guide explains how you can increase your iTunes song collection, or your song collection in [...]

The Libraries feature in Windows 7 provides an easy interface to manage multiple file locations from a single location. Four default libraries are displayed in Windows Explorer: Documents, Music, Pictures, and Video. Many users only utilize one or two of the libraries. You can easily remove any of these libraries from the Navigation Pane and [...]

Today I tried to install the Adobe Flash Plugin for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The basic idea was to download the executable, run it and have Flash installed. The problem was that somehow the whole process got corrupted which had several consequences. The Flash Player installation running in the background was creating new temporary Flash executables [...]

One of the most common questions I’m asked when people email me with PC questions is how they can find out exactly what it is that’s causing X disk operation or eating up Y memory or Z processor cycles.  The good news is that this is actually really easy to find out. In Windows Vista and Windows [...]

Nothing seems to annoy PC users more than networking problems.  They begin with the inevitable when Windows fails to install the drivers for either your network controller card, your WiFi or usually both when you come to install the operating system.  Rather than just being able to get straight on with installing your software and [...]

One of the problems with Windows Phone when the operating system was first released was that while you could secure your phone with a passcode it was either all or nothing.  This meant that you either had to type in a passcode every single time you wanted to do anything on your phone or it [...]

Windows accumulates context menu items any time you install several applications. Not all applications end up on the context menu but enough do so over time that the menu can become cluttered. You might find yourself wondering, “How did that get there?” You may not want it on the context menu, but it is there [...]

The Windows command line prompt can be handy at times and sometimes even the only option to execute a specific command in the operating system. You sometimes may need to copy the output of a command to the Windows Clipboard, for instance to use the output in another application. Most users that I know handle [...]

Sometimes, or maybe even all the time, when you synchronize or download files from your Dropbox online storage you may notice that file transfer rates are lower than they should be. That’s not an issue if you do not need access to the files that are downloaded fast as you can just keep Dropbox running [...]

Data is now everywhere and we store pretty much everything as data.  Contacts, diaries, music, photographs, videos, conversations, business records, everything is data.  In fact more and more people are shredding the paper copies of everything they have and going digital with scanned copies of important documents being much easier to store.  Unfortunately this also [...]

Backing up data on your computer is important and most users know this. Windows features a backup utility that allows you to backup your system and files. This is a useful utility but sometimes you might find that it does not completely backup your files or an error occurs. If you need to backup your [...]

Initially, when your computer is new and you have a fresh Windows 7 installation, Windows Update works perfectly. You see no errors, everything is set to automatic and you need not lift a finger. Then, as you actually use your PC for awhile and utilize its capabilities, one day you see the error messages. Windows [...]

When I worked for one of Germany’s biggest financial organizations back before I started blogging full time, I had to change my user account password on a regular basis. Even worse, they had set the password rules in a way that you could not just re-pick your old password. Heck, you could not even use [...]

So many users enjoy customizing various features and appearances in Windows 7. Personalizing features and appearances is fun and gives a fresh new look you your Windows 7 experience. Generally, Library icons cannot be changed in Windows 7. Someone always comes up with a way to hack the limitations and overcome them and that part [...]

Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 include templates in the applications. These templates are useful when you have to create customized documents such as invoices, charts, and even blogs. If you need to create an Excel spreadsheet and you don’t have time to design the layout yourself, you can use the templates in Excel to streamline [...]