If you regularly print documents on your computer you will eventually encounter a rather annoying problem: stuck print jobs. It happens that a print job gets stuck somehow. Sometimes these print jobs cannot be deleted from the print queue. The consequence is that all later print jobs will be blocked by the stuck one.

We already mentioned how you can manually deal with stuck print jobs which basically involved stopping the Print Spooler service in Windows and deleting the stuck print jobs manually in the Windows directory.

Disabling and enabling the Print Spooler service and deleting files is definitely not the most comfortable way of dealing with stuck print jobs. The portable software Stalled Printer Repair (via Instant Fundas) offers a one-click solution to the problem. This is good news for everyone who has to deal with stuck print jobs regularly on his computer system.

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Here is a quick tip for those of you who encounter swf files regularly on the web and like some contents that much that they want to extract them. The most thought after objects are mp3 files which can be easily extracted from swf to mp3.

Some webmasters suggest a workaround using an audio recorder like Audacity for that purpose and while that is one possibility it is not the most comfortable one.

SWF Rip is an Open Source software program that serves the purpose of extracting objects of swf files to the computer. The software has not been updated for some years but it still works surprisingly well on most swf files. There might be some that it is not working with though.

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If you load to many applications during startup you might notice that this might delay the startup even further because of the system resources required to load the applications at the same time. A better way to deal with startup applications would be to load them in sequence instead ordered by level of priority.

Delayed Exec is a free software program to delay the execution of startup programs. It displays all applications that are started during system start including their title, command and the user.

Applications can be moved into the delayed startup applications table where they will be executed in order using the delay interval specified by the user. The delay interval is set in milliseconds, the default being 15000.

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Only three days left before the first Ghacks Christmas Giveaway ends. We have got two software programs and five licenses for each today. WinSnap and WindowSpace are both developed by NTwind who are known for their free Taskswitch XP application.

WinSnap is also known as the Windows Snapshot Maker, a screenshot application that is available as both a portable and regular edition for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows. It provides the usual means to take a snapshot of the full desktop, an application, a window, object or region. The option to take a snapshot of an object might require some explanation. This option makes it possible to take a screenshot of several elements on the screen. Say you have two open windows on the screen and want to include both in the screenshot but not the rest of the desktop. This can be done by selecting the Object mode which makes use of the [CTRL] key to mark several objects before the screenshot is taken.

A new screenshot will be displayed in the main interface of the software program. It can also be set to be automatically saved to the computer’s hard drive or copied to the Windows Clipboard which can save quite some time if you take screenshots regularly. The filename, image format and quality can also be defined in the options. The defaults are the png image format with a quality setting of 85%.

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There is usually no need to remove the so called ID3 tags of audio files. Actually there are only two scenarios that do make sense. The first is if you encounter lots of audio files with wrong ID3 tags and the second if you want to remove either ID3v1 or ID3v2 tags from the audio files to ensure that all use the same tagging method. ID3 tags make it possible to store meta data in audio files. Meta data includes the song title, the album and artist among other information.

ID3 Kill is a free Windows software that can recursively scan through directories and perform file operations on audio files.

Usage is pretty straightforward. You point it at a directory and check a few boxes to configure the options. It is possible to include subdirectories in the scan. The main options are to remove ID3v1 and / or ID3v2 tags from all encountered audio files.

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