I bought a Toshiba notebook back last year that had Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium installed. Unfortunately though I only received a recovery CD and not a retail Windows Vista DVD. You might wonder why this matters; let me tell you. The original retail Windows Vista DVD comes with recovery tools that can be used in various situations to analyze and fix a broken system.
Microsoft releases two security patches for Windows
Microsoft is releasing collected security patches each month for their Windows operating systems. I’m not a fan of this approach because I would feel safer and securer if they would release patches as soon as they would be ready to be released which would secure computers and reduce the time that someone could exploit these security vulnerabilities.
Fix the missing dll error message
I think every Windows user experienced an error message like “Could not find xxx.dll” before and wondered what the hell happened with that dll. One reason could be that you used to uninstall a program that asked specifically whether you would like to remove the xxx.dll as well because it could still be needed by other applications.
Windows XP Zune Theme
I was never that of a theme fanatic and used the windows classic setting on all of my previous computers because I thought it would speed up my system. I feel a little bit old fashioned to defend this stance against my friends who love to use themes for their windows operating system. It is not anymore a question of speeding up the system, with dual core cpus and gigabytes of ram available for most computers that are sold these days.
Import and Export all Windows Drivers
If you ever reinstalled Microsoft Windows you surely have encountered the following hassle. All the drivers that have been installed on your system are gone because of the new installation and you have to search the web to find the latest drivers and update your system with them. This is of course only valid if you do a clean install and do not install the operating system in the same folder as the old.
Find Product Keys for Windows using Google
Some users simply don’t get it. They are so careless with sensible data that they publish product keys for Windows Operating systems on the Internet. They probably don’t know what they are doing which is not an excuse but a possible explanation for what they are doing. The Belarc Advisor is a free system scanner that generates a detailed profile of installed applications and missing hotfixes and displays the findings on a website.
Phrase Express – Paste frequently used text
I use many phrases over and over again. When I write someone an email, a business letter or reply to a private message in a forum. If you are tired of writing “Thank you for your email”, “Yours sincerely” or a signature over and over again you might want to take a look at the free software Phrase Express. You can use Phrase Express to paste commonly used phrases into any text field using defined phrases. The program adds some of its own at the beginning but the real beauty is the flexibility of it. It is possible to create a folder and text structure that works best for you. You could for instance create folders for business, private and forums and add as much phrases as you want to those folders.
