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 [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic

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 [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic

The hardware driver support in Windows 7 is just fantastic, especially with consumer hardware with more and more companies submitting their drivers for official certification from Microsoft than ever before.  This not only means driver support on the Windows 7 installation DVD, but also through Windows Update.  You can still find computers however for which [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic

BitLocker, first introduced with Windows Vista, is a full drive encryption technology that works with hardware in compatible computers known as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM chip).  It offers enterprise-level data encryption and caused some controversy when it first appeared with some governmental agencies calling on Microsoft to leave them a back door in, something [...]

Categories: Uncategorized

Apple this week announced their new iCloud service, bringing together MobileMe and iTunes in the cloud. With it though they also announced they were dropping support for Windows XP from the new product. Indeed they were only supporting their own desktop operating system, OS X, going back four years to 10.5 ‘Leopard’ too. This raises [...]

Categories: Apple, Microsoft

Windows has always had what many people believe to be an unconventional and frustrating method of addressing physical hard disks.  I’m talking here about drive letters.  These virtual constructs, I can only really describe them as that, are pointers to the actual names of the disks in your computer.  This works in a different way [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic

I spend most of the day yesterday preparing a notebook with Windows Vista installed to hand it over to a family member today. The notebook had not been in use for quite some time, and missed a few updates, among them the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 update which is considered one of the most [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Microsoft have warned of a critical vulnerability in Windows Shell, caused when parsing .lnk shortcuts that can automatically launch a malicious program through use of a specially crafted shortcut. The vulnerability afcects all versions of Windows including XP and Windows 7.   On Windows 7 the exploit can bypass the operating system’s security as it does not [...]

Categories: Microsoft, Windows

If you like the cleartype fonts that Microsoft shipped with Windows Vista you might be inclined to use them not only in the operating system itself but also in the web browser. Many users think that the high quality Vista fonts provide a better reading experience than the default fonts that the websites use. We [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox