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

Windows 7 is Microsoft’s most stable and reliable version of their desktop operating system yet, but it’s still such a complex piece of software that when something does go wrong it can be extremely difficult to diagnose and repair the problem. As the author of “Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out” from Microsoft Press one of [...]

Categories: Tutorials Advanced

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 [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic

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 [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic

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 [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic

With a focus on touchscreen devices – which are predominantly mobile in nature – comes the requirement to reduce a computer system’s power consumption to increase its battery life. According to a new blog post over at the Building Windows 8 site, Microsoft has made important changes to their upcoming operating system’s power consumption. The [...]

Categories: Windows

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 [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic, Windows

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

I’m running a competition on my Facebook page at the moment to win a selection of Microsoft Press books and a fantastic Acer Iconia Tab W500 Windows 7 Tablet, which I can assure you is seriously quick!  The competition runs for six weeks and has some fantastic prizes.  Plus, if any winner says they’re from [...]

Categories: ghacks