A driver, or hardware driver, is needed so that computer devices like the mouse, monitor or video card, can communicate with the operating system. The Windows operating system ships with a huge number of drivers, which means that some users do not have to install a single third party driver to get all of their [...]

Categories: Hardware, Tutorials Basic

Hard disk drives, devices with removable storage and network locations are displayed with their name followed by their drive letter. The device names can be customized which is for instance helpful to distinguish between different hard drives since the default naming convention lists them all as Local Disk in Windows Explorer. The convention to display [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic, Windows

There is nothing better than encrypting the system partition and all other partitions if you want to protect your files from unauthorized access. There are still ways around this but they require specialized equipment and access to the PC. Regular users on the other hand may be better off encrypting only their important documents and [...]

Categories: Security, Windows

Changing a user’s account name in Windows is a straightforward, easy to achieve task. The problem that many users experience after changing the name is that the name of the profile folder is not changed during the process. Say you have a user account Martin and a user profile folder under c:\users\Martin. If you change [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic, Windows

The Windows 7 operating system is climbing in rapid pace on the market share graph. If you look at the Windows 7 market share for the first quarter of 2011, you notice that the operating system has now about double the share of Windows Vista, its predecessor, and half of that of Windows XP. With [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Windows users with little computing experience enter a world of trouble if they forget their login password. They receive the error message “the user name or password is incorrect” and do not seem to have another option than to try again until the correct password has been entered. Microsoft for that reason added the option [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic, Windows

Family computers should have independent user accounts for every family member. These user accounts can be configured by the system administrator, usually one of the parents, for specific requirements and regulations. Some parents for instance may want to configure the computer in a way that their children are only able to use it when they [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic, Windows

You have probably seen the following scenario in multiple thriller and spy movies; A spy connects an USB stick to a computer to copy data from the computer to the device. Movies do not necessarily reflect reality but there is some truth to this scenario after all. It is indeed possible to connect an USB [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic, Windows

The Microsoft Windows operating system stores all DNS look-ups in a cache to speed up the connection for future visits to previously visited websites or servers. DNS for simplifications sake turns domain names like ghacks.net into IP addresses like 96.30.22.116. To simplify it further: computer users make almost exclusive use of domain names, while computers [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic, Windows