You probably know what hibernation is, right? Instead of shutting down the operating system you can use hibernation to save the contents of the RAM to the hard drive to speed up the next start of the operating system and start working where you left off. Hybrid Boot is a new feature of Windows 8 [...]

Categories: Windows

Yesterday’s monthly patch day was a big one, with 17 patches fixing a total of 64 security issues in Microsoft products. Affected applications include Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. If you look closer you notice that nine of the 17 patches have a maximum severity rating of critical, the highest possible rating. The [...]

Categories: Microsoft, 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

I get all manner of emails in my weekly mailbag, but one of the most common is about repairing a corrupt startup. I have a video on YouTube explaining how to use the Startup Repair features in Windows 7 (this will also apply to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 and 2008) but what happens if [...]

Categories: Advice

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

I’ve written about hundreds of Windows 7 troubleshooting tips in my book Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out but one of the most useful tips, at least for business customers, is how you can add actions to events in Windows. Why would you want to do this?  You can commonly find that drivers, services or software in Windows [...]

Categories: Advice

Sometimes there’s nothing you can do when your copy of Windows is malfunctioning other than a complete format and reinstall.  This is always a pain, but how can you take the pain out of the process?  Here’s my own guide to taking the pain out of reinstalling Windows from scratch. Part 1 – Preparation The [...]

Categories: Advice

One of the updates of yesterday’s patch day slipped through my grasps, mainly because I’m running Windows 7 and the update was not for that operating system. Ghacks reader Ilev let me know about it in the comments of my patch day overview guide Microsoft Security Bulletin Overview February 2011. Autorun has been a problematic [...]

Categories: Security, Windows