I foolishly purchased a Kingwin Blackjack BJK-35USBI from Newegg for the low price of $14.99 + Shipping and Handling.
Big mistake – this thing is terrible.
First, the documentation says nothing about it working with Windows XP. And it doesn’t – most of the time.
That said, I did discover a trick to get it working some [...]
Microsoft went and hid the device manager.
It’s buried beneath at least 5 separate click events.
Fortunately, it is possible to run the device manager from the Windows command line. (That is, the box that pops up when you hit Start->Run.)
This should save you a lot of clicking around, particularly if you have to access [...]
I have a really crappy Kingwin USB external drive enclosure.
It doesn’t usually work.
When it does work, I am able to connect it to my XP computer exactly once. That’s right – after choosing to “Safely remove hardware” from the computer, when I reconnect the drive it isn’t recognized by Windows until I [...]
So you want to block your kids from going to certain websites, eh?
There is a lot of software out there that blocks websites, some of it good, some of it not so good.
There is a simple way to block websites on your home computer without installing any additional software.
To block specific websites on a windows [...]
Uh oh. The latest update to uTorrent broke its web interface, WebUI. After the automatic update, people are seeing only a spinning “loading” in the middle of the page.
I appears that the latest update is incompatible with older versions of WebUI.
No worries – here’s how to update it.
Steps to fix WebUI
Download the [...]
I use Synergy to use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers. (Or, I should say, I used to use Synergy – more on that later.) It’s really great software. If you’ve never used it, and you have multiple computers on your desktop, I highly recommend that you check it [...]
In Windows XP, taking a screenshot is usually as easy as hitting the “Print Screen” key. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for movie files. When you try to take a screenshot of a movie in XP, you just get a black box where the still image is supposed to be.
I use VLC as my [...]
Man, nothing bothers me more than computer applications that insist on going full-screen in Windows. (OK, some things bother me more. But it *is* annoying.) This behavior seems to be prevalent in many computer games, and I can’t for the life of me understand why developers insist on abusing their users in this way. [...]
Ah, the joys of Windows XP. Ever go to delete a file, only to be met with the annoying error message, “Cannot delete <filename> It is being used by another person or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.” ?
This behavior is meant to prevent you from [...]
Step one: Create an image file that matches the dimensions & resolution of your two screens. For instance, if you have two screens running at 1920×1200 resolution, create an image file sized 1920×2400.
Step two: Put the images you want on each screen side-by-side. Save the file.
Step three: Right click on [...]
I’m what most kids today would call and “old school” computer user. I was raised on the Apple II, learned to program on the Commodore VIC-20 & the Commodore 64, and my first PC-based computer didn’t even come with Windows. In other words, I’m used to using the keyboard, not the mouse, to get [...]
Unfortunately, Windows XP doesn’t come with the nice automatic screenshot utility like Mac OSX does. No worries, though – it’s still possible to take a screenshot with Windows XP, it just requires a few more steps.
One of these days, I am going to write a nifty screenshot utility that I’ve been planning for some [...]
Extended warranties are very lucrative. So lucrative, in fact, that it’s reported that over 60% of large electronics retailers’ profits come from selling these protection plans.
Knowing how profitable these plans are, it didn’t surprise me when Dell called to ask if I wanted to extend the warranty on a computer I had [...]
Amazon’s Unbox service allows customers to purchase movies & tv shows for viewing on their computer or Tivo DVR. When purchasing a movie, you’re often presented with 2 choices – you can rent the movie for around $4, or you can purchase the movie for about the price of a DVD, about $20. [...]
I love my Apple iPhone. Seriously. L-O-V-E.
I’m not an Apple zealot or anything. In fact, I use Windows XP for my day-to-day computing tasks such as reading email, browsing the internet, writing letters, yadda yadda yadda. The iPhone works great with Windows, except for one little (very) annoyong thing [...]
I found a great XP tip over at Tech Xpress. Ever want to perform an action on multiple files, only to be frustrated to learn that there is no “No to All” button? Tech Xpress has found a solution:
Just Press and Hold the Shift key while you click the No button in the [...]
I spent the last 10 or 15 minutes banging my head against the wall, trying to figure out why a new subdomain that I set up on my hosting account (via cpanel) wasn’t working.
There were really 2 problems here — first, cpanel spits out an error message saying that the DNS zone could not be [...]
OK, so you’ve had Windows XP for a while now and have installed a bunch of third party apps, and Windows just keeps getting slower, and slower, and slower, and slooooower…
It might be Microsoft’s fault, since there are a bunch of things that XP should do differently. It might be a third party application [...]
I’ve been having a problem with my graphics adapter for a while now.
What happens is that my computer freezes up for about 10 seconds, then resizes the monitor resolution to 640×480 and displays everything in 4 colors. An error box then pops up with some nonsense about the ialmrnt5 driver malfunctioning, and I’m forced [...]
Oy vey Microsoft made it a huge pain-in-the-butt to install a newer version of Visual Studio!
It took me no less than 5 hours of my day to uninstall the previous (beta) version (a long, multi-step process), do a boatload of manual cleanup, troubleshoot no fewer than 5 errors with the install of the new [...]
