I’ve noticed that my older laptop running Windows XP has gotten much slower when browsing files in Windows Explorer.
I did some research and found that every time I did anything within the Windows Explorer shell, a process called AcrobatInfo.exe was firing up, eating up system resources, and just generally slowing things down. The result [...]
Ah, daylight savings time.
The time of year that reminds us all that our computer’s automatic clock setting mechanism may not work as expected.
I’ve been getting the error message “”An Error Occurred While Windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com” error message when trying to manually sync my clock to the Windows time server.
A screenshot of the error:
If [...]
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 [...]
If you have a dual monitor setup, you’ve probably tried to watch a flash video on one screen while working on the other. As you likely know by now, it doesn’t work – as soon as you click the mouse on the other screen, the Flash video snaps back to regular size. Pretty [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Getting rid of that old computer? You might want to consider either hanging on to the hard drive or making sure that it’s been completely erased before you do so – your personal data may be at stake.
If you’re like most computer users, you probably have a few files on your computer that you [...]
I’m a RedHat Linux guy, but I wanted to try out the Ubuntu Linux distribution to see if it’s an acceptable solution for Linux newbies (who would likely install a dual-boot XP system) or for cash-strapped non-profit groups (who would likely use it as their primary system).
I had no problems setting up the dual-boot XP/Ubuntu [...]
By default, Windows XP displays a menu entitled “Recent Documents” in the Start menu.
This list of recently accessed files can be viewed by anyone using your computer, which can make for some uncomfortable circumstances when others sit down at your desktop.
Keep your files more private by turning that list off.
There are 2 ways [...]
