I recently ran into a problem on my machine where my installation of Office 2007 became corrupted. As a result, I was not able to repair or uninstall it from the Add/Remove programs menu. Instead of giving up and going through the major hassle of reinstalling everything, I came across a more elegant (and much [...]

Do you want to change the icon, graphics, dialog or sounds used in a particular program? If so, this is typically not possible unless you have access to the source files, but through the magic of Resource Hacker, you now have the ability.
This free utility is more for power users as it allows you to [...]

Keeping with the recent theme of Windows Task Manager, an idea I got from an article I read a while back (sorry, I can’t find the article), suggested setting Windows Task Manager as an item in your start up folder as a way to easily keep tabs on system resources. I started doing this about [...]

Windows Task Manager, as you probably know, allows you to view all the active applications and processes currently running on your computer. This is a very handy tool when troubleshooting or just getting an overall view of your computer.
One tool I have found better than Task Manager is Process Explorer. This free tool allows you [...]

Ubuntu users (or perspective users) take note 8.04 was just released. This release is named ‘Hardy Heron’ has long term support (LTS), meaning this desktop release will be supported for 3 years. Ubuntu 8.04 offers many attractive features, including (the somehow “important”) eye candy enhancements.
Having used the first LTS release of Ubuntu myself (6.06) exclusively [...]

Have you ever wanted Firefox to act as a functional file manager (much like the way Internet Explorer acts in Windows)? With the Firefly Firefox extension, you can have this functionality.
This free extension features (among others):

Support for Windows and Linux (possibly Mac).
View splitting.
Auto-preview of files as long as appropriate readers are installed.
Search features.
“Send To” and [...]

As you probably know, Task Manager is what you use in Windows to view (and kill) currently active processes. There are several ways you can easily open Task Manager so I thought I would list four easy ones here:

Ctrl + Alt + Del > Click Task Manager. This is the most commonly used method.
Right click [...]

I ran across a very interesting read today, an article titled “The Case of the System Process CPU Spikes“. What made this an interesting read was not so much the article content (although I thought it was very informative), rather the methodology used by the author.
In a nutshell, the article walks through the problem (a [...]

One thing I have noticed is a lot of people like to treat their Desktop as a “dumping ground” for all their personal files, folders and shortcuts. Yes, it is very convenient, but quickly gets overwhelming and hard to navigate. If you are one of these people, a handy shortcut is to add a menu [...]

If you are looking to get a new machine and are still wanting to use Windows XP instead of Vista, make a note on your calendar that June 30th is the last day major manufacturers will be able to sell machines loaded with Windows XP. Whether or not you like Windows Vista, it is the [...]

One problem I ran into recently required me to uninstall my existing .NET Framework and reinstall. No big deal, so I thought. When I went to uninstall .NET, it immediately errors out. I restart the computer, same problem.
Well, this frustrating problem was easily solved with the .NET Cleanup Utility. Simply put, this utility forcefully removes [...]

Jane: Hey, I heard about this thing called “Linux”, do you know anything about it?
Jack: Sure! I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Ask away.
Jane: It’s free, right?
Jack: Yes, absolutely!
Jane: Cool! So they give it away for free at the computer store?
Jack: Well, no..
Jane: How do you get it then?
Jack: You have to download [...]

Damn. Whoah. And at the same time, yeah.
This is how I reacted when I saw a story which cites a pair of Gartner analysts saying that Windows is “collapsing”. They go on to say that the situation is “untenable” and that Microsoft must make radical changes to the OS or risk becoming old news.
According to [...]

If you ever have to run a something from the command prompt which isn’t a standard Windows command or its location is not listed in your PATH environment variable, it can be a real pain. You have to open a command prompt and do a  “cd \location\of\the\command\to\run” path change before you can run the command. [...]

This tip is for students who might be interested in download a free full copy of any of the following pieces of Microsoft software:

Visual Studio 2008 Professional
Windows Server 2003
Expression Studio
XNA Game Studio 2.0

Simply go to this web site for the details and to get started. Basically, the only requirement is that you have a Windows [...]

There are times in the live chat were I’m asked what Linux distribution is used most. While that particular question can’t be readily answered, the site www.DistroWatch.com will to a degree indicate what distributions are being downloaded most.
On that site, scroll down and look to the right. You will see a “Page Hit Ranking” which [...]

Here are a few quick tips you can do from the command prompt in Windows XP (this will actually work in all versions of Windows since 3.1):
Getting a listing of every single frickin’ thing on your hard drive in a single text file
Command:
DIR /S C:\*.* > C:\all.txt
This will write a text file of every [...]

It looks as if Microsoft is now contradicting comments from their chairman Bill Gates. Gates originally had said that Windows 7 may be shipping as early as 2009. A Microsoft spokesman, though, as come out and said:
“We are currently in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows [...]

If you want to run one OS from inside of another OS (a guest in a host), then a virtual machine (VM) is the way to go. The great thing about VM’s is anything you do in the guest has no effect on the host so it is ideal for testing. While there are many [...]

If you run a lot of Windows scheduled tasks, particularly on a server, it is very worthwhile to have a local account dedicated to nothing but this. The reasons being:

If you run the task as a normal user account and that user happens to be logged when the task starts, the process runs in [...]