Many of you computer enthusiasts out there like to overclock your PC’s (personally, I avoid it like the plague), however a direct side effect to this is the increased power usage your steroid pumped PC consumes. Increased power usage not only contributes to a higher power bill, but also increased output of heat (which will [...]

Recently, both myself and a lot of users at work here have received a barrage of “undeliverable” email messages. I’m not talking about a few here, but hundreds a week.
Naturally, the first thing I thought is our mail server has been compromised. Long story short, that was not the case. Next, I thought it was [...]

Many times, the items we need to schedule to run automatically, such as virus and malware scans, have a built in scheduler which allow you to create an event without having to use the task scheduler in your OS. This tip serves as just a simple reference to some resources which show you how to [...]

This should be one you file in the “duh” category, but I have seen this more times than I care to remember.
Whenever you are giving a presentation or a demo, take the time to make sure everything is working before it is time to actually give your presentation. I have seen everything from expired licenses [...]

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 [...]

For those of you who like the convenience of an all-in-one security package (typically anti-virus, anti-spyware, spam filtering and a firewall), PC World’s rating of the top packages would be a good read.
I know many people on the forums here prefer to use a combination of various free programs to accomplish the same tasks. However, [...]

If you enjoy watching TV on your computer and are looking for some extra content, take a look at JLC’s Internet TV. From their website:
JLC’s Internet TV is a FREE program for watching and browsing thousands of TV channels freely available on the internet. It’s probably the biggest and most up to date database of [...]

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 [...]

For web developers and those of you who prefer Internet Explorer as your web browser, you might want to give a look at the latest and greatest version 8.
Perhaps the biggest change in IE8 is the move to being more “standards compliant”. All the old quirks which IE supported will still be available, but users [...]

Yesterday I wrote about periodically cleaning out the insides of your computer, but I thought I would post a follow up for those who have pets.
We have a couple of cats and a dog, all of which shed a good bit. Of course, this creates a problem as whenever I clean out my computer, there [...]

Periodically, it is a good idea to clean out the inside of your computer. Doing so prevents dust from building up on your components which acts as an insulator to bottle in heat. There are many different ways to go about cleaning your computer (for example, see this article), but personally, I just do the [...]

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 [...]

… bad.
… good.
… safe to use.

This tip is just a simple reminder that free software is not always best or worst choice when trying to figure out the best tool for the job.
An import thing to remember is just because it is free, does not mean it is free of malware. Think about it for [...]

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 [...]

If you use an instant messaging program, odds are you have it automatically log in using your remembered user name and password. This is a very handy feature, but allows you to easily forget your password since you never have to enter it. If this is the case and you want to “recover” your password, [...]

In order to remote connect to a Windows 2000 machine I have, I use TightVNC. While this works great, it is very inefficient in terms of CPU and bandwidth usage as it continually broadcasts the entire screen back to the connected client which in turns sucks up about 40% of my Celeron 1.3 (since each [...]