If you’ve been working with computers long enough whether new, old or both, you’ve most likely used The Ultimate Boot CD at least a handful of times. UBCD is a free ISO you can download and burn that contains a plethora of disk utilities. Many of the utilities are redundant in the respect that several perform the same function but just in a different...

Netbooks by nature do not have optical drives, so the way to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix, abbreviated UNR, is to use the usb-creator program to create a bootable USB stick.This program is on the UNR 9.10 ISO image itself. To access it, burn the UNR image to a CD or alternatively use an ISO mounting program in Windows, such as Virtual CloneDrive (free, works...

From the Engineering Windows 7 blog from the post Engineering the Windows 7 Boot Animation: From a design perspective, we know that the visual presentation of a feature plays a key role in the user’s perception of performance and quality.  Our objective was to make Windows boot beautiful and was inspired by our Windows 7 personality of light and energy;...

Dumprep.exe is a non-essential (according to Microsoft) process that may be in your system startup. It is OK to remove this but obviously it’s not done by deleting dumprep.exe (that would be bad). Instead we follow these steps: 1. Go to the Control Panel. 2. Double-click the System icon. 3. Click the Advanced tab. 4. Next to Startup and Recovery, click the...

For those of you out there that run a dual-boot system with Windows XP and Ubuntu, you’ve noticed that Ubuntu is the default OS that loads on each system startup. There is a way to change this so that XP is the default OS instead. Full documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GrubHowto/ChangeDefaultOS What that documentation instructs you to...

Over the weekend I was at the Wal-Mart picking up a few things and noticed over in the electronics dept. they had 2GB Sandisk USB sticks on sale. $12.88 a piece. Cheap enough as far as I’m concerned so I bought one. I had 2 purposes for buying the stick.It’s better than the 512MB I have (one can never have too much space). I wanted to try out a...

If you have multiple boot options (i.e. XP, Linux, etc.) configured on your Windows Vista installation, or you just want to tweak some of the options available, you could use the command line tool BCDEdit or the much more user friendly EasyBCD. From EasyBCD’s web site: EasyBCD is NeoSmart Technologies’ multiple award-winning answer to tweaking the...