Internet Explorer 8 features a very useful function which allows you to view the time an add-on takes to load. To view this information, go to the Tools > Manage Add-Ons menu option and then scroll over to view the Load Time column. If you are having problems with IE8 or new tabs being slow to open, you can use this information to figure out who the culprit...

If you have ever called for or been on the receiving end of a tech support issue, the most essential information you can have is a walk through on how to produce the issue at hand. Rather than typing them out by hand or trying to walk someone through it over the phone, Windows 7 has a nifty tool called the Problem Steps Recorder you can use. Click Start, type...

When researching a problem on the Internet, a lot of times you will find message boards and blot posts to be very valuable. If during your research, you come across a post which shares the problem you are having, only post a reply to it if you have something valuable to add to the troubleshooting process. Often times, you will see a problem explained in great...

In the context of this article I’m referring to consumer grade home internet routers, as in the type that typically have one WAN or "Internet" port and four LAN ports. It’s quite difficult to pin down what specifically causes a router to fail. For example, if you have a dead router, hand it to an electrical engineer and asked him or...

Usually when one has a network connectivity issue, the first reaction is to blame the router. When the router checks out, the next blame is pinned on the internet modem. After that, the blame is pinned on the network card itself. Wrong. You should have checked the network cable first. And if that checks out, then you check the other stuff. Years ago a LAN...

A strange problem that I ran into recently on a couple of our machines was what appeared to be a brokent recycle bin. Basically, you delete files to the recycle bin, but if you open it there are no files listed. When you try empty the recycle bin, it tells you that X number of files will be deleted so it knows files are there. The fix I found was to create...

When you open Windows Task Manager and go to the Processes tab, you see a lots of good information such as the actual process executable name and current memory/processor usage. Did you know you can customize the columns shown to include a lot more information? Just go to the View tab in Task Manager and click on Select Columns. In this list you will find lots...

If you look at your Windows Task Manager Processes tab, you will probably see several copies of ‘svchost.exe’ running. This is normal and is the process name that your background services run as. If you ever are curious what each one is actually ‘hosting’, here is an easy way to find out.Download and run Process Explorer. Double-click...

It’s pretty obvious I am a big fan of the Microsoft Sysinternal tools as I have run many tips on them in the past. I am also a big fan of Mark Russinovich’s (the driving force behind Sysinternals) blog where he covers a lot of interesting and in-depth Windows topics. In a post Mark released recently, he discusses how he troubleshot a sluggish Windows...

If you are trying to track down a specific process you think might be hogging your CPU power, rather than doing isolated ‘unit testing’, simply use Process Explorer to track down the culprit. The steps are simple:Open Process Explorer. Locate the suspect process in the list and double-click it. In the properties dialog, go to the ‘Performance...

One problem I run into on systems which have USB devices plugged into them when resuming from [S3] standby is an error message which reads: Power Surge on Hub Port: A USB Device has exceeded the power limits of its hub port. This message is followed by a dialog box which forces you to reset the USB device’s connection. Of course, this can get somewhat...

It’s a safe assumption that the vast majority of computer users today use LCD monitors. It is in fact a very reliable technology and it’s not often that you hear of one breaking. But being that it’s an electronic device, yes it will eventually fail. How long does it take before an LCD fails completely? Usually about 5 to 7 years. What is the...

Q: (Wired/Wireless) All my router’s lights are on and will not go off. When I try to connect to the router, no network connectivity is present. What should I do? A: On all routers there is a “reset” option. It is a button physically on the router. If after a reset this does not work – power off the router, wait ten seconds and then turn it back...

Situation: Your internet connection dies and you’re not sure whether it’s your computer, router, cabling, reception (i.e. wireless), modem or ISP’s fault. If your broadband connection dies for whatever reason, you can use a simple 1-2-3 method which 99% of the time works in reestablishing your connection. After turning OFF everything, you turn...

This tip is for you system admins out there: If you are ever troubleshooting a mail server which is either not accepting or not relaying messages, rather than using the “send and wait” method of testing, telnet directly into the mail server to do your testing. The linked Microsoft article walks you through the entire process of how to send an email...

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 faster) solution: The Windows Installer Cleanup...

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 continuous CPU spike) as well...

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 your existing .NET...

Most computers support “Health Monitoring” in their BIOS where you can view temperatures and fan speeds. This is useful, however not ideal since you have to reboot your machine to see it. If your system does not include monitoring software which can be installed on Windows, then take a look at SpeedFan. From their website: SpeedFan is a program that...

Sooner or later, all hard drives crash. It is only a matter of when. When it happens, the degree of sweat and tears you experience is directly related to how prepared you were for it to begin with. Backing up your data is important. I even have two computers which are set up almost identically so that if the drive on one of my machines dies, I don’t lose...