Archive for September, 2005
Microsoft accessibility site
Microsoft has a site that lists many useful links for helping the physically disadvantaged to use Windows.
Internet vandals and you
The service that hosts this blog has experienced a number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks in recent weeks. These attacks badly disrupt the service causing a lot of trouble for thousands of Internet users. A DDOS uses a large number of computers to flood a service with requests and thus overwhelm it. Where [...]
Renaming many files at once
Sometimes it is desired to give new names to a collection of files. Although the method is somewhat limited in the choice of names, Windows XP allows for a batch process that can speed things up.
Select the files you want to rename. It is a good idea to sort them by date or [...]
How to exit or reboot when the mouse dies
Sometimes it can happen that the mouse stops working. I will skip over all the standard steps such as checking the cable connections or making sure that the battery in your wireless mouse still functions. First you may want to close down the computer and here is the way to use the keyboard to exit [...]
USB mouse problem
It is more and more common that the mouse on a system uses a USB connection instead of the old-style serial port. This may be a direct connection or by means of a wireless station that is plugged into USB. Older computers do not have USB support in the BIOS. If you ever have to [...]
To the average PC user
Here’s a little more about the purpose of this blog.
I have said that it’s aimed at the average PC user. Well, what does the average PC user want? Judging from my experience in teaching at SeniorNet and in giving talks at user groups, most people think of the computer as a tool to help [...]
Possible thumb drive problem
Now that thumb drives are becoming very common and are getting bigger, we have to revisit a problem that we used to have back in the days of Windows 95. Thumb drives are generally formatted in the old FAT system with all the limitations of that old system. For example, there can be at most [...]
Let’s begin
Since everybody else is blogging, I finally decided to join in. I will be posting some Windows tips (and whatever else may strike me). The Web is full of sites with Windows tips so there may seem little point to having yet another. My observation is that many of the sites repeat the same stuff [...]