Archive for November, 2005
USB key drives
One of the most useful developments in the last couple of years is the availability of flash memory drives at ever lower prices for ever bigger capacity. These handy little gadgets let you carry around large amounts of data and computer programs in your pocket (or around your neck , if that’s your desire). [...]
PC maintenance checklist
Just as a car needs regular maintenance so does a PC. A series of articles on the subject can be found here. Fred Langa has also written a number of articles on the subject and his checklist for regular maintenance is here.
Make a shortcut to System Restore
I try out a lot of system tweaks and new software and that means that I am frequently creating new System Restore points. Opening System Restore from the All Programs menu or from Control Panel is a bit tedious. So I prefer a shortcut. (I discuss the details of how to make shortcuts to programs [...]
How to get information about your system (continued)
Previously I discussed finding out what’s on your computer by using the Windows system tool System Information. However. some PC users find the application to be somewhat cumbersome and prefer a third-party program. One that is often used is the free program Belarc Advisor. This program creates an HTML file with all your [...]
The Internet Flunks Teaching
You may have noticed on your phone bill a tax item for something called the Federal Universal Service Fund Surcharge. This money funds Internet access discounts to schools, libraries, and rural health care providers. If you ever wondered if the money was being usefully spent, an Internet Week article with the title given above [...]
How to get information about your system
I often help people with computer problems and very frequently it turns out that they know very little about what is actually on their computer. If you want to know things such as how much RAM you have, what hardware and software are installed, and many other interesting details about your PC, you can use [...]
How to find a live human when you call for help
One of the less pleasant aspects of this technology driven age is the automation of help lines at many (most?) companies. Not only do you have to thread your way through a maze of button-pushing to get to the right subject when you telephone for help or information but you never actually get a [...]
Add spell check to Internet Explorer
Back in the year 2000, Steve Yandl at PC911 wrote a little script to add a spell check feature to the right-click context menu of Internet Explorer. I forgot about it until I ran across it again when I was cleaning out some old Windows 98 stuff from my hard drive. Although the script was [...]
Editing Internet Explorer Favorites
The “Organize Favorites” function in IE is pretty primitive and can be a pain to use. It is much easier instead to open the Favorites folder directly and to do editing functions there. Since IE Favorite are just files, they can be moved, renamed, and deleted in the same way as any group of files. [...]
Fifteen years of the World Wide Web
November seems to be the month for anniversaries. Not only does it mark the advent of Windows but it is also the month when the World Wide Web was born five years later. Here is Wikipedia on the origin:
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Information Management: A Proposal”, which referenced ENQUIRE and described a more [...]
Twenty years of Windows
It is now 20 years since the first Windows operating systen came out. For those who are interested in some of the history of this system that now monopolizes the PC, the Desktop Pipeline has a series of articles. Here is an excerpt:
Since 1985, we’ve lived through more than 15 major releases of the operating [...]
