Hello Boys and Girls,
It seems other companies aside from Apple are putting their thinking caps on and breaking all kinds of molds. There was a mold. Apple didn’t exactly break the mold for tablets, as shown in this nifty diagram. All they did was scale it up. An overgrown cellphone won’t last very long in [...]
October 15, 2009 - 3:59 am
Tags: How To, Tips, windows
Posted in Questions | 7 comments
Please follow this email chain between myself and our friend Karl AKA ATA.
—————————————
ME
Here’s the scenario….
Backed up info off old laptop to external HD.
During XP install I saw two identical drives…nuked the first partition and tried to install. XP said no. Nuked the 2nd one…XP allowed the install. JOY!!!
You know where this is going don’t you…..
Anywho…it [...]
August 4, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: Free, How To, review, Tips, windows
Posted in How To, Reviews | 7 comments
So you don’t want to dole out the big bucks for some fancy smancy cd/dvd authoring suite just to burn cd’s and disk images? Or how about you don’t want the bloat from said suite?
No it’s probably that you are just like me and a big cheapskate when it comes to buying software!
Either which [...]
July 14, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: How To, windows
Posted in How To, Questions | 4 comments
Have you ever wanted to talk to your computer? You know like “Music On” or “Kill Stupid Flanders!“
Well in Windows Vista, you can! And it is as easy as this:
Click the Start menu >> Click Control Panel >> Click Speech Recognition. >> Click Start Speech Recognition >> Now you can tell your computer what [...]
June 24, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: How To, Tips, windows
Posted in Admin's Arsenal, How To | 2 comments
Yes, we know you have taken a million digital photos over the last year, on your fancy shmancy new camera. And we also know the holiday season is almost upon us. Being the geek that you are, you could not just leave your pictures named digital_image_13456.jpg for your slide shows…
We just couldn’t have that now, [...]
May 26, 2009 - 6:41 am
Tags: lookup, startup, windows
Posted in How To, Questions | 2 comments
Tired of your standard Windows Startup and Shutdown tunes?
If you’re like me, you use your Windows-based computer almost every day. The startup and shutdown sounds have just gotten a little boring to be honest. Here are some simple steps to use your favorite voice, music excerpt, or sound for your computer’s start-up and shutdown sequence. [...]
April 13, 2009 - 1:31 am
Tags: Tips, windows
Posted in How To | 2 comments
James from Virginia wanted to know if it was safe to delete these Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files from his network. Check out our answer and step by step removal tips.
Running in a mixed Windows/Mac environment I find it annoying to deal with all the little artifacts the great OS’s leave behind. All of our mixed [...]
April 5, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: How To, Tips, windows shortcuts
Posted in How To | 4 comments
It’s very annoying and counter productive for your hands to leave the keyboard as you use your mouse to click, click, clickity click click away at something.
Join the ranks of power users to add keyboard shortcuts for every computer task you do. Yup Any Task!
Built into Windows is the ability to let you assign a [...]
April 2, 2009 - 12:01 am
Tags: How To, windows
Posted in How To, Questions, Security | 1 comment
By default your windows XP machine shows the Printers and Faxes share along with the Scheduled Tasks folder. You can make use of the scheduled tasks folder like this or use a remote printer share to quickly install a remote printer.
Some people like this, most people don’t use it and a few people REALLY hate [...]
Hello Boys and Girls,
Commodore 64 here to bring you another horror story from binary-land. Lord knows I’ve been through hell and back with computers. Overheating CPUs, which were fixed by the cold of the winter outside my apt; crashing hard drives which were fixed or accessed by various means; faulty power supplies, which had me [...]
Hey out there in computer land… Do you want to speed up your boot times of Windows XP or Wndows Server 2003?
July 7, 2007 - 9:02 pm
Cleaning the Prefetch folder is a Myth and will REDUCE performance. Unused prefetch files do nothing but take up a small amount of disk space and are automatically cleaned at 128 entries down to the 32 most used app’s prefetch files by Windows. Cleaning the folder manually will cripple all applications and windows load times.
XP Myths
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July 7, 2007 - 9:39 pm
Color me shocked Thanks Andrew. I have been doing this for several years as well as many other admins I have met.
I will look into this a bit further and re-post when im done.
Thanks for the comment!
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December 1, 2008 - 12:34 pm
BAD IDEA.
Looks like the Admin has fallen for a myth.
This myth that deletion of prefetch files is beneficial is based on a complete misunderstanding of how prefetch actually works. Prefetch does not preload applications or any portion of them at bootup. Application prefetch files are not even referenced until the application is launched. At this time they are used to optimize the launch time of the application. Prefetch files NEVER cause an application to be loaded. In any event the prefetch folder is self cleaning after 128 entries. All of this has been extensively tested.
Manual deletion of prefetch files will deprive Windows of a valuable resource and has no benefits. If this actually improves boot time this is a clear indication that the system has problems. The proper procedure would be to diagnose and correct the problem.
Check this link to see how prefetch really works:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1285/xp-registry-hack-to-disable-or-modify-prefetch/
References:
http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/XPMyths.html
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000024.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/ryanmy/archive/2005/05/25/421882.aspx
Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA
CompTIA A+, Network+
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
December 3rd, 2008 at 5:56 am
Thanks Larry! You can’t always believe what you read!
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