Wednesday’s Daily Round Up
I have two good questions sent in that might keep you super admins busy for a few minutes:
Joe from New York writes in about his problem to connect to his Windows XP SP2 PC remotely even after the ports have been opened on his router…
Todd from Maryland writes to us about his PC being horribly slow. What advice do you have for him?
Comment away and I will post each of them to their own respective article when I feel the correct answer has been reached – and don’t worry Joe and Todd, if our public can’t help you… The Admin’s got your back and I will break it down into steps for you guys.
The Admin’s off for dinner… POST POST POST!
_TheHelpfulAdmin_
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Is this the new I-Pad killer? Lenovo Ideapad Hybrid – Why didn’t Apple think of this?
February 15, 2010 - 9:33 am
Tags: hardware, hybrid, lenovo, review, tablet, touchscreen, windows
Posted in General, Reviews | 1 comment
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 [...]
A Tale of Two Admins.
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 [...]
Hey Cheapskate, Burn ISOs for free on any Windows Platform!
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 [...]
How can I use Speech Recognition in Windows Vista?
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 [...]
I have hundres of files to rename help me Admin!
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, [...]
4 Simple Steps to Change Your Computer Sounds
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. [...]
What are Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files? Can I delete them? Do I need them and how can i make them stop coming back?
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 [...]
Windows Quick Tip: Set up keyboard shortcuts for your most used icons.
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 [...]
Can I hide the Sceduled Tasks and Printers Folders in the Network view?
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 [...]
Last night Ubuntu saved my life – How I used Ubuntu to recover ALL my files…
March 30, 2009 - 4:41 am
Tags: backup, Troubleshooting, Ubuntu, windows
Posted in How To, Linux, Reviews | 8 comments
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 [...]
June 20, 2007 - 8:23 pm
For Joe: After you have ensured that the prots have been opened on your router and are pointing to the correct IP address for the machine on your network, the next step is to ensure that you have enabled remote desktop on your computer. To do that right click on “My Computer” selct Properties, and click on the remote tab. Check the box to enable remote desktop and ensure you set yourself as a remote desktop user. Next, make sure that Windows firewall (or any other software firewall) allows incoming connections on port 3389.
For Todd: Some things that bog down PC’s are spyware. Get an anti-spyware utility like Spybot or Ad-Aware. After you have cleaned up the spyware, try running a defrag on your hard drive. After all of that is done, Right click on My Computer and go to properties. Click the advanced tab and select performance. uncheck all of the unnecessary bells and whistles. I usually check the “best performance radio button, then go to the bottom of the bells and whistles list and select the last three only. If after all of that is done, you might take a look at which programs are performing poorly. Sometimes it might only be office products or Adobe products. In add/remove programs there are usually repair options for those programs. If after all of this, you still have a slow computer take a look at your processor and RAM. If you have something less than a Pentium 4 with 1.8Ghz for a processor it is certainly time to upgrade the whole thing. If your processor is okay, look at the RAM. I personally like to have at least 1GB of RAM if not more.
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June 20, 2007 - 8:35 pm
Nice. I think you got them both but let me add:
To check your external IP address you can goto http://www.whatsmyip.com and it will be displayed.
To add to checking the firewall I usually advise to shutdown any security services one at a time and give it a shot after each one.
For example goto start run type services.msc to open your services up find windows firewall and stop it and then try… Trial and error.
Todd – one word Microsoft One Care. Ummm not one word but still free. Just dont choose any of the pay options at the end.
Can you send us the specs on your machine todd?
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June 20, 2007 - 8:44 pm
“To check your external IP address you can goto http://www.whatsmyip.com and it will be displayed.”
Good point, I recommend using a free dynamic DNS service like DynDns.com. You set your public IP, and they give you a domain name that points to your public ip. The problem with only using your IP is that if you have DSL or standard cable you have a dynamic IP address that may change over time. DynDNS.com also has a free update utility that updates your account with the correct public IP as soon as it changes.
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June 20, 2007 - 8:49 pm
My machine is a pentium 3 1ghz with 512mb of ram running windows xp.
this windows one care scan is running now and it found 165 problems already.
i will be back to let you know. thanks Admin.
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June 20, 2007 - 9:13 pm
Todd that machine is getting on in years and either get a new machine or if you are happy with your current machine before your BIG SLOWDOWN then if you are able to backup your files save your drivers to cd and format that mother.
Reinstall Clean and it will do wonders for you.
Joe are you still out there man?
Did that help – are we on the right track?
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June 20, 2007 - 9:23 pm
THANK YOU ADMIN IT WAS THE WINDOWS FIREWALL. I STOPPED IT AND ITS ALL GOOD NOW.
J
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