Fix PC Errors

We talked recently about automated backups in Windows XP, but I had a few emails regarding automated backups in Windows Vista. Doing these backups in Vista is very easy with the new feature, the Windows Backup and Restore Center.

To access the Windows Backup and Restore Center you simply click start - control panel, then click on the Backup and Restore Center icon.

In the Windows Backup and Restore Center you can backup your data in two ways, an Automatic Backup and a Complete PC Backup.

Automatic Backup

An Automatic Backup lets you set the feature to automatically backup your data at a stage you select. So it can backup your data daily, weekly or monthly. To set this feature you must;

• Click on the Back up files button in the Windows Backup and Restore Center
• Here you can select where you want to save your backups to, your hard disk, a DVD or CD.

• Now you have to select which disks you wanted included in the backup

• Then you select what file types you wanted in your backup

• In this next stage you can select how often you want the automated backups to run. If it is your first backup the computer will do a full backup first, then do the automated backups at your selected time.

You now simply click the Save settings and start backup button and your computer will either start the full backup or run the Automated backup on your selected date.

We recommend you set your computer to run backups at least weekly, but if you do have plenty of data being added daily you might want to consider running the automated backups daily.

Complete PC Backup

Doing a Complete PC Backup is easy but you may need a decent amount of space to completely backup your whole disk, so we recommend you use a decent external hard drive for this process.

To get started you must;

• Click on Back up computer in the Windows Backup and Restore Center
• Here you will come to a page asking where you want to save the backup, just connect your external hard drive and select it from the drop down (as you see from the image I really need an external)

• Click next, then all you have to do is click start backup.
• Then just sit back and wait for the full backup to take place

We recommend that you do a complete backup every 6 months, or even do it more often if you add plenty of data on your computer often. One thing I can’t stand is loosing data, so make sure you backup your stuff guys!

Have you wanted to add more than 1 homepage to pop up whenever you open your browser? Well it is a very simply task to do through homepage tabs although it is slightly different to do for both firefox and Internet Explorer so I will explain both.

Internet Explorer

• Click tools then Internet Options
• Click the General tab
• In the Homepage area you can add new homepages by pressing enter and adding them on a new line
• Click apply and OK

Firefox

• Click Tools then Options
• In the Homepage area you will see a url set
• To add a new homepage you have to add a new url at the end of the set one by adding |
• So your new homepage will be set like:

www.google.com|www.pc-error-free.com

• Then click OK and it will be set

In the post the other day I talked about cleaning up your desktop in Windows XP, so today I thought I’d mention a little tool for Windows Vista that can ’spice’ up your desktop. It’s not a desktop cleaner, rather it lets you change the look of certain icons on your desktop.

This feature is a new tool to Vista and it comes in the new area of Personalize in Vista. Simply follow these points to get started on changing your icons;

• Right click on your desktop, click Personalize
• In the left hand column click Change Desktop Icons

• Now click on the icon you want to change
• Click Change Icon

• Here you can select whatever look you want for that icon
• Click OK then Apply
• It’s a simple but fun tool you can play around with and redesign your Vista desktop

For those of you eagerly awaiting  the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3, it is not much longer now. Today it was just released to manufacturing (RTM). So it will be available to OEM and enterprise customers very soon.

We can look forward to the web release in about another week - April 29 to be exact. SP3 will then be available via Windows Update and from the Microsoft Download Center. You will also be able to find updated documentation at that time too (in all the usual places).

For those of you with automatic updates turned on, SP3 will be sent down the pipe sometime during the summer, as long as noone at Microsoft presses the wrong button again :)

We will give you a full review of SP3 when it is released.

One thing I can’t stand is a messy desktop, and in the past I have been known to have a desktop totally full of useless icons. So today I thought about the best methods to clean and arrange your desktop.

The simplest method would be to simply delete and move your icons on your desktop around, but this can be time consuming. So if you want an easy fix I have two methods you can use.

The first method is a very simple fix that just arranges the icons on your desktop by something like alpha, this method is fast and simple but it doesn’t remove unwanted icons. The best method is to run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard (this feature has been removed from Windows Vista).

Arranging Your Desktop

• Right click on your desktop
• Select sort by
• Here you can sort out you desktop by Name, Size, Type and Date modified
• Just select one and you will see all your desktop icons sorted automatically

Desktop Cleanup Wizard (Windows XP)

The Desktop Cleanup Wizard is a useful tool in XP that automatically cleans and unclutters your desktop every 60 days. To access the Desktop Cleanup Wizard just;

Method 1

• Click start and go to the Control Panel
• Click Appearance and Themes
• Click Display
• Click the Desktop tab
• Click Customize Desktop
• Make sure the Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days is checked
• Click OK (Youcan also run a cleanup now)

Method 2

• Right click on your desktop
• Click Properties
• Click the Desktop tab
• Click the Customize Desktop button
• Make sure the Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard is checked

Have you ever wanted to use a video as your wallpaper in Windows XP? Well it is possible and you should be able to get it up and running in a couple of minutes. I will include the files you need below.

To use a video wallpaper (for this guide we are assuming its a .wmv file) the trick is to set a .html page as the background.  This .html file will have an embedded video and the video will be set to your screen resolution. The end result is a full screen video wallpaper that looks pretty cool, but admittedly can get pretty annoying.

OK, lets get started.

1) Decide what video you want to use as your background and you will need to know its full file path: eg: c:\documents and settings\videos\myvideo.wmv

2) You need to create the .html file that will be used as the wallpaper. Don’t worry, I have included the template. You just need to edit the filepaths. In the template it will tell you where to edit, just add the path to your file where it says: c:\myvideo.wmv. There will be two places where this needs to be changed. You can also the resolution values to suit your computer.

3) Save your .html file somehwere on your computer.

4) Right-Click on your desktop and select “Properties”. Click the “Desktop” tab. Click the “Browse” button. Locate the .html file you created, click “Open” then click “Apply”.

5) You will now have a video wallpaper as the background

6) To remove it, just go to: Start -> Control Panel -> Display, click on the “Desktop” tab and select a different image for the wallpaper.

The .html template
Copy and paste the code below and save as a .html file. Replace the c:\myvideo.wmv with your video path. You need to change in 2 places. You may also need to change the resolution values depending on your computer.

The User Account Control (UAC) is a new feature unique to Windows Vista which aims to make your operating system more secure than XP.

Essentially the UAC is an application that stops all applications from being loaded unless you trust it. Whenever you do a certain task (Installing device drivers, Changing settings for Windows Firewall etc) you will get a UAC popup that asks you for permission to run the task. By using UAC you can stop any dangerous files from being loaded onto your computer, as you need to give permission to any application trying to run.

There have been some complaints from many users of Vista that the UAC slows down many tasks on computers, including important things such as installing new programs. In fact, a product unit manager David Cross from Microsoft recently said about the UAC;

“The reason we put UAC into the [Vista] platform was to annoy users — I’m serious.”

Statements like this make many users believe that the UAC is just plain annoying, but what David Cross was saying is that by using UAC Microsoft is trying to get developers to change the way applications are made.

Turn off Your UAC

If you are getting way too sick and tired of UAC when you are trying to load software (we suggest you only turn off UAC to load new software), there is a way you can temporarily turn it off. To turn off the UAC, just follow this;

Control Panel Method

• Click and open control panel
• Click user accounts
• Click turn user account control on or off (accept permission)
• You will now be on the ‘turn on user account control (UAC) to make your computer more secure’ page

• You will be able to turn your UAC on or off here
• You will have to reboot to make the changes active

Msconfig Method

• Click start
• In search box, click run
• In your run box, click Msconfig (accept permission)
• In the system configuration box click on the tools tab
• Here you can scroll down to enable or disable UAC

• Click on either enable or disable your UAC
• Click the launch button under the command line
• You will now need to reboot to make the changes active

I found this cool Vista tool over the weekend that allows you to make screenshots much easier than the old ways. This application is called the Snipping Tool and it is only available on Windows Vista.

To access the Snipping Tools follow these points;

• Click Start
• All Programs
• Accessories
• Now click Snipping Tools

When you get in a box like this will pop up;

From here all you need to do is to drag the cursor (red line) around the area you want to capture. When you have done that it will bring up the Snipping Tool editor with your screenshot on it.

From this editor you can now save your screenshot in various formats (jpg, gif etc), saved as a HTML page or emailed out.

A great tool that you can find in Windows Vista that allows your computer to scan itself and see what aspect of your computer is slowing it down is called the Windows Experience Index.

The Windows Experience Index measures the capability of your computer’s hardware and software configuration and expresses this measurement as a number called a base score. The higher the base score is on your computer the faster your computer will run, so if you require a computer to do multiple or resource-intensive tasks you will need a much higher base score than someone doing basic word processing.

To run a Windows Experience Index on your Vista run computer, simply follow these points;

1) Go to your windows explorer and right click on computer, now click properties.

2) This will open a page that has View Basic Information About Your Computer at the top

3) Now if you look down to Rating you can see if your computer has been rated.

4) If your computer is unrated then you need to click the Windows Experience Index: Unrated button.

5) You will now be on a page called Rate and Improve Your Computer’s Performance

6) Simply click Rate This Computer to run a Windows Experience Index scan

7) Note: The scan may take a few minutes

8 ) When the scan is done you will be back on the Rate and Improve Your Computer’s Performance page, but with a base score of your computer.

9) You have now finished your Windows Experience Index scan and will be able to use your Base Score.

Your Base Score is not an actual average of all your scores, it is just the lowest of all the scores. So as you can see from the images above (a little hard to see), my Gaming Graphics scored 3.1 which was the lowest so my whole Base Score becomes 3.1.

With this base score you can now work out what may be slowing down your computer, and what you need to improve your computer. As I never play any games (apart from the odd game of solitaire) I do not require any new graphics card to improve my Base Score, but I have a Memory score of 4.7 which means my day to day usage can be of a fast speed.

If you do need new software for your Vista computer then you can now use your Base Score to be confident the software will work well. Before you purchase any software you can check that it requires a computer with a sufficient Base Score of your own computer. That way you will always get software that runs fast and able for your computer.

Previously we looked at some basics of backing up your files and email and why you MUST backup before your hard drive crashes!! Do not make the mistake of starting your backup policy after you have lost data.

In Windows XP it is very easy to run automated backups. This is a great feature that most people have never even used. With the XP backup tool you can specify exactly what you want to backup, where to backup to and then you can set a schedule so that it does this on a regular basis. You can then sit back and relax knowing that your data will be safe.

Using the Windows XP Backup Tool

OK, lets get started with setting up a basic weekly scheduled backup. Note: You can also use the backup tool to run a once off backup, it doesn’t have to be scheduled.

1) Startup the Windows XP Backup tool: Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup

2) Click “Next”

3) You can then choose to backup files or restore files. In this case we are doing a backup, so select Back up files and settings, then click “Next”.

4) Choose what to backup. From this window you can backup My documents, the entire computer or you can select what you want to backup. For custom scheduled backups, it is most likely that you will want to choose your own files/folders to backup, so select “Let me choose what to back up” and click “Next”.

5) Now you simply select which folders/drives you want to include in your backup. Click the box next to a drive or folder to select/deslect. After you have select what you will be backing up, click “Next”.

6) Select where you will be backing up the files. You can either backup to another hard drive, an external hard drive, or pretty much wherever you want. Click “Next” to continue.

7) You are at the end of the standard backup procedure. Now we want to setup scheduling. So click on the “Advanced” button.

8) Select the type of backup. Here you can select normal, incremental, differential or daily. For now just select normal. Click “Next”.

What are the other backup methods:
Incremental backup - Only the files changed since the recent backup will be included.
Differential backup - A cumulative backup of all changes made after the last backup.

9) On this screen you can choose to verify the data after backup, use hardware compression and disable volume shadow copy.  It is probably a good idea to verify the data after backup. It will take longer, but thats fine, because generally you will schedule the backup to run when you are not using the computer anyway. Click “Next”.

10) You can choose to append this backup to existing backups or to replace the backups. This depends on your preference. I personally like to append the backups. Click “Next”.

11) When to Back Up. This is where you can specify the schedule for your backups. You can either run it now, or later. You will need to choose Later in order to setup the scheduled backups. Click “Later”, then give the job a name, then click the “Set Schedule button”. Here you can set your backup to run once, daily, weekly, monthly and you can specify the time. There are also other settings you can play around with once you get used to the whole process. Once you are happy with your schedule, click “Ok”, then click “Finish”. At this point you may be prompted for the account password.

Your automated backups will now run according to the schedule you set. No more worrying about data loss!

The one important thing with any backups is to test the backups. Every once in a while you should make sure that the backup actually took place and check the file itself or run a restore.