Fix PC Errors

As you all know, the Windows Vista SP2 has been under development and Microsoft are working hard to get this out asap. The first dev version has even shipped out to some testers and can be downloaded too.

SP2 for Vista should have a release candidate out sometime in February 2009.  This is just about a year after the release of service pack 1. The finalised release should be sometime in April 2009 (if everything goes to plan)

Many of the changes in SP2 will be under the hood stuff, so users wont notice a great deal of changes.

With Windows 7 coming out soon, will anyone really care about the Vista SP2?

If you need to recover lost photos, images or videos then you need not worry any longer.

There is a great new product that does exactly that. It recovers lost, corrupt and even missing photos from virtually any type of digital camera. It also has the capability to recover photos from hard drives, flash drives and pretty much any other type of media device.

The formats you can recover are not just limited to the typical image files (eg: gif, jpg, tiff, bmp). This product also recovers video files and sound files. So no matter what you have captured through your digital camera, it can be recovered (if necessary). Even if the SD card or flash drive has corrupted the files, there is still hope.

This product is called Stellar Photo Recovery and has become very popular for recovering data. Most of us have lost some important photos at one time or another, and with digital cameras it is all too easy to just press one button and lose data. It is also very common for image files to become corrupt due to the storage media they are on, so this is yet another reason for having this product on hand.

Try the free download below. It will allow you to recover files from any media device and you can specify which type of files to locate. It’s very easy to use.

Free download - Stellar Photo Recovery

Have you ever visited a website and wanted just a bit of content from the page, but ended up printing the whole web page?

Well most users are not aware that they can actually print off just a selection of text. So instead they end up wasting tons of paper printing a whole web site when they could have just printed off the part they needed.

OK, so here is how you can print off a selection of text from a web page.

• Select the text you want to print, by clicking the mouse and highlighting the text.
• Right-click on the selected text and choose “Print”
• On the print dialog, under “Page Range”, check the option called “Selection”

That will just print off your selected text. Now you can save paper and save time!

The New Windows Live is launching pretty soon and looks to be a cool service. The new and updated Windows Live services will help you stay in touch easier, faster and better than before.

Along with this new service, there are also a bunch of cool new icons. And who doesn’t love a nice icon?

Below are some samples of the new icons that will be launching with the new Windows Live services.

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Fix Errors and Speed Up Your PC - Free Download

Autorun occurs when a CD or DVD is inserted into a Windows computer. When this happens, Windows looks for a file called autorun.inf. If the file exists on the CD/DVD, the instructions in the file will be followed - generally to run a .exe or other installer type file.

There is malicious software out there that relies on the autorun feature in order to execute and infect computers, so many users these days are turning the autorun feature off. You will have slightly better security with it turned off, but you will then have to manually run the contents on the CD/DVD.

To disable the autorun, you will need to edit the Windows registry. Always be careful when editing the registry and you do so at your own risk.

Click start -> run, type “regedit” to fire up the registry editor:

Browse to the location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

If “NoDriveTypeAutoRun” does not exist, Right click on the “Explorer” folder, select New -> DWORD value. Call the key “NoDriveTypeAutoRun”.

Set the value of this key to B1. To turn it back on, set the value to 91.

Vista and Autorun

In Windows Vista you will be prompted with a dialog asking you what you want to do. You can either choose to run the file or you can set the defaults. When you choose to set the defaults you will see the following options. (these options can also be accessed via the control panel)

So for each type of media, you can choose whether it autoplays or whether you should be prompted. For things like software it is a good idea to be prompted everytime. You never know what might be lurking on a CD/DVD.

It looks like we will all have to wait a bit longer for the Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 release due to bugs, and lots of them.

The beta 2 release has been halted by approximately 17 bugs.  While the team is hard at work fixing the bugs, this will probably delay the release date to somewhere in late November. For now you can download the beta 1 version.

If you are still not using version 3 of Firefox, then you should upgrade ASAP, as there are many cool new features and interface tweaks.

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Fix PC Errors - Free Download

If you want to uninstall a program on Windows XP or Vista, you can do so by going to the Control Panel and selecting the “Add or Remove Programs” option. Then you just browse through the list and select the programs you want to remove.

This generally works pretty well, but in some cases there will be programs that cannot be removed via this method. Quite often spyware/adware applications wont uninstall and some programs that are missing their uninstall file also won’t be going anywhere in a hurry.

The options are to just leave the program hanging around in the program list and delete its folder and related files, however, this does not necessarily remove the registry entries for the program. In the case of some adware, it can reinstall itself if it still exists in the registry.

So for really stubborn programs we recommend something like Perfect Uninstaller. This should be able to uninstall pretty much anything. It’s a very simple program to use and it does the job. If you need to remove something, try it out via the free download trial below:

Uninstally annoying and unwanted programs

For those of you that were given a copy of Windows 7 build 6801, there are some features that can be unlocked.

It has been found that in this demo, the features were locked out for users that were not Microsoft staff etc. But it seems that Rafael from WithinWindows has found a way to enable the locked taskbar features.

I don’t have a copy of Windows 7 to test this out, but the following site will give you the details of what you need to do. It sounds pretty cool, so let us know how it turns out.

Unlock Windows 7 features