Fix PC Errors

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

The Professional Developers Conference has just been going on from October 27-30 and Microsoft has been releasing alot of info about their new upcoming products as well as demos of Windows 7.

Below are some links to the keynote presentations from Day 1 and Day 2. If you have any interest in Microsoft related products, you should find these very informative.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

When you click the start menu, on the left hand side it shows items that you commonly use. These items can be rotated based on use.

However, you can add more items to this part of the menu and it can make life alot easier.

All you need to do is click “Start”, then “All Programs”, then you just right-click on whatever you wish to add and then select “Pin to Start menu”.

The item will now show up when you click on “Start” in the main menu programs.

Just recently at the PDC conference, Microsoft has revealed further information about their Azure platform.

Azure is a Microsoft hosted platform that allows for internet-scale cloud computing and services. It can be used to add web service capabilities to existing apps, build web apps with minimal on premises resources, perform services off premises, reduce costs and develop new web services inexpensively.

Read more about Windows Azure

If your system has limited RAM, and you can’t update due to hardware constraints etc, then you might try upping the size of the Windows XP paging file.

This is a very simple little tweak and it may prove useful if you are using alot of applications at once and hence consuming lots of memory.

To change your XP virtual memory:

• Click “Start”, then right-click on “My Computer” and select “Properties”
• Click on the “Advanced” tab
• Click the “Settings” button under the “Performance” heading
• Click the “Advanced” tab
• Under the “Virtual Memory” label, click on “Change”
• Here you can select the drive to use for the paging file and size. For size you can set an initial size and maximum

If you are using up alot of memory and resources, give that a try and see if it helps boost performance!!

It wasn’t too long ago we were discussing the release of Windows Vista service pack 1. Well it seems that Microsoft is now hard at work with Vista Service Pack 2.

There is not a great deal of information available about this yet, but rumours have it that a beta version has been floating around and provided to a few customers.

There is a bit of info about this at the Microsoft support site, but not much. Anyway, the link is below:

Windows Vista Service Pack 2

In the meantime, you can fix all of your existing Vista errors and slowness with our free download.