Archive for the ‘Useful Stuff’ category

Get Rid of PC Errors Without a Technician

April 12th, 2011

Have you ever received error messages from your computer? Has there been a time that you had to finish a project and when you have tried to print it, the driver for your printer gave you this error message that you have no idea how to fix? Has your computer been so infiltrated by viruses and malware that you don’t know what to do? Did the Windows registry give you weird messages that something is broken? You think you don’t have any other option but to call out an expensive computer technician? There is another option!

If you’re having problems with a faulty driver in your computer, an expensive PC technician isn’t the only answer. You can fix the issue right away. Faulty drivers are mostly caused by not updating the device drivers installed on your computer. Device drivers need constant updates to be able to perform at their optimal. But, if you have not updated the drivers, you can search the internet for the correct updates and install them onto your computer, given that they are compatible with your operating system. Another way of solving the error message caused by faulty device drivers is to perform a clean uninstall of the driver and reinstall it correctly. By just doing that, you eliminate the error message caused by the device driver and you didn’t pay anything to a technician.

Registry errors are another cause of frustrations. First, because it makes your computer speed and performance slow down. Second, because the registry is one of the most complicated parts of the operating system and messing with it can totally damage your computer. The registry stores all the settings and configurations of a computer, so when it’s not working properly or if there’s something wrong with it, the whole system fails. But this problem can be worked out by downloading a fix from the internet. These are known as registry cleaners. Many are even downloadable for free. After you have downloaded and installed the registry cleaner, you can quickly fix many errors and problems. The computer technician would have done the same thing.

Now, if your computer system has a malware infection then that is a different story. Malware are programs created for the purpose of damaging a computer or for stealing data. These programs are all over the internet and can just enter your computer anytime without you noticing. In order to prevent this, you must protect your computer by downloading one of the malware scanners distributed on the internet. Run the scan on a regular basis and always keep the software up-to-date.

With these steps alone you can protect computer, improve performance and save a lot of money.

Total PC Health Review

February 2nd, 2011

OK, I started using this product a couple weeks back. Initially i was a bit sceptical. I thought I am just downloading yet another Registry cleaner which would pretty much give me the same old results.

Well I was actually pretty shocked. This software certainly isn’t the run of the mill Registry cleaner, in fact it is kind of hard to explain, but I was completely impressed. First i will try and explain what the product is, then give a breakdown of all the actual features.

Total PC Health is not just a PC cleaner. It is an all-in-one tool that has all the features you need to totally fix your PC and improve performance. The scan model in this product is actually five scans built into one. It will scan the Registry, drivers, processes, privacy and Malware. Overall I think the scan took like 45 seconds, but this was on a decent PC. I expect slower scans, depending on how many errors.

The scan detected about 38 errors and 12 out-of-date drivers. What it also detected were all of my privacy items such as chat logs, internet browsing history, Office history etc. This was pretty cool because I don’t normally use a privacy cleaner, but i can see why it would be useful (i have now shredded some stuff that shouldn’t be seen).

Besides the scan and repair, I also found a bunch of other features in this product. There are disk defrag tools, duplicate file finder, file extension locator, temp files cleaner, startup process manager, restore point manager, etc.  To be honest, I haven’t gone through all of the features yet, as I find the quick scan and repair quite sufficient. But I think as an overall PC optimization tool, this is going to be hard to beat.

Here i will try and list all of the features I located in this application:

  • Registry cleaner and Registry repair
  • Automatic driver updater
  • Disk defrag analysis and repair (with scheduler)
  • Privacy cleaner and shredder
  • Duplicate file finder
  • Process optimizer and process manager
  • Startup manager
  • Browser helper object manager
  • Disk cleanup
  • Malware removal
  • File extension fix

That is a pretty impressive set of tools to have in one interface. To sum it all up, an excellent product that I now have on three of my PCs. I just can’t tell you how handy it is to have a driver updater with Registry cleaner. This saves me so much time and I no longer need to run two different programs.

PROS: Multiple scan models, tons of excellent features. You can easily fix PC errors and optimize with this product. If this doesn’t fix up your PC, nothing will.

CONS: I think the Malware remover needs a bit of work. It does find stuff, but I don’t think it finds everything. Also, some of the menu browsing was a bit confusing. You just need to get acquainted with the green arrows in the top right.

I highly recommend this product. You can get it from the link below, or via Softpedia.

Total PC Health

Total PC Health on Softpedia

Related Blogs

Use Primo PDF to Convert for Free

April 7th, 2010

Every now and then a great product comes along and you should all download it.

Well my license for Acrobat has long gone and I needed to convert something to PDF fast. Well I wasn’t about to fork out thousands of dollars on a clunky piece of software that does nothing but slow down my PC.

To cut a long story short, I stumbled upon Primo PDF and this is a great little product. It’s lightweight, converts to PDF fast and its FREE. Yep, 100% Free to convert your documents to PDF.

convert to pdf for free

There are plenty of cool features including a new drag and drop. So once installed, you just drag your documents onto the icon and they automatically convert. You don’t even need to open the application. Awesome!!

If you ever need to convert to PDF, then try this product. Well worth the free download.

PrimoPDF – Free PDF Converter Download Link

Uninstaller

May 20th, 2009

Quite often we get asked how to remove those annoying programs.

Well the first step is to try and remove these programs via the Windows installer. Of course this does not always work. In Control Panel, there is an option called “Add or Remove Programs”. This should be the first thing to try.

Now if that doesn’t work it can be difficult. Many programs leave remnants or have missing uninstall files and then can never be uninstalled. This clutters your PC and is also very annoying.

The best option in such situations is to use something like Perfect Uninstaller. This program has the ability to remove anything. No matter how hard it might be to uninstall, this product can handle it. It uses advanced registry editing and cleanup tools to fully remove any program that you don’t want.

So if you have something that won’t uninstall, give this a try. It is free to download.

Download Perfect Uninstaller – Free Download

Skype 4.0

February 5th, 2009

The latest version of Skype (4.0), the gold version has just been released for Windows. This version has been in development since 2006 and it does deliver many new features.

This is basically one of the biggest releases in the history of the company and now you can expect an even better experience when using Skype.

The new version has had a very strong focus on: improved video calling, great call quality and ease of use. Check it out and see for yourself.

Get the latest version at skype.com

Next Generation SD Cards

January 8th, 2009

SD cards have long been the standard for digital cameras. However, with the increasing megapixels and image size in these cameras, the limits of SD cards are being felt.

So the next generation of SD cards are on the way. These are called SDXC – the XC stands for extended capacity. These cards will be able to store up to a massive 2TB, which is pretty impressive. That is storage enough for something like 100 HD movies or 60 hours of HD recording. So you won’t need to constantly change cards anymore when doing alot of photo/video work.

You can expect to see the SDXC cards very soon.

 

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Fix PC Errors – Free Scan

New Windows Live and New Icons

November 17th, 2008

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.

Live Icons

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Fix Errors and Speed Up Your PC – Free Download

Disable the CD Autorun

November 13th, 2008

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)

Vista autoplay

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.

Windows XP Virtual Memory Tweaking

October 21st, 2008

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

Windows XP Virtual Memory

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

100GB CompactFlash Memory Card

September 24th, 2008

There is a handy new CompactFlash memory card being released – and this one has a whopping 100GB of storage. I have been waiting for something like this for a long time now.

The new memory card is being released by Pretec and will be the world’s largest CompactFlash memory card. At 100GB that is pretty impressive. Not only are the cards data capacity storage impressive but the speed is awesome too. These things are not slow, with transfer rates of around 35mb/s.

These should be available sometime around the end of 2008. You can expect to pay somewhere around $600 for the largest card. But with competitors catching on, I would expect prices to be driven down soon after. So keep an eye out for these, they should be good!!