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.

——————–
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.

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!!

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!!

It looks like lasers are out, with the new Microsoft Blue Track Mice.

These new mice use blue beams and wide angle specular optics architecture instead of laser. I have no idea what that actually means, but these mice are looking pretty cool.

The advantages of these blue beams is that the mice will be more functional on a variety of different surfaces.  They should have no problem working on marble, granite, concrete, carpet, or pretty much anything. 

These should be out sometime in November, so put them on your Christmas shopping list.

These days there are some fantastic open source products on the market. A huge amount of time and effort goes into these products and the fact that they are free is quite amazing. You can find products for almost any task and you can setup a PC to do almost everything without ever having to purchase a commercial product.

Here is a list of some of the best open source products available, some of these you should definitely test if you haven’t done so already.

Firefox - By now everyone would have heard of Firefox, unless you have been living under a rock. This is a great browser, secure, stable and pretty fast. It is a nice alternative to IE and works on all platforms.

Thunderbird - Thunderbird is a great little email product. In our office here we pretty much use Thunderbird for 95% of our email needs. This was developed by Mozilla and is also a multi-platform product. We have found Thunderbird to be much more stable that products such as Outlook/Outlook Express.

OpenOffice - OpenOffice is the free alternative to Microsoft Office. It does pretty much everything you will need, and has programs that are equivalent to Access, Excel, Powerpoint and Word. We have discussed this previously - see the post here on OpenOffice. 

Miro - Miro is a free internet TV and video player. It has thousands of channels can save YouTube videos and much more. Worth a look!

FileZilla - FileZilla is a free FTP solution. There is both a client and server version available, so it should be able to meet any of your FTP needs.  The client is available for all platforms, but the server is currently Windows only.

Gimp - Gimp is an image manipulation program. It isn’t Photoshop, but it is free. So if you have basic image editing needs then check this out.

uTorrent - uTorrent is a free torrent client. It is very lightweight, fast and easy to use. Highly recommended for downloading torrents.

Apache - This is probably the greatest web server available and yes it is 100% free. It also powers most of the servers on the web. If you ever need to setup a web server for home or office or any other needs, then use Apache. It works great on Windows and Linux.

MySQL - The world’s most popular open source database. MySQL is a powerful database program that can be used for almost any database requirements. The most common combination is to use MySQL with an Apache server. This works extremely well and is also used on most web server configurations on the web.

I was reading the latest version of a computer magazine lately and was happy to see they offered a free version of Prism video converter. Since my last video converter seemed to just not want to work after I upgraded to Vista I thought I’d give it a go.

If you want to give it a go you can download a version from download.com here

Basically the software lets you do all the video conversions you can do in most other conversion software, but with Prism I straight away liked to features;

• Ease of output settings
• Ease of adding files to convert

I have found with some other video conversion software that you need to have a great deal of knowledge on video and conversion to run the program. So I was pleasantly surprized when I found how easy this was to use.

This software lets you convert any video from any one of these formats;

• avi
• wmv
• asf
• mpg
• 3gp
• mp4
• mov
• flv

So basically you can convert all your videos for things like Youtube, iPods, mp3’s etc.

Here is a screenshot of the program

Here is a simple run through on how to convert a video;

Select add files

It will then list out the movie you selected;

Now select your output format;

Now click the convert button;

The software will now take a while for the conversion to take place but once done you will find your video has been converted and placed in the output folder you selected.

You can alter the way your computer displays numbers, currencies, dates and times through a simple edit in your control panel.

By doing this your computer will display € instead of $ every time the $ is displayed. If you change the language you will also notice all language on your PC will also change (it can also be done as a prank).

To change the language format on your PC just follow this;

• Open your control panel
• Open regional and language options
• Click the Formats tab
• Here you can select the new language you want
• Click apply and OK
• It also gives you a link to access many more languages

Here are a few tips and tweaks you can do to increase the overall speed of your Internet explorer 7, by doing these you should experience faster IE7 browsing.

Phishing Filter

This feature is designed to protect you from being tricked into accessing a dodgy website, but it does also slow down your website. If you do feel safe in turning off this feature just do the following;

• Open tools
• Under phishing filter click phishing filter settings
• Scroll down to the phishing filter section
• Check disable phishing filter
• Click apply and you are done

Turn off your SSVHelper Class

Your SSVHelper Class is a file which is part of the Java plug-in, it is basically a non-essential file and it does slow down your IE7. To turn off this feature just follow this;

• Open tools
• In manage add-ons click enable or disable add-ons
• Go down to SSVHelper Class and click on it
• Now underneath click disable and then click OK

Turn off RRS Feeds

You may not have this feature (automatically checking RRS feeds) enabled but if you do you will find it can slow down your IE7 quite a bit. If you want to disable this feature or check that it is not running then follow this;

• Click tools
• Open internet options
• Click the content tab
• In the feeds area click settings
• Uncheck automatically check feeds for updates
• Click OK and you are done

Disable ClearType

ClearType is a feature on that is designed to sharpen fonts on your Windows display, but it can also slow down the running of your Internet Explorer 7. If you want to disable your ClearType just follow these points;

• Click tools
• Open internet options
• Click the advanced tab
• Scroll down till you see Always use ClearType for HTML*
• Click apply and OK

Run a Registry Clean

One of the simplest methods you can do to improve any application on your PC is to run a registry repair, this will clean up your computer and allow you Internet Explorer 7 to run faster. To run a registry scan just click the link below and follow the prompts;

Run a registry scan for Internet Explorer 7

Here is a cool tool found in Windows Vista that lets you run a quick scan of your computer and checks its overall health. The scan checks the operating system, all hardware and security settings within your PC and offers solutions to any problems found.

The results are shown in an easy to read format with solutions beside each problem, these include;

• Errors
• Informational
• Basic system checks
• Resource overview
• Software configuration
• Hardware configuration
• CPU
• Network
• Disk Memory, and
• Report statistics

These results can essentially solve many problems you have with your PC, the report also takes the guess work and trial and error out of identifying problems. eg: Maybe you think RAM is a problem, but it could just be your CPU consumed by a background process. Run this report before trying any drastic tweaks.

 To run a system health report just follow these steps;

• Open control panel
• Click system and maintenance
• Click performance information and tools
• Click advanced tools
• Click generate a system health report
• It will take a moment to scan and then give you the results