Fix PC Errors

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!

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 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

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.

Yahoo Messenger 9.0 is now available and integrates with the latest versions of Windows XP and Vista.  Of course it comes with a bunch of new features and redesigned interface and is ready to compete with the latest release of Windows Live Messenger.

One of the new features is the Yahoo Messenger Pingbox. This lets users IM you without the need for Messenger or a Yahoo ID. There will also be a few new skins and more emoticons. Overall it is a better and easier to use product.

The new Pingbox feature:

For all of you Yahoo Messenger fans, you can download the latest version below.

Download Yahoo Messenger 9 Here

If you didn’t already know, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 has been released. It was actually released ahead of schedule by a day or so. This beta does have quite a few changes so if you are an IE nut then you will probably want to download this release. I won’t bother listing all the new features here, because I am sure those of you that are interested in IE 8 just want to download it. So I have provided the link below.

Download Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

I haven’t installed it yet myself. When I installed the previous version I had a lot of system problems - freezing and crashing. So I will let you all know how this one goes.

What I have heard though, is that Javascript runs much faster in IE8. This was from an unconfirmed test, but supposedly IE8 is over 30% faster in Javascript that IE7. Hopefully speed improvements will be noticeable in all areas of the product.

Well it has only taken a few years and feedback from millions and millions of annoyed users, but Microsoft has gotten the hint.

So for Windows 7, Microsoft will be working hard to dramatically improve dog slow boot times. This is a common issue that we deal with almost every week with our clients, so I think it is a great step for Microsoft to be moving in this direction. Hopefully they will continue to listen to the users.

In order to fix the boot times for Windows 7, Microsoft will focus on system services and reducing the number of services that boot (by booting only the essential core services), as well as reducing their CPU and memory demands. Basically it means the Microsoft programmers are going to have to stop being sloppy coders.

For now you can speed up Windows XP and Windows Vista boot times with our free download. 

For many users it might be important to keep both Windows XP and Windows Vista running. In our office we have about 4 PCs running both, so lets look at a quick guide to setting up a Windows Vista/Windows XP dual boot. We will assume you already have XP installed and will be installing Vista as the second OS.

For the dual boot setup you will need separate partitions or hard drives. I always recommend separate hard drives as I find it cleaner and easier. Either way, just do not install Vista onto the existing XP partition as that will kill it. If you are going to partition an existing drive, just give it enough space to fit Vista. 20Gb+ will be enough.

Installing Vista

You can start installing Vista either from XP or from bootup. To run from bootup you may need to change the BIOS to boot from the CD drive.

When the installation starts you want to select “Custom”. The upgrade option will upgrade XP. So don’t select that.

The next step requires you to select which drive to install Vista on. Make sure you select your other drive/partition that does not have XP on it. Then let the installation process run its course.

Post Installation

After the installtion is complete and the system reboots you will see the following boot menu. To change this you will need to modify the bootloader in Vista.

To edit the the boot manager in Vista, run the command BCEDIT. Note: BCEDIT is not an easy tool to use and it is completely command line driven. Instead we recommend a tool such as EasyBCD created by NeoSmart.

If you install EasyBCD, then all you need to do is click on the “Configure Boot” button. Here you can change the “Earlier Version of Windows” to Windows XP. Now when you reboot the menu will display correctly.

Have fun!!

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