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

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.

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!!

This is a pretty simple tweak, but can be very useful for keeping your desktop clean and clutter free. The XP desktop cleanup works be helping you remove shortcuts that are not used very often.

What we will do is set Xp to automatically run the desktop cleanup wizard every 60 days.

• Right-click on your desktop
• Select properties
• Click on the “Desktop” tab
• Click “Customize Desktop”
• Then check the box “Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days”
• You can also run the desktop cleanup immediately by clicking the “Clean Desktop Now” button.

Done. You now have a nice clean desktop.

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Cleanup and Remove PC Errors - Free Scan

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

For those of you thinking of reinstalling Windows XP, just note that you will probably need to reactivate it. While this is generally a pretty easy process, in some circumstances it can be problematic.

If the reactivation process doesn’t go correctly, you will need to deal with Microsoft support directly and this could be a very time consuming process. So try this instead.

Before re-installing Windows XP, there is a file you can copy that will help you avoid the reactivation process.

Make a copy of the following file, which you will then later replace after reinstalling XP. (So be sure to copy it to an external drive/usb drive etc)

c:\windows\system32\wpa.dbl

After XP has been reinstalled, boot into safe mode. Rename the existing wpa.dbl and replace with your old version. Now there should be no need for activation.

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.