Fix PC Errors

Well it seems that Microsoft has finally come up with an official name for their new Windows 7 Operating system and it looks like they have thought about this long and hard.

The official name is……..Windows 7.

Pretty original huh?

Anyway, who really cares what they call it. Lets just hope it meets expectations and with all the new user feedback they are getting, it should be a better OS than Vista.

This is an old topic but probably the most requested. It seems that everyone has a PC that is (or was) running slow. Time and time again the problem is usually just poor maintenance.

Over time as you clutter your PC with more applications, drivers, software etc, things just start to slow down. Everything is controlled by the Windows Registry, so obviously as time goes on and your PC gets cluttered, so too does the registry. More clutter, means your PC has to do more work - which means a slower PC.

In cases of poor PC maintenance, extra tweaks and even hardware wont help much, because you are not hitting the cause of the problem. Tweaking your system and adding hardware is only good when your system is already in good shape, then it will respond much better to changes.

So what we recommend is that you start maintaining your PC correctly and on a regular basis. The easiest is to use a PC optimization tool. These can give a huge performance boost and they will fix the majority of problems on your PC. With most of these tools you can also schedule them to automatically run on a regular basis. This keeps your PC in great condition without any hassles.

Besides running an optimization tool, you should also ensure that your PC doesn’t have any viruses or spyware. These can really slow down a system and you might no know you are infected.

The last option would be a re-install of Windows on your PC. If things are really bad, this can be a good way to start over. If you do this, just make sure you don’t let your PC go bad again. Because re-installing can take hours and there is potential risk of losing data - so back it up!

Free download - Optimize and cleanup your PC now

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

One of the features that we have all wanted to see is support for the Windows Taskbar across multi-monitors and it looks like this could finally be addressed in Windows 7.

Microsoft have said that this feature is not as easy to implement as it may seem, and there is no promise that Windows 7 will feature this support. But nonetheless, rumours are that Microsoft is working hard on this feature. We will most likely see the outcome at the upcoming Professional Developers Conference in Vegas.

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 have ever used Outlook, you are too aware of how annoying PST files are. They are hard to find, have problematic file sizes and they often become corrupt. Besides that, Outlook is a great product.

Anyway, for too long the management of PST files within Outlook has been a real hassle. Rolling back to older versions and trying to repair existing PST files never works well.

We have recently been playing around with a new tool that is a PST file recovery program. So far we have been pretty impressed with the product. It does a good job and works quite fast. So if you have any PST issues at all, give this product a try. The download is free, so you can try it out and see what you think.

Scan and Repair Your PST Files - Free Download

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.

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.