If you’ve ever opened Task Manager in Windows 7 or below, you may have been surprised to see only the graphs of your CPU cores rather than detailed information. You aren’t a victim of a virus, but you simply are in a different view.
Archive for Category: "Windows Tips"
How to fix VLC’s “Font Cache is Being Rebult” Message
Sometimes if you run VLC player you will see a “Please wait while your font cache is rebuilt” message. If this takes longer than a few seconds then you’ll need to do this fix:
Windows 8 Task Manager: Restore Logical Processors
Even though you may have an 8-core or 12-core CPU, you may have noticed that the Windows 8 task manager just shows you one big graph. It’s very easy to get this back, but like many things in Windows 8 it’s not apparently obvious.
How to Take a Screenshot in Windows
Don’t laugh… you’d be surprised how many people don’t know how to do this…
Here we cover how to take a snap of your entire desktop, one window on your desktop, full scrolling web page grabs, and screenshots of PC games.
How to center two inline images in WordPress
WordPress is a great content management system, but one of the weirdest quirks about its WYSIWYG editor is inserting two or more centered images side-by-side. There is a way to do this in the Visual editor without having to enter any custom HTML and works without compromising your layout.
How to Shut Down Windows 8
Since the new Windows forces a “tablet” experience onto all users regardless of their platform, they must assume that most people will let their PCs enter sleep mode, as most tablets do. So how do you shut it down?
Windows 8 Keyboard Shortcuts
Windows 8 has added 16 new keyboard shortcuts, thanks mostly to its confusing Metro UI. We have for you the complete list of Windows keyboard shortcuts, and tell you which ones no longer work on Windows 8.
How to Speed Up WordPress in Firefox
I like to use Firefox when authoring articles via Wordpress, but I experienced unexplainable slow-downs when typing in the editor. I thought that it might be Firefox’s built-in spell check, or some setting within Wordpress. Come to find out there are a few tweaks you can do to Firefox to restore the speed you once had.
Type Special Characters Using Only a Keyboard
In today’s computing world, there are a lot of special symbols and characters in use that just cannot fit onto a standard keyboard. Even as a hardware reviewer, I find myself consistently using the degree, one-half, one-quarter, copyright, and registered symbols on a regular basis. Many others have to use accented characters, such as when [...]
Run Hidden Power Efficiency Report in Windows 7
Computer laptops are just about everywhere, and as such today’s modern operating systems have a lot of power-saving options… some of which are hidden or are not used, like your hard drive never sleeping (we show you how to fix it here). But I digress. My point is that there are several tools available in [...]
How To Change the Shut Down Button
If you’re like me, then you rarely actually shut down your computer. Even though I have fast RAIDed SSDs that can cold-boot Windows in less than 20 seconds, I always have lots of tasks open at once to get my work done. It would be a severe pain to have to re-open all of my [...]
Enable Hidden Windows Themes
Windows 7 configures a handful of themes upon initial installation, but did you know that there are several more that are not installed by default? Microsoft has set up Windows 7 to only install themes relevant to the language and location you specify during the installation script, but you can easily access and install more [...]
How to switch audio tracks in Windows Media Player
Every now and then you come across a video that has multiple audio tracks… much like a DVD. Sometimes you may have a video file that has both a 5.1 and stereo soundtrack, or director’s commentary. In my case, I came across a video that had normal movie audio and Rifftrax.com commentary. If you were [...]
How To Install Windows 7 From a USB Flash Drive
Thanks to a nice check sent to me by Uncle Sam, I got to upgrade my living area a little bit this past week. A new LCD HDTV, a console, and some new furniture. And I paid a few bills that I would otherwise ignore until I got a letter saying that it was sent to a [...]
Change the Windows 7 Logon Background
Do you sneer at people who use the default Windows desktop? If you want to set yourself apart from your grandma that uses Windows XP’s Luna theme, then one of the first you do to your Operating System is make it your own. You’ve probably already skinned your Aero desktop and now need to customize your logon [...]
Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows
Keyboard shortcuts have been in the Windows operating system since its inception, but the Windows key started appearing about the time Windows 95 rolled out. Some analysts say it is in response to Apple’s command button, which is used in conjuntion with other keys to perform keyboard shortcuts. There were only a handful of “Windows [...]
How to Enable Command Prompt Scrolling from the Keyboard
If you are a system administrator, then you probably find yourself using the Windows Command Prompt more often than most people. When running this window, old-school admins get into a DOS or Linux mindset and just don’t like to use the mouse. Heck, one of the Microsoft interview questions for admins is “How do you [...]
Windows 7 Programs not launching
So, I finally installed Windows 7 (after yet another hard drive crash… more on that later) and it looks pretty good. One problem that I ran into was that certain programs would not launch at all. After Firefox 3.51 ran once it would not run again. The task appears in Task Manager, but cannot be [...]
File Systems Explained
File systems are an integral part of any operating systems with the capacity for long term storage. There are two distinct parts of a file system, the mechanism for storing files and the directory structure into which they are organised. In mordern operating systems where it is possibe for several user to access the same [...]
Full-size photos not working on WordPress with IIS7
I thought I had all the weird caveats figured out when hosting WordPress on IIS7. It looks like there’s another one. Apparently by default you cannot view full-size images uploaded through the WordPress interface. You can show the thumbnails, but not the full-size version. The full-size version is completely blank. This can also be demonstrated [...]
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