Now I know why brand new laptop computers have become so cheap over the last couple of years. And it’s not due to any technological advancements. It’s due to huge amount of software crapware which the major hardware vendors, and their partners, bundle on the machines before they ship them out. More »
Windows XP has a tendency to sprinkle lots of hidden “thumbs.db” files all over your hard drive, specifically in folders that have images of any kind. More »
If you get a “directory missmatch” warning when you launch the XAMPP control panel, it’s almost certainly because you’ve installed XAMPP without an installer. This is how to fix it. More »
With the release of Microsoft Vista a couple of years ago, Microsoft introduced six new cleartype typefaces. More »
By default, Windows XP doesn’t display common filename extensions like “.exe”, “.doc”, “.xls” and others. While you may not be aware of this, malware writers certainly are, and they use this knowledge to trick you into opening dangerous files. More »
I’ve recently had to convert a Word 2007 document, sent to me by someone who wasn’t savvy enough to realise that “docx” documents are incompatible with earlier versions of Microsoft products. While Microsoft offer a downloadable 28MB file converter, there’s a much better way of getting around their backward compatibility issues. More »
After upgrading my Intel wireless driver and management software from Dell, and having launched the management software, I was greeted by one of the dumbest dialogues I have seen in a long time: So the “latest” driver and management software aren’t compatible. That’s not the first time I’ve encountered that. More »
For those of you who are still using the over-bloated Adobe Reader to view and print your PDF documents, seriously consider uninstalling it and replacing it with Foxit Reader instead. More »
Over the last eight years I’ve been exclusively using Notetab for all my text editing needs in the Windows environment. Simple to use, really intuitive and very powerful. Great for editing multiple files too. More »
I tried the brand new Safari browser for Windows last week. While I’m still a little puzzled why Apple would even bother entering the Windows market, I’ve noticed a couple of things which I don’t particularly care for: Like iTunes, it has a kooky user interface, which can’t be customised. More »
While Kerio V2.15 has always been our favourite personal firewall, a number of people we know have complained that it’s “rule-based” architecture can be little hard to muster. More »
Is this the most amazing collection of free desktop “stock photo” wallpaper on the internet? I think so. More »
Has any other Windows XP user had their file explorer stubbornly refuse to remember their custom folder settings and revert to pretty “icon” view instead? More »
Quite some time ago, I documented how manifest files can be used to make VB6 applications look like they were designed for Windows XP. Having recently worked on a project which liberally used third-party ActiveX controls, I experienced one major pitfall of this approach. More »
If your corporate “standard operating environment” precludes you from changing the default (blue) Windows XP desktop theme and your system administrators have disabled your registry editor, here’s an alternative way of doing it: Open up a command shell window by clicking on the “Start” button and selecting the “Run” menu option. More »
Having recently decided to get serious about managing my personal finances, I started to look around for something which had all the important features but didn’t require an accounting degree to use. More »
I recently got an email from one of our readers who found our Spellchecking from Visual Basic article useful but wanted to know if there was a way to ensure that Microsoft Word was installed before attempting to invoke the spellchecking function. The short answer is “yes, there is”. More »
Sooner or later, every VB programmer needs to be able to plugin to the native Windows framework to perform some task which isn’t possible with their development platform. More »
After trying a bunch of RSS readers, we finally settled on Sharpreader from a clever bloke by the name of Luke Hutteman. More »
Over at ZDNet Australia, Steven Deare asks a very pertinent question about why the decision by Kennards Hire to switch from Windows to Linux on all of it’s desktops has sadly remained inconspicuous: Why has the country’s biggest known desktop Linux implementation gone relatively unpublicised for so long? More »