One of the most annoying things about operating systems, especially Windows, is it’s insistence on popping things up at the front of the display screen irrespective of what you might be doing. If you are running a number of applications, say a word processor, email application, Twitter client, couple of browser sessions, and one or [read more...]

Whilst attempting to upload a new blog article, using Windows Live Writer (build 14), recently I received the following warning “Invalid Server Response: The response to the metaWeblog.newMediaObject method receive from the blog service was invalid: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server” after which the upload aborted. The curious thing was that other posts [read more...]

Computer display screens are pretty inconsistent from manufacturer to manufacturer – and a very readable screen of text on one computer may not be quite right for you when viewed on a different screen. If the text on your Windows 7 screen doesn’t seem quite clear enough for you – you can adjust it by [read more...]

Windows Boot Time Utility – measure your computer boot time. The current version of the free utility BootTimer, from Planetsoft.org, currently runs on Windows XP platforms and is a handy utility for getting a good understanding of your computers boot time (the time from BIOS start up to loading Windows). BootTime is a very small [read more...]

Here is an interesting one, regarding Windows Explorer, that someone asked me about a few days ago. They were telling me that on their work computer, which is running Windows XP, that clicking on a folder in Explorer automatically expands the folder and contracts other folders – whereas on their home computer, which is also [read more...]

If you use a shared Windows 7 computer and want to keep your search queries private you can highlight each search term in the drop list and press the Delete key on the keyboard (hold down the Delete key to delete multiple entries).   However, you might want to switch off the search history altogether, [read more...]

A little known application utility in Windows is cipher.exe which allows you to utilise the functions of the encrypting file system (EFS), which we previously talked about in the article . The cipher utility is pre-installed with Windows 2000, XP, and later versions and operates through a number of command line switches, we will look [read more...]

If you have concerns over the privacy of some of your data – you could utilise Windows built-in encryption and decryption feature, EFS (Encrypting File System). In this article we’ll talk introduce the basics on how to do it.