WindowsXP

This past week has been a challenging week for me when it comes to using my computer. Last weekend my desktop got infected with a Trojan called VirtuMonde (read about it here ) and it took me almost the whole weekend to finally get rid of it. And then today I discovered how my laptop's Windows XP registry got messed up for some unknown reason. That took me another hour or so to get it fixed. And it was only made possible by a stroke of luck. I'll explain as we go along.

If you use Windows XP and have multiple user profile on the same computer, you may experience an issue whereby when a user logs off and the screen will go blank for a long time before it goes back to the welcome screen where you choose the user profile. During that time, there seems to be nothing you can do but stare at the blank screen. The usual Alt-Ctrl-Del combination does not respond either. If you are patient enough you can wait, for several minutes before it will finally return to the welcome screen.

For those of you who uses GMail or Yahoo Mail, you probably wish there is an easier way to check your mail numerous times a day without having to open a browser each time to do that. It would be nice if you can just click once and you are in the favorite web-based email program. Well, there is a solution for you. Bubbles to the rescue.

Remote Access software has certainly come quite a way compared to a few years ago. I still remember using remote access software like PCAnywhere, and thought it was neat even then to be able to control another computer remotely as if you are there. One drawback of most of these software was that you had to install software on both ends. The problem with such approach is that often the computer you are using to access the remote computer does not even belong to you sometimes. You borrow it for a quick access to your remote computer. And this limitation of needing to install the client version of the software in order to access the remote host computer, makes it an inconvenient way to access your computer remotely.

Just this last couple of days, I noticed something that I haven't noted before when I started my Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). After IE was loaded, it just sits there blank, with the word connecting... while trying to load my homepage (which was www.yahoo.com). Eventually the homepage loaded but sure took a long time. Once the page is loaded, clicking any links within the page will load ok just like normal. The same thing happened when I open another tab window. I timed the whole process and it took around 90 seconds before the first page eventually gets loaded.

PDF (Portable Document Format) file has pretty much become the de facto standard for printable documents. It is highly likely that at some point you would have installed a PDF reader because of the fact that more and more people and businesses are sharing documents using PDF files.

PDF standard was created by Adobe Systems. And they offer a free download for a PDF reader called the Adobe Reader. At the same time, there are other free third party PDF reader that one can use. Most websites provide a link to the Adobe Reader download whenever they make available PDF documents. The Adobe Reader works fine for most people. But for the impatients, like myself, I just don't quite like the fact how slow it takes to load up Adobe Reader whenever you want to read a PDF file. That is because Adobe Reader takes a longer time to start, being a bigger program.

Unless your profession is being a system administrator, it isn't very often that one would add new hard drives to one's PC. Even for a computer professional ike myself, I may upgrade to a new drive once a year at the most. And quite often I can't remember how to add or upgrade to a new hard drive. That was exactly what happened to me recently when I tried to add a new hard drive. This Christmas I received a new WD 1TB (WD10EACS-32ZJB0) drive. And I was pretty excited about getting this drive, that is almost 7 times larger than the one that I currently have (150GB). As I got down to installing the new drive, I came to the conclusion that I need to document the steps involved, so that in future when it is time again to upgrade or add a new drive, I have something to refer back to. I hope you too may find this useful.

Are you looking for a program that burns disc image to a CD/DVD that doesn't cost much or anything at all? If so, you might want to check out ImgBurn , a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit.

In brief, ImgBurn is able to do the following tasks:

• Read - Read a disc to an image file
• Build - Create an image file from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc
• Write - Write an image file to a disc
• Verify - Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct
• Discovery - Put your drive / media to the test! Used in combination with DVDInfoPro, you can check the quality of the burns your drive is producing

If you are a regular user of Windows Media Player, and are satisfied with it for your needs, then stick with it. The important thing is that you are happy using what you have. But if Windows Media Player doesn't quite meet your needs, for example, couldn't play many of the unusual media formats you threw at it, then I would suggest that you check out the VLC Media Player.

There are some utility programs that are necessary to have on your computer. A file archiver is one of such programs. It is necessary to have around not so much for archiving/compressing your own files but more for unarchiving/decompressing files that other people may send to you. What is a file archiver anyway? It is a program that compresses/decompresses and stores (archives) one or more files into a single file, for one or both of the following reasons - to make it a smaller size file for faster transmission, eg over the Internet, and/or to 'archive' a number of files together in one file for better organization, especially useful for keeping a bunch of files together when transmitting a group of files to someone else.