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Windows 10 under Fusion sluggish
If you made the mistake of upgrading your virtual copy of Windows under Mac OS X using VMware Fusion (version 8 here), you may find Windows 10 runs painfully sluggish. The answer? Disable 3D graphics acceleration. Shut down the virtual machine. Bring up the virtual machine settings (⌘E). Select “Display”: Deselect (remove the checkbox for) “Accelerate 3D Graphics”: Close…
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Get rid of annoying “People Pane” in Outlook
I wouldn’t mind the “People Pane”, except that in our organization is shows nothing useful. Moreover for a reason I cannot fathom, it always gets opened up, taking enormous reading real estate. So from this (Outlook 2010 at least): Click the “View” tab: Select “People Pane” and set it to “Off”: Voila! UPDATE: Same two steps work…
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Make Excel text fit row height
As part of my job I for better or worse have to deal with Excel on a regular basis. One of the issues I have is the sizing of rows (the cell height) not properly expanding, or conversely shrinking, when I add or remove data in the cell. It turns out there is a very…
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Four keyboard shortcuts you should know…
I’m writing this because I see so many people who use computers regularly who don’t know these basic keyboard shortcuts. They’re easy – learn them and your computer life will be much better. Most work on pretty much any GUI (Windows, Unix, even Mac substituting the CMD key for the CTRL key). So with no…
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Forcing a Window Media Player library rescan
If you’re using your Windows Media Player (WMP) as a Windows Media “server” to share your music library, yet don’t use WMP directly to manage your media (I use the much more rich MediaMonkey) then you may want to force a library rescan when you add new tracks to your file-store(s). This isn’t very hard,…
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Useful Intel links…
Two links from Intel are particularly useful for desktop/laptop users. First, this tool will find out if the Intel drivers you’re using are up-to-date: http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/detect since many if not most desktops/laptops include some Intel based chipset (even if it isn’t the main CPU), then this is a pretty useful site to use. If you’re interested…
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1 Reason Why Microsoft Bing Is Gaining on Google
eWeek has this “fluff” piece on why Microsoft Bing is “gaining” on Google: 10 Reasons Why Microsoft Bing Is Gaining on Google I don’t usually like to go this far, but frankly it’s pretty shameless pandering. Bing may or may not be a good search engine, personally the results it pulls just don’t cut it…
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Why Internet Explorer rules…
This article about the growth of Chrome has a little gem in it that shows just how anti-competitive installing IE by default as the only browser on Windows is. It says: NetApplications reported, Microsoft’s [Internet Explorer’s] 61 percent is a record low for the company as its market share continues to decline. A key reason…
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Outlook email verbosity…
I write HTML in Thunderbird because I like some rich formatting (an area I am sad to admit Thunderbird is weak on). In particular I do a lot of indented stuff, which Thunderbird translates to simple “<blockquote>” tags. However, when I moved to Outlook 2007 (which I don’t use for mail, but was just checking)…
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Favorite free Windows toys…
Though I’m a Linux bigot, I work generally on a Windows laptop. Below is a list of my favorite free toys/tools that I use regularly. I’ve had good luck with all of them: Unlocker Assistant – for unlocking pesky locked Windows files or drives. I8kFanGUI – for controlling your laptop fans TrueCrypt – for creating…
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The unfortunate truth about Exchange
Up until the last year my workplace used IMAP servers running on Linux and Solaris to manage and deliver mail. Then we decided because of the collaborative benefits, particularly with mobile devices like Blackberrys, to move to Exchange. The results have been dramatic, and this chart made by Google to espouse their GMail product reflects…
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How to convert to/from DOS format in VIM…
It’s very easy, but also easy to forget how to convert to or from a DOS format file in Unix using “vim” (Vi iMproved), the Open Source “vi”. If the file is in DOS format and you want to convert to Unix, use the command: :set ff=unix note that “ff” is an abreviation for “fileformat”…
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Where to find the Windows XP “hosts” file
Just like Unix you can add a static host to the Windows system. On Windows XP the file is usually found in the “intuitive” location here (may change depending on where you loaded Windows): C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc This is also where the “lmhosts” file is found. The format is in standard ARPANET format. For more information see…
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How to disable “dumprep.exe”
If you’ve ever had a program spontaneously self destruct in Windows XP and/or you did a forced kill from the task manager for a “Not responding” application, you may have found it takes forever for things to come back to normal and meanwhile your drive is being banged on like crazy. Worse things usually drag…
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Disabling Firefox Resume From Crash
Though to many it’s handy, personally I find Firefox‘s “Resume from Crash” function, well, annoying. This function makes it so that if Firefox is killed prematurely that the next time you start it you get an (annoying) popup that asks you if you want to restore the previous state/page(s) that Firefox was viewing. I can…
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CrossLoop – secure remote access
A friend of mine showed me what looks like a nice (free) secure remote access solution for visually managing a remote PC: http://www.crossloop.com It’s based on TightVNC and therefor has the advantage of using encryption on the control session, helping reduce the risk of prying eyes. It also has a pretty cool way of letting…
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That dang “Unused Icons” popup…
Drives me crazy when Windows XP pops up the “There are unused icons” balloon and unfortunately it isn’t as intuitive as you’d think to turn it off. Fortunately the guys at “HowToGeek.com” have the directions to turn it off here.