When asking a Tech Support person, or someone you trust to remotely assist you, they may ask you “What is your computer name?” or “Please find me your computer name”. This process can be quite challenging for some people since every new operating system seems to change the process ever so slightly (while manufacturers, don’t).. Well, fear not – I’m going to list the simplest of ways to get that information so you can supply the details you need and move on.
In a more fragmented way, these tools were borne of necessity and never grouped together while I created them in the late 1990s – until now. Today, I give you three new tools to download and I simply call them Reboot / Log Off / Shutdown. Read on for download links and details.
You might have come here once or twice to see reviews of various hardware devices or software applications. But, one thing you may have noticed is that there aren’t star ratings attached to the reviews you see here. Why’s that? Well, let me explain.
One of the more unusual Windows-specific errors we’ve come across is the above pictured “This terminal server display is inactive”. There are certain conditions where this error occurs and a way to recover from this remotely. Read on for more details.
One of the biggest casualties with Windows versions after XP, was the loss of all those settings you could control in the “Display” applet in XP’s Control Panel. They allowed you to turn off a bunch of things that would improve performance for slower computers – and in some cases – take an unusable machine and make it useful again. Are you looking for those settings that will let you “Turn off Window Contents while Dragging” or how to turn off the “Aero” interface? look no further, all the details are here.
You might remember the recent articles called Laws of craigslist: Sellers and Laws of Craigslist: Buyers. Both articles were a great introduction to the idea of buying and selling online and were an incredible success here on the blog. Such an amazing success, that I thought I would add some more points to those two articles. If you haven’t done so yet, I encourage you to go check those out and come back for more Online buying and selling tips.
New with Windows Vista (and included in later versions) was the Windows Mobility Center. This great little tool typically allows mobile users to see and control many of the most obvious and useful settings on a Windows machine. The settings are arranged as tiles on a single window with each tile containing a specific setting. Also possible by OEMs, is extending the interface to include other tiles for controlling a system. I thought, this is cool and useful but really, really ugly. I thought, there must be other stuff I can do with this.
I was also looking for a quick way to do some Delphi-ish stuff in Windows, and what I found was incredible! If you’re a fan of Object Pascal, you should really check out Lazarus and Free Pascal. With those two, I decided to revive the Install/Uninstall tool and clean it up a bit while getting some of my programming legs back.
Are you an early adopter? If you’re reading this, you likely aren’t the pure definition of this category, but more of a combination of two or three of the categories (depending your risk tolerance). Based on my experience, there is a kind of category that seems to be missing from all this. Let me explain.
I’ve really been on the fence since I heard about a new service called APP.NET . The Twitter-like service was created by Dalton Caldwell as a paid-for service that will have a full API with (hopefully) a strong ecosystem. If you haven’t already, it’s worth your time to check out his blog article “Announcing an audacious proposal”. I won’t repeat what he says, but I wanted to add my own thoughts about why I decided to put up the money to back this interesting and important idea.