No, you haven’t gone off the deep end, but you could be hearing voices—from your Windows. It’s all a part of an enhanced administration experience: alerts when events pop up on the screen but not in the logs. Called Narrator, it is a speech synthesizer that comes with Windows as part of the Accessibility tools. Here’s how to use it: If you didn’t add them when you installed Windows, insert the Server CD and go to Start | Settings |…
It’s the one of the worst things you can do, and it makes you feel like a complete idiot. You forgot the password for the Administrator account of your Windows system. If you’ve just finished the install, check for an innocent mistake before you jump out the window or reinstall—enter the password in uppercase in case the Caps Lock key was on when you created the Administrator account. Didn’t do it? Hopefully you have another account that is a member…
You’re probably familiar with Start’s left side menu—but do you know why the program list is divided in two? Here’s what you need to know about the pinned items list found in Windows XP, and how you can customize it to easily access your favorite programs. The left panel of the Start menu consists entirely of a divided list of programs that Windows XP thinks will come in handy for you: the pinned items list above the separator line, and…
If you often work from Windows XP’s command prompt, chances are you know that you can cycle through a list of all the commands that you’ve typed in a particular session using the up and down arrows on your keyboard. You can also change the size of this history list by clicking the command button in the upper left corner, selecting the Properties command and and then changing the buffer size number on the Options tab under Command History. By…
How many times have you wished you had an easier way to open programs that have no application association? You double-click an unassociated file and Windows pops up the Open With dialog, prompting you to specify the application you want to use to open the file. Each time you have to scroll through the list to find the program, and chances are you pick either Notepad or WordPad. Gets old, doesn’t it? There’s an easier way. Add Notepad or WordPad to…
Many programs in Windows support the use of command-line switches that modify the way the program starts or functions. Microsoft Word, for example, supports an /M switch that prevents autoexec macros from executing at program startup. Most of the console commands (XCOPY, DIR, etc.) also support several switches. It’s easy to add switches to control the way an application starts. If you’re starting the application from a shortcut, just modify the shortcut to include the necessary switch or parameter. Right-click…
Windows Vista’s Start menu contains an integrated search feature that, in addition to searching for files on the hard disk, can also search for application shortcuts nested within the Start menu. For example, the Windows Explorer shortcut is nested in the All Programs | Accessories folder, but you can get to it very quickly by typing exp in the Start Search text box and pressing [Enter]. You can emulate the same type of timesaving search capability in Windows XP by…
If you aren’t feeling quite as secure with the location of your My Documents folder in Windows, don’t worry—you can change the properties of My Documents in order to move it to a different drive or rename it altogether. Here’s how to make it truly yours. My Documents is a quick, easy way to access documents because the folder is integrated throughout the Windows interface. You’ll find it in just about every address bar in sight (such as a…
Hidden clutter exists on your Windows XP machine in the form of duplicate files. Here’s how to free up valuable hard disk space by doing some early spring cleaning with the Duplicate Finder tool. Even if you’re a conscientious computer user (i.e., you regularly delete unnecessary files, empty the Recycle Bin, and run Disk Defragmenter), you may be unaware of a potentially big waster of hard disk space: duplicate files. Applications can litter your hard disk with duplicate files, or…
There’s lots of buzz about Windows Vista’s speedy search features, but what can you do to speed up Windows XP’s Search Companion? Here’s how to optimize your search with speed in Windows XP. One reason why Windows Vista’s Search tool is so fast is because, rather than searching your whole hard disk, it only searches the Documents folders. So the next time that you pull up Windows XP’s Search Companion, click All Files And Folders and select My Documents in…