This forum is for prior post on the News server. Please note you WILL NOT! be able to post nor comment.
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…
If you’ve ever run the Windows Disk Cleanup utility, you probably discovered that your temporary files occupy a significant amount of space. You might select the Temporary Files check box in order to allow the Disk Cleanup utility to delete the files in the Temp folder, but the Disk Cleanup utility will not remove all of the files. The reason for this oddity is that the configuration for the Disk Cleanup utility does not allow deletion of files accessed in…
Outlook Express is a handy, easy-to-use e-mail client — it just needs a little help in the security department. Microsoft Outlook Express is a popular and free e-mail client that comes bundled with most versions of Windows client (except for Windows Vista, which replaces Outlook Express with Windows Mail). It’s easy to set up, and it’s easy to use. However, it’s also a target for a lot of current and future hacks and viruses — thanks to the fact that…
Find out how Windows XP’s Device Manager can help you track down non-present devices, which may still cause problems even though they’re not physically attached to your machine. When troubleshooting driver problems in Windows XP, one of the first places you may look is Device Manager, which provides detailed information about every piece of installed system hardware. In light of devices such as removable USB drives becoming more and more common, you may need information about devices that are not…
Finding your network’s free IP addresses in Windows XP Pro can work a little too well, giving you more entries than you can easily manage. Here’s how to narrow your search for unused IP addresses and output the results to a short, easy-to-read text file. When you’re troubleshooting DHCP problems in Windows XP Pro and want to find out which addresses in a range of IP addresses aren’t in use, you may open a command prompt window and launch a…
When you try to compress old files, the Disk Cleanup tool may stop responding and you may receive the following message: Disk Cleanup is calculating how much space you will be able to free on (C:). This may take a few minutes to complete. Scanning: Compress old files CAUSE This problem occurs when there is an incorrect entry in the registry that is used by the Disk Cleanup utility to locate compressed files. WORKAROUND Warning If you use Registry Editor…
When you double-click the My Computer icon in Windows XP, you see a list of all the drives on your hard disk. However, when you launch Windows Explorer, it displays the contents of My Documents in the right panel. If you like the way that the My Computer view displays all the disk drives when you first launch it, but prefer the Windows Explorer view, here’s how you can get the best of both views. Right-click on the desktop. Select…
Your Windows XP system probably has the Browse Folders setting configured to Open Each Folder In The Same Window in the Folder Options dialog box. However, sometimes you may wish to open a folder in a separate window. For example, you may want to have two windows open in order to use drag and drop to copy or move files from one folder to another. For these cases, there’s a little known keyboard trick that you can use to easily…
By sharing a folder in Windows XP Pro, it usually means that you want network users to be able to find and access the folder in the My Network Places tool. If you want to share a folder with only certain users, you can use the Net command line tool to essentially hide your computer and shared network folders. Follow these steps to create the hidden share: Open a command prompt. Type this command: net config server /hidden:yes. Share the…
I first ran across this problem when adding a virtual adapter to a VMware virtual machine, but it’s also an issue for physical adapters in a multi-homed system or one with multiple network adapters. When you add an adapter to a system that uses the NetBEUI protocol — such as Windows 2000 Professional — you might see the message “ERROR: A duplicate name exists on the network when you start the system.” Or, if you add the NetBEUI protocol to…