January 2009 - Mike's Window

Mike's Window

A commonly held 'view.. '

"Well, it worked in Windows 95!"

MVP Award years

2005 - 2006 - 2007

2008 - 2009 - 2010

2011 - 2012 - 2013

The original MVP logo

My Favourite Utilities

Speedfan is a great hardware monitor which can automatically control fan speeds, warn when temperatures are rising in the case, and do a SMART scan of your hard drives. A 'must have'.. http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Piriform Speccy tells you what is inside the box and with great accuracy.. http://www.piriform.com/speccy

Networx shows download/upload bandwidth used.. http://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/

Piriform Recuva is probably the best file recovery utility around and is free too.. http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Treesize shows you what you have got, where it is, and how much space it is all using.. http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

Windows 8 alternative start menus.. Classic Shell.. http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

Stardock Start8.. http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/

EaseUS Partition Manager is the best free utility of its type.. http://www.partition-tool.com/download.htm

YoWindow, a weather utility which appears to work with the Windows 8 desktop.. http://yowindow.com/

My Favourite Gadgets - Windows 7 and Vista only..

Gas Buddy.. http://www.londongasprices.com/VistaGadget.aspx

NetMeter.. http://addgadget.com/

Network Monitor.. http://samwtucker.com/

Asst'd gadgets.. http://gallery.djinngo.com/gallery/index.html

Weather fun.. http://yowindow.com/

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Windows 7 – is it ‘King’ material? In my opinion..

The news is that Windows 7 will skip from Beta 1 to RC very soon. The beta testers have been sending in reports to the MS Beta team as the rate of one every fifteen seconds. So, is Windows 7 working well? It certainly should be by the time that the RC...

Published Sat, Jan 31 2009 11:00 by Mike Hall

Filed under: Vista, XP, General, Windows 7
Windows 7 questions..

If you hover the mouse over the Internet Explorer icon in the Start Menu, a flip out menu appears.. If you hover the mouse over the Microsoft Word 2007 icon in the Start Menu, a flip out menu appears.. Start Menu flip-outs are possible.. If you attach...

Published Thu, Jan 29 2009 23:42 by Mike Hall

Filed under: General, Windows 7
This is my Windows 7 Start Menu..

.. but the list of programs shown is not definitive yet. Some of the entries exist because I am trying them out on behalf of some of my local clients. So far, there are twenty eight icons showing and the icon size is set to ‘small’. They have...

Published Fri, Jan 23 2009 23:20 by Mike Hall

Filed under: Vista, XP, General, Windows 7
Annoying problems..

Yeah, yeah.. so the weasel word for problems these days is ‘challenges’ and, in fairness, it is not too far off of the mark in that many of the problems encountered ‘challenge’ one’s sanity. Challenge #1 Why is it that windows do not hold their set position...

Published Mon, Jan 19 2009 13:23 by Mike Hall

Filed under: Windows, General
Say your goodbye’s..

.. and don’t look back because it is not allowed. You will move forward. You will adopt new ways to work even though the new ways do not make it easier for you. They are trying to make it easier for you, and you must see and agree to that. The alternative...

Published Fri, Jan 16 2009 14:20 by Mike Hall

Filed under: General, Windows 7
48 Hours later..

and I had six hundred and four hits on my ‘Windows 7 Quick Launch’ piece. I have had this many and more hits on other pieces which have appeared in this blog, but never is such a short time. This tells me that at least six hundred and four people wanted...

Published Mon, Jan 12 2009 13:58 by Mike Hall

Filed under: General, Windows 7
Windows 7 so far..

I do like it and it works very well on my aging computer, but I have to say this.. Regarding the removal of some features which I and many more see as ‘ease of use’, I am seeing the present response as 'take it or leave it', a response which...

Published Sun, Jan 11 2009 9:40 by Mike Hall

Filed under: General, Windows 7
Windows 7 Quick Launch..

is hidden!! Right click in the taskbar -> Toolbars -> New Toolbar... Now search in C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ for the folder "Quick Launch" Then un-pin everything from the superbar .. but not anymore...

Published Fri, Jan 9 2009 21:36 by Mike Hall

Filed under: Windows 7
Features and Functions.. Operating Systems

First question.. Do you use the XP or Vista Quick Launch bar? If you do and you are intending to migrate to Windows 7 at the earliest convenience, I would suggest that you find some other way to organise your program icons. The Quick Launch bar...

Published Fri, Jan 9 2009 13:40 by Mike Hall

Filed under: Windows 7
nVidia custom resolutions..

This is a useful feature if you have a monitor like a Dell P990 (Trinitron CRT). The trick is to go into Control Panel > nVidia Control Panel and head down to ‘Manage custom resolutions’ For the Dell P990, 1280 x 960 works well because...

Published Thu, Jan 8 2009 20:54 by Mike Hall

Filed under: Vista, Utilities, General
Windows 7 Beta..

I have installed the 32bit version because the scanner does not have 64bit drivers available. If I can’t get the scanner recognised, I will install the 64bit version of Windows 7. Twenty minutes install from start to finish. It picked up ALL of my hardware...

Published Thu, Jan 8 2009 15:51 by Mike Hall

Filed under: Windows 7
Snappy start-up = no features

I did something recently that I have never done before. I used the ‘disable’ function in WinPatrol to eliminate some start-up items. For the most part, they were the ones which auto start but don’t show in the notification area, so I...

Published Mon, Jan 5 2009 13:39 by Mike Hall

Filed under: Hardware, Utilities, General
Features and Functions.. Browsers

When I ran IE6 as my default browser, like many others I also had the Google toolbar installed but, other than the Google search box, I didn’t use any of its other features. Did I reduce the toolbar footprint and customize it down to the search box only...

Published Mon, Jan 5 2009 12:23 by Mike Hall

Filed under: IE7, General

January 2009 - Mike's Window

A commonly held 'view.. '

MVP Award years

The original MVP logo

My Favourite Utilities

My Favourite Gadgets - Windows 7 and Vista only..

Links

Syndication

Recent Posts

Tags

Archives

Blog Archive List

Windows 7 – is it ‘King’ material? In my opinion..

Windows 7 questions..

This is my Windows 7 Start Menu..

Annoying problems..

Say your goodbye’s..

48 Hours later..

Windows 7 so far..

Windows 7 Quick Launch..

Features and Functions.. Operating Systems

nVidia custom resolutions..

Windows 7 Beta..

Snappy start-up = no features

Features and Functions.. Browsers