In Windows 8 Microsoft removed the user interface for creating and viewing the Windows Experience index on the System Control Panel. Even though it is not an accurate benchmark of a computer it does give some basic and especially quick indication of performance of some of the major parts of a computer. Below, I show…

Windows 10 has just released but most people will receive it in “waves” spanning multiple months. If you don’t want to wait, you can take things in your own hand and get on with it right now. This method will stay and will be available at later times as well in case you need to…

Many users, who need basic photo editing/organizing functionality used to use Microsoft’s Picture Manager (formerly known as Photo Editor) before. This useful utility was included in the Office suite of applications. Starting Office 2013, Microsoft has removed Microsoft Office Picture Manager from its Office suite. All is not lost, however, as it simply moved to the…

More often than not, when I have a look at a client’s computer I find they use the default computer name, as it came from the shop where they bought it. Although there is nothing wrong with using a computer with a name like windows-2jkfk263 or ubuntu-52df53, it is nicer and possible easier to work…

Nowadays, speeding up a computer is probably cheapest done by replacing the traditional hard disk (HDD) with a Solid State Disk (SSD). SSDs are more than 10 times faster than HDDs, but are also more expensive, at least for the time being. For comparison, a 3TB HDD can be had for about €110 while the some amount…

… is a bad thing. Some think they can strengthen their defences against malicious code by installing multiple anti-malware applications. This is plain wrong: Having more than one anti-malware software on a single computer will lead to unpredictable problems, such as false positives, false negatives and other system errors. You should pick one of the…

Many computer problems can be seen before they actually happen or before they cause real trouble. These can be easily caught by looking at the logs created by Windows automatically. The most important logs are found in the Event Viewer -> Windows logs -> System, in Computer management: Checking these logs once a month helps…

It’s not a best practice to not ask the user for a password at login (from a security point of view), but in certain cases it does make sense to do so. Such cases may be, for example, if the computer is used in a kiosk mode or as a media centre at home. To…

When friends and family ask me for help with their computer I often use Teamviewer to access their computer remotely and do the necessary troubleshooting. However, more often than not getting Teamviewer up and running on their computer is a challenge. They don’t remember where it was saved/installed the last time, where to get the…

It is much faster and eco-friendly to install Windows from a USB drive than a DVD, if you have one larger than 4GB. The steps to perform is as follows (you need to issue these commands from an elevated command prompt):

 Once the above commands have been successfully performed, all that is left to do…