Posts Tagged ‘Windows’

Uninstall Specific Windows Features

While not immediately obvious, the Add/Remove Windows Components allows you to double click particular entries:

Double click Accessories and Utilities and you’ll see a sublist of Accessories and Games, which can also be double clicked to reveal even more specific programs to uninstall. Have the Powertoy Calculator? Uninstall the ordinary calculator. Never play the Internet Games? Uninstall ‘em.

Use the Same Keyboard + Mouse with Multiple Computers

Control two networked computers with the same keyboard and mouse using Synergy, a free program available from SourceForge.net. It’s available for all platforms, but we’ll delve mainly into the Windows usage. Install the latest version for all the computers you want to control, plus the computer with the controlling keyboard and mouse. (more…)

Windows Vista Features for XP

The latest version of Windows, Mojave Vista, is often criticized by others for being slow and having too many unnecessary features. We’re going to show you how to get several of Vista’s major features on XP - for free.

We’re going to also be including a list at the end of minor features touted by Vista, and XP alternatives. (more…)

Windows Media Player Always “On Top”

Rather complicated simply to enable a quick feature:

Right click on the Windows Media Player titlebar, select Tools, then select Options.

Check the box that says Keep the Player on top of other windows. That’s it.

Create PDFs with PDFCreator

‘Print’ anything into a PDF file using PDFCreator, a convenient method of saving documents, webpages, and anything else that can be printed into PDF files. Download it here at pdfforge.org. When you install it, it’ll setup a ‘printer’ on your computer that outputs PDF files.

(Left: Picture of one of our articles in PDF format) (more…)

Share Folders with Windows Live Foldershare

While there exists a seemingly infinite number of ways to send files to your friends, Windows Live Foldershare takes the cake for being the most convenient — once you set it up, which can have its own quirks here and there and may be considered “too much work.”

We’ll show you how to setup a sync so that both you and your friend (or whoever you’re sharing files with) can pick and choose which files to download. To begin, head over Foldershare.com, and hit the Get Started link and download the appropriate version. We’ll leave you to follow through the install and setup an account with Foldershare. (more…)

Master iTunes with XP’s Speech Recognition

As a follow up to our post on getting speech recognition for Windows XP (and 98, 2000), we’ve decided to write a series of tutorials on controlling your applications with it (The speech recognition is not as full featured as in Vista and therefore can’t handle much more than basic commands).

This collection of tips will focus on controlling iTunes (playback). We’ll be focusing on switching songs, and general play/pause and next track (we’re still working on getting previous to work).

Please note that I have Shuffle on for all of these tips. Also note that iTunes must be the active window for any of these to work. (more…)

Wallpaper Tagging in Vista

Everyone knows about the Windows Wallpaper section in Vista, which is categorized by tags, unlike the rest of the sections presented in the Wallpaper dialog. This tutorial will go over how to add your own wallpaper to the Windows Wallpaper dialog, and tag it so that it appears under a category. Here’s a YouTube explaining the steps from downloading the wallpaper to adding it to Vista’s wallpaper dialog.

Regular boring tutorial with pictures follows ahead. (more…)

Speech Recognition for Chinese and Japanese

Using a file from Microsoft’s Speech SDK, we can install both Japanese and Chinese speech recognition engines into Windows. This serves as a follow up to our previous post on getting speech recognition for free in Windows XP. Head over to the Microsoft Speech SDK download page and download the SpeechSDK51LangPack.exe. (more…)

Keep Software Updated with Secunia PSI

Keeping all the software we have on a computer updated is a pain - open this program, check for updates, open this program’s updater - Secunia Personal Software Inspector takes the work out by profiling all your programs and then checks for updates, and provides a link to the file you can update with. We’ll be showing use of Secunia PSI in this tutorial, and you can download it here. We assume you’ve installed it. (more…)