Windows Tools, Help & Guides

If you are on the move a lot, using your computer on many different networks, chances are that, after a while your computer has a pile of unused networks settings stored on your system.

Windows stores these settings so you don’t have to go around keeping track of each and every network you connect to–making it easier to connect to your preferred networks without typing in security keys and passwords every time.

Windows will remember each network you connect to and over time you might find a long list of networks that you no longer use or have the need for. How do you remove the unwanted ones ?

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On a brand new system (freshly installed) Burning CD’s and DVD’s in Windows 7 is a very fast and enjoyable experience. Then something happens, you suddenly experience that Windows 7 takes for ever to complete a burn session. Some have experienced it taking up to 2,5 hours to complete a DVD. Which would mean a transfer rate of about 370 kb pr. second. where about 4,500 kb pr. second  (15-17 minutes) is considered slow.

What happened ?

There can be a number of reasons, but what you experience might be that your computer (or the device controller) has switched from DMA-Mode to PIO-mode.

Say what?

I’d thought you’d say that. Before we get into how to fix it – let’s look into what DMA and PIO are. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my colleagues asked me recently if it is possible to prevent a certain group of people to use certain PC’s on our company network. If you have a domain set-up, it is quite easy, provided your set-up is done well.

My meaning of “if your set-up is done well” does not refer to how well your server software has been installed or anything of the sort. I refer to how well you have grouped your users in the active directory. We created groups for each level of user in our organisation, so it was quite easy for me to block a particular group of people from using certain workstations.

In this case, I was asked to prevent the Electrical and Instrument guys from using the PC’s allocated to the Mechanical Foremen, as the Electrical & Instrument guys has their own PC’s to work from.

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I recently ran into a problem at work with Windows 7. One of the users logged into his new workstation PC and I helped him set-up his profile. After he was happy, I left him to continue working. The next day he phoned me and asked me to have a look, all the settings etc had disappeared. I found this strange and started investigating just to find that he was logged onto the workstation as a TEMP Profile for no apparent reason.

I Google’d again just to find stacks of forums where very similar problems are discussed, but with no clear-cut solutions. After searching for a couple of days between my other work, I stumbled upon something that made some sense.

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As many of you may have noticed from one of my previous post, (Monitor CPU and Memory Usage with Just One Click in Windows 7), I am doing a little research about Powershell.  The new script language that is shipped with Windows 7.

Today I want to show you how to find the top 10 of largest files in a computer using this new feature.

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No matter how much money you have invested in a new computer, sooner or later you will face performance problems.

These problems are usually related with the CPU or the memory. Computers are becoming so complex that you need all the help you can get to find the source of the problems.

The first thing I do when I notice that my computer is not acting as it should is run Task Manager. With this tool you can easily see the usage of Memory and CPU of every process on your computer. I always do the same: look for the processes that are using more CPU and see if there are enough physical memory available.

So, why not have a utility that do the same with just one click and that can be easily found in your Windows 7 Taskbar?

To do this we are going to use one component of Windows 7, PowerShell, that can be also used in other Windows versions.

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