Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Today, we bring you a quick tip with which you may or may not be familiar. On it’s own, this tip isn’t useful but this is a supporting guide for tutorials where you’re told to change a file extension without any explanation of how to show the extension (disabled by default in Vista and 7) in the first place.

This guide will show you how to show file extensions in Windows XP and Windows Vista/7.

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Do you frequently have the same folders open when using your PC? i.e. your My Documents, My Music, Homework folders etc? If you do, it may be a little tedious to open these folders when you log off and on or restart your computer.

Here’s a quick tip to restore these folders when you restart or log off and on.

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Recently, I asked iTunes to organize my music directory (getting music from different sources other than just the iTunes store left it a little messy and I decided I’d let iTunes do its thing) and it did a great job; however, it left a bunch of empty directories. Although these empty directories didn’t pose any performance impact, they just looked… messy and I decided I’d delete them. I started doing this one by one and soon realized I had over 50 empty directories and sub directories. Being lazy, I decided to run a command to remove these directories. I’ve done this a lot in Linux so I figured it was easy; well, not quite, but it’s also not that hard. In this guide, I’ll show you what I did and hope you can find this useful in some way.

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If you are looking for a way to speed up your computers read and write speed and you like taking chances, then Striped Volumes are the way to go.

A striped volume uses the free space on more than one physical hard disk to create a bigger volume. Unlike a spanned volume, a striped volume writes across all volumes in the stripe in small blocks, distributing the load across the disks in the volume.

How does it work ?

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In this guest post, James Ricketts explores the basics of computer drivers. Find out more about James at the end of this post.

Device Drivers – An Introduction

Computer operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and Mac, and hardware components, such as sound cards, memory cards, and video cards do not speak the same language. To communicate effectively, hardware devices and operating systems require an interface. This interface is provided by device drivers. These drivers enable the computer operating system and installed software to communicate with the hardware devices.

In this article, you will learn:

• Why it is necessary to use only the latest drivers
• Which is better – manual driver updation process or automatic driver updation process
• What is Driver Finder?

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In the last guide, I showed you how to extract files from multi-part archives. If you want to create on of these archives yourself, follow this guide. This guide will show you how to create multi-part archives with the following tools:

• 7-Zip
• WinRAR

Why would you want to create a multi-part archive?

• You want to email a large file to a friend but your email limits attachment sizes to 20MB.
• You want to host a file and want people to have a greater chance of wasting less time with failed downloads.
• You have a file that’s over 4GB and you’re moving it to a file system that doesn’t support such a large size (i.e. FAT32.)
• You need to spread the archive across multiple thumb drives, CDs, DVDs etc.

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