Windows Tools, Help & Guides

When you get to that point in time, when you decide to upgrade or re-install Windows.  Are you sure you have all the old Drivers or install disks lying around still ? Windows does recognize most devices available today, but not always. What do you do when it fails, and your driver installation disks are nowhere to be found ? Another issue to consider is that your device driver may have been outdated, making the old installers disk obsolete. This does by all means not only apply to older systems but may also apply to your brand new hardware.

If you want to stay ahead of this possible future problem, there is a great solution available:

Driver Magician v.3.5

Driver Magician offers a professional solution for device drivers backup, restoration, update and removal in Windows operating system.

Windows Guides’ Rating	Compatible with
5 out of 5

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We recently launched our suggestion box (Read about it here) where we ask you to help us improve our site, and to come up with suggestions as what articles to write. In response to that Bert H. asked us to write: “A clear and concise explanation about RAM. A lot of my co-workers are clueless about what it is, what it does, and why upgrading is simple.”

RAM the story behind…

RAM (or R.A.M) is an acronym for Random Access Memory (pronounced ramm). This is, your computers short time memory, which temporarily stores important data or information while the computer is working. In the early days of Computer Development, all data and information had to be stored on magnetic tapes in reels. In order to retrieve the data, you had to rewind the tape to the beginning and then search through the tape until you found the part needed. With RAM you didn’t have to do that anymore. The CPU (Central Processing Unit, or the number-crunching part of your computer) could access “randomly” parts of the memory, without having to search through the entire thing. RAM is organized and controlled in a way that enables data to be stored and retrieved directly from specific locations. Which of course saved a lot of time and energy. Thus making the computer faster and more efficient.

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Personally, I don’t see the point in upgrading your hardware if your computer does everything you need it to. However, sometimes it’s nice to improve what you already have. In this guide we will learn how to make the most out of the hardware you have and make Windows Vista run faster. (Here’s a similar list for Windows XP and for Windows 7.)

I highly recommend you create  a system restore point before you follow this guide.

Note: There is a lot of crossover with this guide and the guide to extend laptop battery life; some of the procedures, listed below, will help save power.

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Personally, I don’t see the point in upgrading your hardware if your computer does everything you need it to. However, sometimes it’s nice to improve what you already have. In this guide we will learn how to make the most out of the hardware you have and make Windows 7 run faster. (Here’s a similar list for Windows XP and for Windows Vista.)

I highly recommend you create a system restore point before starting.

Note: There is a lot of crossover with this guide and the guide to extend laptop battery life as some of the procedures, listed below, will help save power.

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In this article, I share five of the best free media players for Windows. If you have suggestions for other media players, let us know in the comments.

I chose these media players with the following requirements in mind:

• The media player should play most file types out of the box.
• The media player should be free and not include adware, spyware etc.
• The media players should work on all recent versions of Windows (XP, Vista, and 7.)

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The Windows 7 Enterprise is designed specifically for IT Professionals interested in experiencing the Windows 7 Enterprise on behalf of their organization, for both software and hardware testing purposes of the final version of the product. In addition, it provides the opportunity to become more familiar with the key improvements over previous versions of the Windows operating system.

This 90-day trial of Windows 7 Enterprise can be downloaded absolutely free until the end of the year (December 31, 2010). It will not require a product key; it is embedded with the download. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available and five languages are supported: English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. After the 90-day Trial expires, if you wish to continue to use the Windows 7 Enterprise, you will be required to purchase and perform a clean installation of Windows 7, including drivers and applications; Windows 7 Enterprise is not available through retail channels.

Official Guidelines by Microsoft:

Protect your PC by backing up your data first.

Don’t test Windows 7 on your primary home or business PC.

You have 10 days to activate the product. If not activated within 10 days, the system will shut down once every hour until activated.

The 90-day Trial will shut down once every hour when you have reached the end of the 90-day evaluation period.

Minimum System Requirements:

1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

1 GB of RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)

DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

DVD-compatible drive

Internet access

Download here (bottom of the page)