William D Buchanan » Tips & Tricks

Create Shutdown & Restart Icons for Vista/Win 7 on the Desktop

William Buchanan — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:48:00 +0000

If you are not too thrilled with the Windows Vista/7 shutdown menus or just want the convenience of having those options on your desktop it’s pretty simple to do.

Here’s how to create a shutdown shortcut on your desktop:

Right click an empty space on the desktop and select New | Shortcut. In the box labeled "Type the location of the item," type: Shutdown.exe -s -t 00 Click Next to continue. Type a name for the shortcut (e.g. [...]

"An Unexpected Error Occurred" When You Right Click on a Network Connection in Windows XP

William Buchanan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:41:00 +0000

When you try to right click a network connection in the Network Connections folder in Windows XP and select Properties, you get an error message that says "an unexpected error occurred". Not very descriptive, so what is the problem? The most common cause of this problem is damaged registry settings that prevent you from viewing the network connection’s properties.

To repair this problem:

Click Start | Run In the Open box, type: regsvr32 %systemroot% \system32 \ netshell.dll Click OK in [...]

Unable to Upload Files to Live Meeting

William Buchanan — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:10:16 +0000

I ran into an interesting problem recently with a client who was trying to upload a file for a Live Meeting in which she was the presenter. Her presentation was created in Power Point 2007 and had the extension .pptx. When she attempted to upload the file to Live Meeting she was prompted to install an ActiveX control to convert the .pptx file to a Live Meeting (.lmp) file. The problem came when installing the ActiveX file, when she clicked [...]

Program Windows Are Blank When You Use the RUNAS /USER:ADMINISTRATOR Command in Windows XP

William Buchanan — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:55:00 +0000

A client of mine had this issue recently. When you try to start a program with administrative privileges in Windows XP by using the Runas command, the program window opens but it’s empty. This happens because of an issue with permissions. There is a fairly simple workaround for the problem.

To work around this problem, keep the first Command Prompt window open. To do so:

Click Start, and then click Run. In the Open box, type cmd, and then [...]

Windows XP Doesn’t Remember Settings in Explorer

William Buchanan — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:36:02 +0000

I ran across this gem recently when I had some folders in Explorer that were set up to show in the Details view, but some worked and some did not. What I found out is by default, Explorer in Windows XP will remember the customization settings for up to 400 folders. When you exceed that limit, it will no longer retain the settings. There are a couple of ways you can fix this issue…

You can manually edit the registry [...]

Problem Printing From Vista to XP

William Buchanan — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:56:30 +0000

I ran into this problem the other day while trying to print from a laptop running Windows Vista to a PC that was running Windows XP. The XP machine had a USB printer that was being shared and was visible on the network. I installed the shared printer through the Add a printer function as a network printer on the Vista machine and it installed without error. When I tried printing something to the newly installed printer nothing happened, no [...]

Rename Multiple Files with the Tab Key

William Buchanan — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:45:00 +0000

We discussed earlier about how to rename a bunch of files in Vista, but what if you want to rename a group of files with names that discribe each one? Suppose you have a bunch of photo that you took with your camera and they have been named something like DSC_0001, DSC_002 and so on. Good news, you don’t have to go through the “right click and Rename” process each time.

Here’s how you do [...]

Rename Multiple Files in Vista

William Buchanan — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:36:01 +0000

At some point you may need to rename a bunch of files at once on your computer. This is a simple little trick for renaming files in a batch on Vista using a common file name and numbers added in sequence automatically.

Here’s how:

Highlight (select) all the files in the folder that need to be changed. Right click and select Rename. Type in a name you want to use for all files selected and hit Enter.

Now the first file that was selected in [...]

Speed Up Your 802.11n Connection

William Buchanan — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:09:15 +0000

The latest standard for wireless networking is 802.11n that clocks in speeds of above 100Mbps. If you’ve upgraded your wireless networking equipment to 802.11n you may not have experienced the performance boost you were expecting. By default, Windows XP is not optimized to handle this increase in speed. You can edit the registry to turn on a feature called Receive Window Scaling that will help XP take advantage of this speed increase. As always,