Tips & Tricks

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…

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 error, nothing…

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.

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.

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, back up the registry before making changes.