Windows

How To: Fix Internet Explorer Freeze

September 9, 2010

Internet Explorer 7/8 has a nagging problem of freezing when its started. The tab opens up with the text “Connecting” and remains at the same state for an infinite amount of time. The culprit seems to be the Windows Live Sign-in Helper add-on and disabling this add-on fixes this freeze issue. To disable the add-on [...]

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Validating English Word Pronunciations

June 30, 2008

I find myself pronouncing a lot of English words differently from what my friends do. One of the reasons for this is the fact that English just happens to be one of the 5 languages that I speak. A couple of these word pronunciations also lead to a healthy debate with neither party accepting defeat [...]

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Firefox 3 – What is new ?

June 22, 2008

Firefox 3 was downloaded by more than 8 million users in 24 hours and it might well go down as the most downloaded software in 24 hours ! India’s contribution in the above 8 million was 226K  and US was the highest with 4632K. Talking of new features in FF3, Alex Faaborg, the user experience [...]

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How To: Activate or Deactivate a Service on Linux

June 13, 2008

A service is a long running executable which does require any user intervention and is configured to start when the operating system is booted. On Windows, the services are managed via services.msc and you can also communicate with a NT service using the SC tool. On Linux the services can be controlled via the chkconfig [...]

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Safely Remove USB Hardware

June 11, 2008

I have been reading in many posts which mention special tools to help in ejecting/removing a USB disk. The Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” feature has been notorious for hiding itself after installing the new hardware. You do have the option of Ejecting the hardware; however this becomes a pain if you are working with multiple [...]

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Cleanup your hard drive with WinDirStat

May 14, 2008

At my workplace I somehow managed to eat up almost all of the 40GB on the primary partition and I had no clue as to what directory/file was eating up the space. As usual, Windows XP has no inbuilt tools to accomplish the simple task of finding the culprit directories/files. In my earlier post, I [...]

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Xobni is now publicly available

May 6, 2008

Xobni is an excellent add-on for Microsoft Outlook and has definitely simplified email management for me. Even Bill Gates fell in love with this application and referred it as the next generation of social networking. (Microsoft did try to acquire Xobni and it failed due to various reasons) Xobni was initially invite only and today [...]

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Screen Capture with Jing

May 4, 2008

Jing, a concept project from TechSmith is a handy screen capture utility. It also adds up as a useful screencast utility. One aim of the Jing project is to simplify the process of screen capture and screencasting and it does fulfill this aim. Jing has one of the simplest UI for taking screenshots. In SnagIt [...]

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Acer – Updating BIOS

March 22, 2008

The BIOS on my Acer 1694 laptop was 3 years old and I did manage to find an updated version of the same on the Acer support web site. However ever after trying for about say 10 times, I couldn’t upgrade the BIOS from Windows Vista. The upgrade from Vista always ended with a blue [...]

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Windows Vista SP1 released

March 19, 2008

Ah.. the day I have been waiting for ! Windows Vista SP1 has been finally released via windows update today ! I upgraded to Vista last year and there were a few issues bugging me including the file copy to external drives, WiFi connectivity, Printer Connectivity etc. Few of the issues were addressed by patches [...]

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