Category: Troubleshooting

(function() { var s = document.createElement('SCRIPT'), s1 = document.getElementsByTagName('SCRIPT')[0]; s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.async = true; s.src = 'http://widgets.digg.com/buttons.js'; s1.parentNode.insertBefore(s, s1); })(); digg The holiday season has always been a time for gathering -- but in recent years, it's also been a time when family and friends come bearing gifts of computer ...

The Bluefire e-reader for iPhone made a big splash last week because it's a free app that can read DRM-protected e-books, like the ones offered by many public libraries. We've reviewed Bluefire and shown you how to get borrowed e-books onto your iPhone, but there are two better and faster ways to accomplish this, without opening Adobe Digital Editions on your computer or syncing with iTunes. ...

Saving a multi-page article to Instapaper can be a pain. Caching each page individually takes several clicks, and some sites don't offer a single-page view of their articles. If you're using Safari 5, you can get around this problem with Safari Reader. When you activate Safari Reader, you'll get a highly readable text-only view that usually includes the entire article, all on one page. If you ...

Did you know that you can chat with your AIM buddies using Gmail's built-in chat? It's actually been a feature since 2007, but at some stage it seems like Google hid it away. For some reason, if you're using any display language other than English (US), you can't use the AIM integration. Fortunately, it's just a matter of hitting Settings in the top right of Gmail and changing the Gmail Display ...

If you're constantly being called on by friends and family to provide tech support, troubleshooting, and computer advice, you've probably had to install security applications on other people's computers more than once. Heck, you may do it just about every day. If so, you might want to grab SSDownloader -- an open source app which makes downloading current versions of popular antivirus, ...

S.M.A.R.T is an acronym that stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. It's a nice bit of intelligence that hard drive makers have been including into drive firmware for several years now. In simple terms, it's supposed to let you know that a drive is about to crash before the crash happens. You can then take measures to protect your data or, perhaps, return the drive to the ...

Due in no small part to the popularity of Windows 7, 64-bit desktop computing is finally starting to take off. Some developers were quick to get on board, but we're still a long way away from seeing the disappearance of the 32-bit compatibility layer (if it ever disappears). Mozilla recently started making x64 builds of Firefox available to Windows users, and now the popular anti-malware tool ...

SystemRescueCD is an incredibly useful, Linux-powered tool for troubleshooting and correcting problems on PCs that are in need of help. CDs and my workbench just aren't a good mix, though -- they tend to get forgotten in optical drives or sandwiched between case panels and scuffed beyond use. While it's been possible to dump Sysresccd to a USB flash drive for a while, it's gotten a whole lot ...

I don't have to look up Windows error codes often. You know the ones I mean -- they're those lovely hexadecimal heads-ups that sometimes pop up when a program acts up? When I do, however, it would be nice to have a simpler way to do it than sifting through Google or MSDN search results. ErrMsg is a free, portable utility which makes decoding those messages about as simple as it can get. Launch ...

I don't often run into corrupt or unloadable user profiles on my workbench, but when I do they can be very tedious to repair. There's a lot of registry tweaking and permission setting that I'd love to be able to leave up to an application -- like ReProfiler, a free, portable tool designed to fix exactly this problem. Highlight a user account, then click the properties button to see what ...

One thing I've found with a number of the malware infections that come across my workbench is that they do their best to make it difficult to run cleanup tools like MalwareBytes and SmitFraudFix. In typical malware author fashion, however, their application-blocking abilities are lazily programmed and pretty easy to sidestep. Here's what I do when an infection won't let me run my favorite ...

Just yesterday I wrote about FixWin, a free program which helps fix a number of Windows Vista and Windows 7 errors. It's a lot like Microsoft's web-based FixIt solutions. Today, there's another option and it comes straight from Microsoft. Their new Fix It Center is a program you can download for free which provides automatic fixes for a wide range of bugs and annoyances. Choose the issue you ...

Microsoft's FixIt solutions generally work well, but sometimes they just take way too long to run -- especially on Vista and Windows 7. Some of them also require a little more interaction than I'd prefer: I know where the registry key is to fix that stupid bug where DVD drives disappear from My Computer, I just want a point-and-click way to do it! Fortunately, The Windows Club has a nice ...

Process Explorer is one of the staples of the hard-core Windows geek. It's a Task Manager replacement which does so much more; some would say it does too much. It's produced by Microsoft-acquired Sysinternals, which have been making some of the best in-depth system utilities for Windows even before Microsoft bought them out (years ago). My favorite feature in the new update is that I can now ...

TeamViewer has always been a great, no-fuss way to connect to remote computer systems. With the (sort-of) recently added presentation features, voice and video chat, and improved window sharing options, version 5 of the desktop app is the best release so far. And now -- despite what my pal Constantin at TeamViewer told me a bit over a year ago -- they've launched an iPhone app [iTunes web ...