Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

If your children will be using your Windows Vista computer, you can protect them by using Parental Controls. Windows Vista Parental Controls can control which websites your children can access, what games they can play, when they can use the computer and which programs they can run. To effectively set up Parental Controls for a [...]

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System Restore is a useful tool that you can use to reset your computer’s settings to an earlier time. It can be very helpful in times of crisis, when your computer fails to work as it should. However, you can only restore your computer’s settings if you have a valid restore point to set it [...]

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Prefetch is a feature, introduced in Windows XP, that stores specific data about the applications you run in order to help them start faster. Prefetch is an algorithm that helps anticipate cache misses (times when Windows requests data that isn’t stored in the disk cache), and stores that data on the hard disk for easy [...]

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If you want to improve your searches, the best place to start is with the indexing feature itself. In Control Panel, open the Indexing Options window to show the folders in which Windows currently looks for files. Here, you can choose each folder to include in the index; you can index an entire drive index [...]

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Most components directly attached to your motherboard—including PCI slots, IDE controllers, serial ports, the keyboard port, and even your motherboard’s CMOS—have individual interrupt requests (IRQs) assigned to them. An interrupt request line, or IRQ, is a numbered hardware line over which a device can interrupt the normal flow of data to the processor, allowing the [...]

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By default, the Quick Launch toolbar comes with a Show Desktop button, which allows you to quickly hide all open windows and access stuff on your desktop, and then quickly bring them all back when you’re done. But what if your Quick Launch toolbar doesn’t have one? If your Show Desktop icon got deleted in [...]

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To avoid some of the drawbacks of Vista’s Sleep power-saving mode, you can hibernate your PC. Hibernate saves a copy of everything in your PC’s memory (RAM) onto your hard disk before it shuts down. Windows uses the file hiberfil.sys, stored in the root folder of your hard disk, to hold your hibernation data. Because [...]

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We know the pain of forgetting a lost password.  If you only use a single administrator account and you forgot THE password, you’re dead.  To preempt this scenario, Vista lets users create a password recovery disk. Since this is a preemptive tool, you need to do this while you are still logged in to Vista.  [...]

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Has your processor been at 100% utilization lately? If you went to the Task Manager in Windows and looked at your processes tab, you may have noticed a process called msmpeng.exe eating up all your available CPU. So what is msmpeng.exe and how can you prevent it from slowing your system down? Well, unlike what [...]

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