Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

It’s the Easter holiday season so I will show you how to uncover a really cool Vista boot-up screen.  There is the default and boring black boot screen of Windows Vista (shown below), however, there is also a “hidden” boot screen created by Microsoft.  The alternate boot screen is inspired by the starry display seen [...]

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Being able to resize partitions using only Vista’s administrative tools is one of it’s features that I love.  In XP, this is not possible unless you have a 3rd party tool like Partition Logic. By using Disk Management, you can enlarge or shrink a disk partition in Vista.  Be warned though, when dealing with disk [...]

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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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By default, the Run command is not visible on the Start Menu in Windows Vista unless you are using the classic Start menu. If you love the new Aero theme, switching to the classic style is not an option. Having the Run command available is a basic necessity for more advanced users who routinely access [...]

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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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Backup, backup, backup… that’s the tip you always hear from wiser computer users.  Somehow we tend to be lazy and don’t really realize the importance of having a backup until a disaster occurs. In this tutorial, we will show you how to properly backup your hard disks to DVDs so that you can restore from [...]

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Windows Defender is a built in malware protection software included in Windows Vista.  If you are running other spyware and malware protection tools like Avira, Norton or McAfee, it is a good idea to turn off specific redundant Defender processes to avoid system performance loss.  On the other hand, you might not be satisfied with [...]

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Can’t seem to find the Mail icon in your Control Panel? Well, here’s another quick tutorial that might help a few Administrators out there! I wasted quite a bit of time trying to figure this one out! Basically I was trying to setup Outlook 2007 on my Windows Vista Ultimate machine to connect to an [...]

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If you’re working on Windows Vista, you probably have seen your fair share of error messages already. It’s definitely many more than on Windows XP SP2. One that I came across recently on a client computer was the following: Windows Explorer has stopped working. Windows is searching for a solution. Windows Explorer is restarting. This [...]

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