Windows XP calculator missing or disappeared?

Posted on September 24, 2009 - Filed Under Computer Tips | 1 Comment

You’re probably reading this article if you were going to find the calculator on your Windows XP machine to figure out some important calculation. After a bit of searching, you probably realized that your calculator is missing!

Pretty weird right? Well this can happen for a number of reasons, but basically your calculator is gone! If you recently installed a service pack to XP, such as SP2 or SP3, that could be the culprit.

Either way, here are a couple of ways you can get your calculator back in Windows XP!

“Duplicate name exists on the network” Windows error

Posted on September 21, 2009 - Filed Under Computer Tips | 3 Comments

Previously, I wrote an article about what would happen if you had two computers with the same IP address on the same network: an IP address conflict. But what happens when you have two computers with the same name on a network?

Well, in that case, you might end up seeing a message like the following:

Duplicate name exists on the network

At first, you might think the obvious answer is to just rename one of the computers, right? Well, you may also get this error even if no two computers have the same name on the network!

How to shrink PDF file size

Posted on September 19, 2009 - Filed Under Computer Tips | Leave a Comment

I’ve previously written in-depth articles on how to reduce the size of an image file, but have never written about PDF documents. PDF files with lots of graphics and images can become very large very quickly.

In this post, I will try to show you a couple of methods to reduce the size of a PDF file. Depending on whether or not you have Adobe Acrobat (the full version), you can try one method.

How to encrypt your USB flash drive

Posted on September 18, 2009 - Filed Under Computer Tips | 9 Comments

USB flash drives are great because they are really cheap and you can conveniently move data between computers. The only problem is when you store sensitive data on a USB drive and it gets lost or stolen!

Most people are intimidated by the words “encryption” because it involves fancy algorithms and names like “WPA, EFS, SHA1, etc”. However, there’s a very easy way to encrypt a USB drive in Windows.

How to create custom Run commands in Windows

Posted on September 14, 2009 - Filed Under Computer Tips | 3 Comments

If you’ve ever used the Run command box in Windows, you probably know you can type certain predefined commands to open programs, etc. For example, if you type “notepad” in the Run box, it’ll open Notepad in Windows.

If you type “cmd” in the Run box, it opens the command prompt. If you type “regedit”, it open the registry editor. So on and so forth. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could create your own predefined Run commands?

Merge, split, rotate, and repair PDF Files

Posted on September 10, 2009 - Filed Under Computer Tips | 1 Comment

Previously, I wrote about a nifty little tool called PDFHammer that lets you merge and edit PDF files online. Though it works well, it’s still convenient to have this ability without an Internet connection.

pdftk is a free toolkit that lets you manipulate PDF files in many different ways. The tool is run using commands entered into the command prompt, which may scare some people, but it’s not all that bad.