kadaitcha.cx

This article explains how to remove the stupid Homegroup item from Explorer in Windows 7, and how to hide the Libraries group from Explorer too. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a bootable Windows 7 installation DVD or a bootable recovery disc you can rip an ISO image of it to your hard disk, install the image on a USB 4GB pen (flash) drive and boot from it, all in two easy steps. If you already have a bootable ISO image you can skip the whole of Step 1 and go straight to the easiest and last step, Step 2.

The beauty of the method described here lies in the fact that once your USB pen drive has been made bootable, you can create a directory and store any special drivers or standalone applications you might need, which means you don’t need driver disks either. When the flash drive boots and the Windows Recovery Environment is loaded you can install things like OEM drivers directly off the flash drive. Read the rest of this entry »

Scenario 1: You’re buying a new machine and you’ve spent the best part of a week or two investigating the absolute best bang you can get for your buck; your browser favourites list is full of references to benchmarking articles, reviews, and both performance and price comparisons. Finally you decide that you can buy an entire Black Edition 6 core AMD Phenom II processor-based system with 6GB of 1.6GHz RAM, two amazingly fast Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB HDD’s, a 24-inch 1080p high definition monitor and a factory over-clocked PowerColor HD 5850 PCS+ video card for less than the cost of Intel’s top-end i7 processor on its own. You bite the bullet, buy it, install Windows 7, and with much fanfare and expectation you run the Windows Experience Index (WEI) tool only to have your ego pitifully deflated by a horrible 5.9 rating for your hard disks, which are in RAID0 configuration and pumping more than 4x the bandwidth of a standard hard disk.

Scenario 2: You spent a small fortune on the best and fastest laptop you could find, which has Vista installed and gives a Windows Experience Index of 5; you upgrade to Windows 7 and your ego is pitifully deflated by a shocking score of 2.

In this article kadaitcha.cx will explain the discrepancies and advise you what to do about it. Read the rest of this entry »

This page provides advice, links to resources, sample sounds, high-definition videos and guides to help you show off the capabilities of your Windows 7 surround sound system. Unless you have a great collection of Dolby digitally encoded DVDs or some of the more recent Dolby encoded PC games, 3D surround-sound samples are generally hard to come by, but not now. Read the rest of this entry »

When Firefox started to become popular kadaitcha.cx watched the site’s browser stats for Firefox creep up to and then surpass the 10% mark. There was much rejoicing back then because if 10% of visitors were using Firefox then there was finally a serious competitor to Internet Exploder, and that was taking place despite the Microsoft Borg’s shenanigans in forcing users to comply with its will. A few years later, in 2009, kadaitcha.cx watched as the Firefox stats crept up to close to 30%, but still not surpassing Internet Exploder as the preferred browser. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t get ripped off when looking to buy a USB pen drive for use with Windows 7′s ReadyBoost cache.

Caveat Emptor

Not all ‘Hi-Speed” USB flash drives are high speed. Unwary consumers can be caught out by misleading words or, as in most cases, completely missing information about the USB flash drive’s read/write specifications or it’s ability to support ReadyBoost. Read the rest of this entry »

Agent Ransack has been around for a decade or more and it’s fast, reliable, stable and so feature rich once you’ve used it you might wonder how you ever managed without it.

From the website:

Agent Ransack is an award winning file searching tool from Mythicsoft. It is a freeware ‘lite’ version of FileLocator Pro and offers a comprehensive set of features to find information in even the most obscure file formats. Read the rest of this entry »

The original title for this Knowledge Base article is “Unexpectedly slow startup in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2″.

Consider the following scenario:

• You have a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

• This computer is connected to a high resolution monitor.

• On this computer, the default dots per inch (DPI) display setting is set to a value other than 96 DPI.

In this scenario, the computer has an unexpectedly slow startup time after a change is made to the default DPI display setting. Then, the computer has an unexpectedly slow startup time every other time that the computer is started.

See the Knowledge Base article for the steps needed to determine if you should apply the available hotfix.

Microsoft calls the Command Prompt in the System Recovery Options “the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE)”. In this article we call it what it is, a command prompt.

If you need instructions on starting the recovery tools there is a step by step guide here. Once the System Recovery Options menu is displayed click Command Prompt:

Click to enlarge...

In this article you will be using a tool called Bootrec.exe to repair A) a corrupt master boot record (MBR), B) a damaged boot sector or C) Windows 7′s Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Windows 7-based computer doesn’t start because the master boot record (MBR) has been corrupted. When you try to use the Startup Repair tool to fix the MBR, the Startup Repair tool reports that no problem was found.

When a USB flash drive is inserted in a computer, the computer hardware sometimes reports that the USB flash drive is the system partition. The Startup Repair tool examines the USB flash drive instead of the actual system partition on the hard disk. Because Startup Repair cannot locate the corrupted MBR, it does not detect a problem.

To avoid this behaviour, remove the USB flash drive before you run the Startup Repair tool.

If you do not have a USB flash drive then disconnect any external disks you have attached to the computer.

If the problem persists see Advanced Startup Troubleshooting in Windows 7.