Everything from Consumer Tech to Cloud Computing, all mixed up with Baseball, Books, and Travel Writing
“I tired out Windows Live OneCare and now I can’t figure out how to get rid of it. What do I need to do to uninstall Windows OneCare from my computer?”
Ideally you should be able to remove Windows Live OneCare simply by going to Add or Remove Programs (aka Programs and Features in Windows Vista). If that doesn’t work, Microsoft also offers a tool to help in uninstalling OneCare from your system.
“I read somewhere that my computer will be faster if it has more RAM. How can I find out how
Nischal writes, “How can I remove START from the Start button in Windows and replace it with my name?”
You need to do a fairly deep level modification of Windows to edit the Start button text and replace it with something else. You are directly editing details inside the explorer.exe file that is the Windows display layer, so if you make a change that messes things up you could very well end up with a computer that won’t work. Be sure to backup anything you care about before you venture down the path of making the required changes. If you’re still willing to take the risk for the vanity of having a custom start button, then follow the next several steps to get the job done.
Don writes, “I have set up my old Window XP Pro PC to my home theater system and it works fine. However, I would like to control the PC via RDC so I do not need a monitor or have to buy a video card to hook to my TV. I will RDC from my new Vista machine and have the music play through the Home theater and not the Vista PC. Is this possible? When i remote into the XP machine, all the sound goes to the Vista machine and not the home theater.”
By default Remote Desktop brings the sounds from the remote PC to the local PC, which is useful if you are truly working remotely but not ideal in your case. To keep the sounds on the remote PC playing through your home theater, you need to change one of the RDC options before you connect.
“Can I use the Xbox 360 Live Vision camera as a Webcam with my Windows computer?”
In a word, yes. You can use the Xbox Live Vision camera as a webcam with Windows XP or Windows Vista. After you connect the Live Vision camera to a USB port on your computer, the Found New Hardware Wizard should launch automatically. Choose the option to let Windows Update find the driver automatically. Once the driver is installed, the Live Vision camera should work with any software that supports USB cameras, like Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, etc.
The power management built into Windows doesn’t offer much customization in what gets turned on or off on your system under various configurations. I occasionally find it useful for conserving my laptop battery life, but often Windows power management is more hindrance than help. Local Cooling offers a solid alternative to Windows power management, with a number of handy features. The app automatically turns off your monitor, shuts down or hibernates your PC, and offers a very important option to suspend shutdown when specific applications are running. That last feature is a must because I’ve lost information due to aggressive power conservation features in the past. I don’t necessarily buy into the purported greenhouse gas reduction estimates generated by Local Cooling, but it does offer statistics regarding energy reduction over time, including a competitive feature where you can compare your power savings against the community of other Local Cooling users. [Windows 9x/XP/Vista $0.00]
Mike writes, “When I boot my XP machine I get a DOS screen with a “please select operating system to start” prompt. How do I change this so it just boots to the correct system without having to go through this screen?”
The option to select an operating system to start usually appears after you’ve installed more than one operating system on a computer. You can bypass it by turning off the selection option and setting a default operating system to load automatically. There are a couple of ways you can change your start up options so that your default operating system loads and you never need to see that screen again.
I use an app called Second Copy for most of my backups. You can schedule backups a million ways with custom profiles depending on whether you need to copy entire directories, only back up files that change or only look for new data at certain times of day. When I originally configured it, my Outlook PST backup would fail because you can’t copy the file while Outlook is open. I almost never close Outlook.
While Microsoft has something called Personal Folders Backup to manually backup Outlook, using it interrupts my workflow and it isn’t automatic. One of the reasons I use Second Copy is because you can automatically run applications before and after the backup operation. This allowed me to create a batch file to automatically close Outlook before the backup and a second batch file to re-open Outlook after the backup finish. It occurred to me you could do the same thing using a similar batch file, the command line copy operation in Windows and Windows Scheduled Tasks. This tutorial walks you through this free method for backing up Outlook.
CC writes, “If I were to use XP Pro remote desktop to access my home computer and send an e-mail, would the home computer’s IP show as the e-mail sender or would it show the IP of the computer currently being used?”
As long as the email client you are using is on the remote machine, connecting to a PC via Remote Desktop (RDC) to send mail will result in mail that appears to come from the remote machine. In a scenario where you connect to your home machine over RDC while using your laptop from a coffee shop, the IP address your email is from will be the IP address of your home machine, because that’s the Internet connection being used to send the mail.
I was curious about this myself and while it intuitively made sense that the IP address should be the one for the remote machine, (not the one you are connecting from), I still had my doubts. I tested this scenario with my laptop at several coffee shops using both the public WiFi and my Cingular BroadbandConnect card. In all cases, the IP address the mail appeared to be from was the IP address of my cable connection at home.
This same scenario came in handy for me when I was in China recently and wanted to check something on Technorati (which is blocked in China). By logging into my home system with RDC, I was able to use Technorati over RDC because my home machine was outside the Chinese firewall.
Rick writes, My Windows Volume Control has somehow been uninstalled, so that my attempt to follow your instruction for restoring
Jake Ludington 