Windows Vista: Sleep Mode

I have really only briefly described Windows Vista's new Sleep mode in the past. Sleep is a hybrid low-power state, it combines the benefits of Standby and the Hibernation low-power modes.In Windows XP, Standby mode turns off the monitor and hard drive and then your computer goes into a low power state. The advantage of this mode is that computer can resume quickly to its previous state by

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Windows Vista: Power Options

Windows by default can go into hibernate or sleep when they have been inactive for a period of time. To control when your computer hibernates or goes in to sleep mode follow the instructions below:From the Start menu, in the search field type power options, then click on it in the results.From here you can select which power plan you want your computer to use (such as balanced [balances power

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Windows Vista: Putting Your Computer into a Low Power Mode

When you're done using your computer for the day you should turn it off, but if you need to continue where you left off you can put it into a low-power state. There are two low power modes, the first is called sleep (a new feature in Vista) and second is called hibernation.In sleep mode the hard drive is turned off, then the the monitor and motherboard are put in a low power state. In

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Article: 529 Computing Tips

PC Magazine reports: "For this very special feature, we'll boil down that manual's hundreds of pages into hundreds of tips—529, to be precise—carefully organized into nearly three dozen categories. This should take the hard work out of being an expert!Crafted by our analysts and editors and tested in PC Labs, our tips compendium starts with the fundamentals of computing: the operating system and

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Windows Vista: Managing Services (Part 2)

In the first part of this article I explained how to access the services installed on your system. Now I am going to discuss how to manage them.From the Services management console you can start, stop, restart, or disable the different services on your system. When you start or stop a service, that is very obvious what it does. Although when you stop a service, it's only stopped until you

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Windows Vista: Managing Services (Part 1)

All modern operating systems have several programs that run in the background. These programs are known as Services. Some of these services perform mundane tasks, while others perform critical system operations.Unless you're performing some type of system maintenance or diagnostics, you will almost never need to worry about them. Most of the time they run quietly in the background and you

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Windows Vista: Turning Off Features

If you installed Windows Vista on your computer yourself, you may have noticed that you were not asked a lot of questions during the installation of the OS. Vista makes several assumptions about what it will and will not install for your computer.It tries to install the applications and features that people will most often use. Although like anything that makes automatic assumptions for you it

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Software: Google Earth 4.3 (Awesome Update)

Google Earth is an amazing application, but Google Earth 4.3 is awesome. Check out the following video which contains demonstrations of the new features in the program.

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Windows Vista: Enabling/Disabling the Hibernation Feature

To turn on or off the hibernation feature in Windows Vista, you have to do it from the command line. Follow the instructions below:Open the Start Menu, in the Search field type cmd then press Ctrl-Shift-Enter (this opens the administrative level command prompt).In the command prompt type powercfg /hibernate on then press Enter.Reboot your computer and the hibernate feature will be enabled.Note:

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Review: avast! antivirus 4.8 Home Edition

PC Magazine reports: "When the version number of a new software release is just 0.1 higher than the old one, I expect a ho-hum incremental update. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that avast! antivirus 4.8 Home Edition adds significant functionality: It now protects against spyware, rootkits, and other forms of nonvirus malicious software. Best of all, it's free for personal use."I was happy

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Windows XP: System Recovery (Continued)

I received a great question via email, about the last article I wrote (Windows XP: System Recovery). I was reminded that not all home computers (to be honest a good majority of them), will not ship with Windows Installation media from the factory.These machines generally include some type of system recovery media (such as: CD or DVD), or a recovery partition on your computer's hard drive. These

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Windows XP: System Recovery

There are times when Windows XP will not start properly because you have a corrupted system file, configuration, or possibly some type of driver conflict. You can easily identify this type of failure because Windows will partially start then stop during the boot-up process.Generally at this point you have two choices, do a clean install of the OS or do a system recovery install. A system

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Windows Vista: Freeing Up Disk Space After Installing SP1

Now that Windows Vista SP1 has finally been released, the following tip may come in handy if you need to free up a few hundred megabytes of disk space on your system.SP1 includes an uninstall feature that allows you to remove the the update if you decide you don't want it. This feature works by moving all the pre-SP1 files to a temporary location on the hard drive during the install of the

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Best FREE Windows Malicious Software Removal Tools (Updated)

These are the best free utilities for fighting malicious software (aka Malware). Malware can be defined as any software that installs itself on your computer without your permission, generally these types of programs will try to: monitor your computer activity, destroy data, steal information or steal resources (such as processor, memory, and network bandwidth) for malicious activities.The

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Intenret: Adobe Photoshop Express

I decided to check out Adobe's free Photoshop Express site (currently in beta), which is an online photo editor with two free gigabytes of storage. Personally I was not expecting too much from the site, but I came away pretty impressed. I found it to be a very simple to use photo editor, with some cool effects that will meet 80-90% of the average person's needs.I would suggest that you take

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Internet: Google Docs now wtih Google Gears

Google Gears is a technology that allows you to view and edit your online documents offline, without an active internet connection. As of March 31, Google Docs (an online word processor) is rolling out with Google Gears functionality. Initially offline access to your documents will be limited to: 1) viewing and searching your document list; 2) viewing and editing word processing documents.

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Windows Vista: Creating XPS Documents

Have you ever needed to keep a copy of a certain document that you created, but didn't want to print it out. For example, if you make online purchases, you may want to make an electronic copy of the receipt of the transaction for your records.One way to do this is use Microsoft's built-in XPS printer driver. When you print a document using this printer driver, the output will go to a local file

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