Analyze Windows 7 System Resources

How To Quickly View And Analyze System Resources When Using Windows 7

While using Windows, it may become necessary to find out CPU usage, memory usage , disk as well as network usage especially when trying to troubleshoot performance issues.

Windows comes with a handy dashboard that shows all of the above information at a glance. Continue reading »

Windows 7 Taskbar Icons

2 Ways To Enable Or Disable System Icons on Windows 7 Taskbar

The default Windows 7 settings for taskbar includes all the system icons like clock, volume, network, power and action center as being active and displayed.

In order for any of these system icons to prevent from being displayed in Windows 7 taskbar: Continue reading »

Laptop Disassembly Tips

Precision Screwdriver Set

Here are a few tips that may help you strip down and reassemble laptops:

• Use a digital camera or camera phone to take a shot of each stage of the disassembly for reference when you are ready to reassemble it. Zoom in and take separate shots for areas where you have various plugs and connectors or wires running in a specifc way so you know exactly how they were before you took them apart. (unless you have a really good memory!)
• Use scrap sheets of A4 paper to map out screw positions. Sketch a point (or points) of reference like a battery compartment or RAM module cover on the paper so you know what way up it goes and stick each screw to the paper with clear tape so when you’re finished taking all the screws out of the bottom of the laptop they will all be stuck in their corresponding positions on the piece of paper. Depending on the laptop I may have 2 or 3 sheets of paper with screws on – bottom of unit, under the keyboard and motherboard screws. Doing this will be a great help if you have to leave the laptop disassembled for some time (e.g. to order parts etc) as you will have no doubt as to which screws go where. Some makes and models will use the same length screws for most of the base assembly but others have all different lengths which makes it all the more important to remember where they go back. A ‘too-long’ screw in the wrong place could cause major damage! Continue reading »

Theme Companion CSS Override Plugin

WordPress Plugins

We recently set up a WordPress site for the New House Basketball Club in Sittingbourne and we used a theme from iThemes as the basis for the design. Quite a bit of CSS had to be changed to get it exactly how we wanted it so we used the Theme Companion plugin for WordPress to override the bits of CSS that we wanted to alter.
Normally we’d use a Child Theme instead of this plugin, but for themes that don’t support Child Themes, Theme Companion can be quite useful.

On the basketball club site, we had to make alterations like increasing the height of the header and logo area and ‘push down’ the top horizontal menu to compensate for the new height. Here is a sample of what we used to acheive this in the Theme Companion editor: Continue reading »

rel=nofollow on selected Blogroll links

I’ve been looking out for something like this for a while now. WordPress by default has a number of (not very useful IMO) relationships or ‘rel’ checkboxes you can select for various link relationships but rel=”nofollow” is not one of them.

All the plugins I looked at put the “nofollow” attribute on ALL links – you can’t select which ones you want.

Turns out you can easily add this option with a few lines of code. Without further ado, here’s where I got the idea and code from for this blog: How To Add “nofollow” To Certain Blogroll Links In WordPress 3.x

Thanks Trainman1405 for the info!

Parent Password for Home Access Laptop

Home Access Grant

We recently did a complete system recovery on an Acer Extensa 5235 that had a dead hard drive.

This was one of the ‘Home Acess’ computers provided by Becta the now closed government funded grant scheme to help low-income families own a computer.

The client had neglected to make her recovery DVDs whiled the system was up and running.
Usually if we don’t have the recovery DVDs or CDs we can install an OEM version of Windows using the product key on the Windows sticker attached to the laptop, resulting in a nice clean Windows install without all the crap that the manufacturers install alongside Windows. However, the Home Access laptop in our care didn’t have a product key on the sticker.

The license sticker reads: “Windows 7 Pro Natl. Academic Only OA” with a few tracking numbers and bar codes on it. Not very useful for installing Windows!

Luckily we had created a set of 3 recovery DVDs on an identical model that had come in months ago – just in case!

So Windows installed – no problem there, but… When it was time to log into Windows, we were presented with two preconfigured user accounts – Learner and Parent. Learner had no password and was a ‘Limited Account’ which basically means we couldn’t install anything or even update Windows using that account. Parent was a password protected administrator account but we had no password since the client had misplaced the original documentation provided by Comet. Continue reading »

Stupid Laptop Designs

Laptop Repairs

Updated November 20th 2011

Some laptops are designed to be relatively easy to open and repair but others are the absolute pits.

Because we do see a lot of different brands and models it’s not easy to remember which are the ones that are going to need some extra time and expertise to disassemble and repair.

We thought the best thing is to make a note of them here where we can refer to them later and also possibly help other people who are looking for confirmation for: “Yes, you really do need to disassemble the WHOLE laptop to get to the bit you want” sort of thing.

Here I’m going to start on a list of laptops and netbooks that need to be put in the ‘Ridiculously difficult to open and repair for no good reason’ category.
We shall be adding to the list as we come across more stupidly designed models. Continue reading »

Avast + Malwarebytes = ❤

Avast & Malwarebytes

Avast Free Antivirus is a very capable tool which I recommend to my clients.
I know many like AVG as their free antivirus solution but I find the more recent versions of AVG to be very resource hungry. If you stick it on a machine with a single core CPU, it’s like installing the software equivalent of a lead weight.  Avast 6 is still lightweight enough to make just a small impact on performance.

Malwarebytes is the tool to use if you want to clean up a nasty malware infection on your PC. It’s recommended by experts on all the malware help forums. Best of all, you can clean up your system for free! I was so impressed with the detection and removal capabilities of Malwarebytes that I decided I should buy the full version for our in-house PCs. The full version adds real-time detection and malware site blocking capabilities. (We’ve since become resellers of Malwarebytes!)

At the moment I use Avast (free) Antivirus and the full version of Malwarebytes on my main workshop PC. They compliment each other beautifully but they can get in each other’s way if you don’t set them up right. Here’s how to do it… Continue reading »

Windows 7 won’t Log Off or Shut Down

Shutting down......still shutting down....

After spending ages disabling things like sound card, LAN, Avast Internet Security, Malwarebytes and everything in MSCONFIG, we still couldn’t get the Packard Bell iMedia desktop to log off or shut down. This was a machine running Windows 7 perfectly for the last six months.

Apparently MSCONFIG cannot disable all third-party services because there were still quite a few running on reboot.

Avast and Malwarebytes were then completely uninstalled but the machine still would not log off or shut down.

Process Explorer was then used to find what else was running when the machine started up in Normal Mode.

Turns out the culprit was something called Rapport from a company named Trusteer. There was no way to disable the Rapport services but once we uninstalled it all our shut down problems vanished.

Hope this helps someone else from wasting a few hours!

* Update- Another Rapport problem on an unrelated system…

Today (25th October 2011) we got a Toshiba laptop in that would consistently ‘blue screen’ (BSOD) everytime it was booted into Normal Mode. In Safe Mode it booted fine. The BSOD referenced: “A Driver has overrun a stack-based buffer”

The dump files were analysed and it was found RapportEI.sys was the cause of the blue screen fault. The Safe Uninstall tool from the Trusteer Rapport website was used to uninstall Rapport because the Windows Installer would not run in Safe Mode. Consequent Normal Mode boots successful. (This system is running ESET Internet Security – not sure if this is relevant).

Photoshop – Fill with colour quickly

Photoshop

Back in the day I used PaintShop Pro and I was really comfortable with it. During those years I had a brief fling with Photoshop 7 which left me feeling utterly confused with her seemingly counterintuitive tools.

One of those things I seemed to do really often was fill stuff with the Paint Bucket tool. In PaintShop Pro, this seemed to work as expected and I got so used to the way it works; you just set it to 100% Tolerance to fill the whole layer or selection.

The Paint Bucket tool just doesn’t work that way in Photoshop – in fact it is very similar to the Magic Wand – it just fills with colour the same way it would make a selection. I had some retraining to do if I was going to grow up and move in with Photoshop…

I found out it’s actually quite simple to fill a layer (or selection) with colour in Photoshop – just hold down Ctrl and press Delete to fill with the Background Colour or hold down Alt and press Delete to fill with the Foreground Colour!