Windows Tools, Help & Guides

In this guest post, James Ricketts explores how to deal with EXE issues on your PC. Learn more about James at the conclusion of this post.

Solving computer problems on your own means less downtime, less hassle and no or low cost. However, it is important that you know what problems you can handle on your own and which issues are best left to professionals.  For example, it is advised that most hardware-related problems are best left to computer experts. Similarly, it is advisable that you try and analyze most software-related issues yourself, as quite often, they can be easily resolved.

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Windows Guides reader, Jas, asks the following question:

I installed SP2 and ever since my laptop has been a nightmare.  Shutdown takes between 4 and 5 minutes and involves an unnecessary screen  “CONFIGURING UPDATES”.  Boot is not so bad but still takes an agonising 3 to 4 minutes with screens displaying messages that stages 1 , 3 are being updated.  In both cases there are long periods of blank screens which gives the impression that the machine has stopped working completely.

Is there any way in which I can uninstall SP2 completely? I have tried the stand Vista update uninstall but it always fails with the message   “NOT ALL UPDATES WERE SUCCESSFULLY UNINSTALLED“.

This guide shows you how to remove Vista SP2 and answers Jas’ question about uninstalling Windows Vista SP2 when the conventional method doesn’t work.

Yesterday, I showed you how to remove service pack rollback files, which allow you to revert from SP2 to SP1 or from SP1 to no service pack. If you followed these instructions, this guide is of no use to you as the rollback files are gone and you are stuck with SP2.

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If you are happy with your installation of Windows Vista SP2 (UPDATE: go here if you are not), you can remove the files, stored on your computer, that will allow a roll back. I only recommend this if you are looking to save space. With hard drives as big as they are today, I see no need to remove these files unless you are below 10% free disk space on your operating system’s partition.

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As software changes, some file formats a deprecated and, if you don’t convert these files, you may find you simply cannot open them anymore. There are a few things you can do to remedy this problem, learn what you can do, to open an old file format, in this guide.

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This quick tip is in response to a couple of readers’ questions on how to forcefully kill a program.

Sometimes a program will hang up and wont close. You can use task manager to kill the process or you can run a simple command. Learn how to do both of these in this guide.

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Please Note: This guide involves working with the Windows Registry. If this is your first time editing the registry, please read this guide to get you started. Learn how to backup and restore your registry here.

If you are tired of the balloon tips coming up in Windows XP or Vista, this quick simple guide will help you remove them. You can also bring them back again if you miss the company…

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In this guide, you’ll learn how to set up LDAP integration on Drupal. This guide is written for WAMP server, but should work on a LAMP server as long as you have root access. Read the rest of this entry »

In this guide, you’ll learn how to set up Drupal on your local WAMP server. Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including:

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

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In this guide, you’ll learn how to set up Wordpress on your local WAMP server.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

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If you would like to build your own website, you can do it on your own computer without putting it online. This can be useful for a number of reasons:

1. You don’t have your own web hosting to test with
2. You want to test a website before you put it online
3. You want to start a website that helps you organize your life, for example, but you don’t always have access to the internet

In this guide, you’ll learn how to set up Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your computer. This will be the base for your website and will create an environment for you to develop in.

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