Windows Tools, Help & Guides

MyWindowsPC member, April Daly, offers the following advice:

If you are having trouble with some websites not displaying properly, this guide is for you. Because there are so many ways to render web pages and so many different ways people create them, there are often problems with displaying websites in different browsers. Internet Explorer 8 is no exception to this rule. In fact, Microsoft has built IE8 in a way that ensures websites display properly if they are compliant with W3C standards. For now, many websites may not display properly, because they were built around older, non-compliant code. In this guide, you will learn how to run IE 8 in compatibility mode, which overcomes this problem.

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Windows Guides reader littlelooloo asked the following:

I had a question about this worm that is supposed to wreak havoc on computers tomorrow… the news said most security programs have it taken care of.  I just wanted to get your opinion/confirmation if that’s really the case or should I download a patch from Microsoft?

If you are concerned about the Conficker (a.k.a. downandup) worm, possibly scheduled to wreak havoc tomorrow, April 1, 2009, you can download a cleanup tool from ESET. You can also apply a patch from Microsoft

From the Sophos blog:

It’s quite possible that Conficker will not do anything significant on April 1st. Certainly it won’t be “deadly” and your computers won’t melt. :-)

The fact of the matter is that Conficker is not set to activate a specific payload on that date. Rather, on April 1st Conficker will begin to attempt to contact the 50,000-a-day potential call-home web servers from which it may receive updates.

But it’s just as likely that Conficker will receive instructions to do something on March 28th, or April 2nd, or April 14th as it will on April 1st. The emphasis by some media outlets on April 1st is really unfortunate.

What we can say with certainty is that people should keep their protection up-to-date, ensure that they have firewalls and security patches in place, have a proper policy in place regarding USB usage and passwords. In addition it wouldn’t do any harm – if you suspect you may be infected by Conficker – to run a Conficker removal tool such as the free one from Sophos.

Download the ESET Cleanup Tool

Download the Patch from Microsoft

Are you bored and do you want to play pranks on your friends? Get a few minutes with their PC and have some fun while you watch them try to figure out what’s going on. UPDATE: I thought I would bring this up again for April Fools. Do you have any to add to the list?

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I just went through a bunch of my old OS discs and extracted the boot sounds; I want to share them with you. Some of these sounds really take me back. Do you have any you want to share? Here is what I have so far:

Thanks to Hunky Dork and Harry who contributed some more audio clips.

Boot/Logon Sounds

	Windows 3.1
	Windows 95
	Windows 98
	Windows NT
	Windows 2000 (Thanks Harry)
	Windows XP (Thanks Hunky Dork & Hary)
	Windows Vista (”Longhorn Beta”)
	Windows Vista (Thanks Harry)
	Sega Dreamcast
	Apple II C
	Mac II

If you make a change to the group policy on your Windows XP Professional; Vista Business or Ultimate; or Windows 7 Ultimate machine, you will need to restart your computer to make the changes take effect. In this guide, you’ll learn how to avoid restarting with a simple command.

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Windows comes with a built in voice system, which I wanted to utilize recently. In this guide, you’ll learn a Visual Basic script that is only a few lines, which will give you a popup box you can use to type in anything you want your computer to say.

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Dishant has written a helpful post, on adding a ‘Delete Folder Contents’ to the right-click context menu, on Windows Forums.

This guide works for Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

Thanks Dishant!

Do you find when you’re modifying system files in Windows 7, Vista, or XP that you have to change permissions a lot?

I’ve been using this for a while now and I can’t tell you how useful it is.

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Some guides on this site will require you to change values in your registry. If you make a mistake and don’t correct it, you may find your computer is not as functional as it was before. To protect yourself from any mistakes, you need to backup your registry. Learn how to back up and restore your registry in this guide.

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This guide is included as part of the Windows Guides security and administration series. In this guide, you will learn what the Windows Registry is, how to access and configure it, and how to backup and restore it.

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