Windows Tools, Help & Guides

The System Health Report is a great feature of Windows 7 that will help you find potential problems with your PC and point you in the right direction to a resolution. This report records details about your computer’s performance, resource usage, and more and includes diagnostic information about things that aren’t working with resolution suggestions.

Specifically, the report includes:

• Diagnostic Results (Warnings, Performance)
• Software Configuration (OS Checks, Security Center Information, System Services, Startup Programs)
• Hardware Configuration (Disk Checks, Systems, Desktop Rating, BIOS, Devices)
• CPU (Process, Service, Services, System)
• Network (TCP, Interface, IP, UDP)
• Disk (Hot files, Disk breakdown, Physical disk, NTFS Performance)
• Memory (Processes, Counters)

In this guide, we’ll cover the following:

1. How to run a system health check.
2. View the output of a system health check.
3. Research Issues.
4. Fix Issues.
5. Get help with reported issues.

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In earlier versions of Windows, you’d need a third-party solution to help you monitor key subsystems (CPU, RAM etc.) of your computer. With Vista, came the Resource Monitor (Resmon) and with Windows 7 came improvements to the Resource Monitor.

In this guide, we talk more about Windows 7’s Resource Monitor. Previously, Angel Luis showed you how to determine if you need more RAM using Windows 7’s resource monitor. In this guide, we’ll show you what else you can monitor with Resource Monitor and help you interpret the data it gives.

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You must have figured it out by now, I love these little Quick-Tips. I also love to find new uses for “old” things. I recently re-discovered the LOG feature in Notepad, and this inspired me to dig out some more hidden features of this seemingly insignificant program that has been installed with every single Windows Version I can remember.

This time I’ll show you how to Hide important information inside a Notepad document.

It has been reported that this doesn’t work on FAT partitions, only NTFS.  But if it does – let me know.

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Windows Guides’ Rating	Compatible with
3.5 out of 5

PROS: Free. Low resource usage. Made for geeks at heart.

CONS: Still a little rough around the edges (got a couple of unhandled exceptions with the disk monitor.)

VERDICT: Give it a try and see if you like it!

PRICE: Free

VERSION REVIEWED: 1.00401

DOWNLOAD: SuperbarMonitor

Requires . NET Framework 3.5 (included in Windows 7.)

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Not too long ago we encountered some problem with our users that share PC’s in different locations on our network. Some users do not always log-off their PC’s when they have to go into the plant. Now from where they are on the network, they remote desktop into another workstation for a particular system developed in-house.

Now if a user does not log-off, this remote desktop connection stays logged-in and makes it so no-one else can use that PC. Therefore, I was tasked with finding a way to log a user off if there is no activity for a certain amount of time.

I searched on Google and couldn’t find any other solution except this one. This involves getting hold of the “winexit.scr” screensaver contained in The Microsoft Windows 2000 Resource Kit, or you can read about and download individual resources from this toolkit here.

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Tired of seeing your icons constantly re-arranged ?

Every time you swap between screen resolutions, or turn on (or off) your dual monitor, you will most probably experience that you have to re-arrange your desktop icons.

Many of the applications for dual monitor have a feature for saving and restoring the position (and layout) of your Desktop Icons. But if you don’t already have this functionality at hand, then this is for you.

How to Add the Save / Restore Icon Layout functionality to your Context Menu.

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