Windows Tools, Help & Guides

The addition of a TV Tuner card turns your PC into a full “DVR” – a Digital Video Recorder. For those familiar with it, your PC becomes just like a “TiVo” box providing high quality record and play-back options from broadcast TV.
This tuner card also brings in all the available FM Stations.
In the US there are a wealth of stations to tune into and each of them has an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) transmitted along with the picture and sound and picked up by Windows Media Center for presentation in WMC on-line TV Guide.
The EPG is an essential part of a recording system because it provides a schedule of up-coming programs and allows you to schedule the recording not just of the show itself, but every show in the series (like all the episodes of “Family Guy” ) – you can even instruct the guide to record episodes of the show even if they are seen on different channels and at different times.

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One of the things Microsoft forgot to properly think about when making Windows 7, was the start-up sound.  With every new version of Windows should come a new start-up sound, however they chose to keep it the same as Vista.

If you’d like to change the start-up sound (the sound played when you get to your login screen) then this is the guide for you.  My favourite start-up sound comes from Windows 95 and I’ll be using its start-up sound for this guide.

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This is the second part of our series on the Windows Media Center. Did you miss the first part?

In this section we’ll take a look at the ways Windows Media Center can organise and present your movie collection.

Media Browser:

The “bare-bones” WMC movie component is pretty good, but a bit stark.  Fortunately the clever developers out in the world have come up with software packages to add functionality, flexibility, and better looks.

There are several to choose from but my choice for an enhancement to the WMC movie component  is “Media Browser“.  It sits as a separate icon in your WMC start page and handles your music collection as well, but we’ll focus on the movie parts for now. The front page is below. It’s fairly straightforward, adds a lot of functionality, it looks good – and it’s free.

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If you would like to customize your Windows 7 Start Button, you can do so with these Token Start Orbs created by our very own rsvr85.

Want to learn how to customize your Statrt button? Use the manual method or this tool.

Download Token Start Orbs by rsvr85.

These days ‘Going Retro’ is all over the place. Fashion, home design, artwork etc. If you’re all Retro Fan, or just feeling nostalgic,  by all means read on.

If you’ve been around computers a while, you should remember the good (well not good perhaps, but) old Windows 98. Back in the days a great piece of software. For the savvy home user, Windows 98 came with a really great enhancement: Windows 98 Plus! Which (if memory serves me right) had to be bought separately.

The Plus! pack was a set of themes to edit the appearance of your windows by changing the system colors, icons and screensavers – fun fun fun.

With Windows going on 8 we are getting used to the idea of changing themes and the graphic layout of our computer, but back then… this was as high-tech as we could get. Funny thing is – these “enhancements” still works today – on your Windows 7.

So if you feel like going Retro, or simply have a stroll down memory lane…

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It’s no secret — I really don’t like gadgets on my desktop; however, I frequently see people using them. So, I thought I’d give some  a try (I tried at least 100) and here are the 10 most useful gadgets I found.

Have any gadgets you can’t live without? Let us know about them in the comments.

Here’s a list I put together for Windows Vista

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