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free music online Mute System Sounds when Playing Music or Movies in Windows 7 [Quick Tip]

Playing music while you work makes a day at the office much more pleasant. However having the usual system sounds interrupt the music can be quite annoying. Especially if you use programs that constantly beeps or make disturbing sounds. The old-school solution would be to disable system sounds all together. In Windows 7 there’s a faster way…

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bad printer Stalled Printer Repair Detects and Fix Failed Printer Jobs Don’t you just hate it when your printer messes things up ?

I do, every once in a while a document gets stuck in the spooler system, resulting in total havoc. No documents will print. And if you don’t catch it right away you end up with a stack of documents piling up in your print dialogue.

Usually that is a lost cause. Especially if you are not able to delete the document that is causing the problems. Cutting power to the printer (and unplug the USB cable) might enable you to delete it. But the worst case scenario is to power off everything. Loosing every print job in the queue, and start all over. Ahh lovely days huh…

If you experience this regularly or every now and then – well, I might just have the very solution you need.

Stalled Printer Repair – portable freeware application to Detect and Repair Stalled Print Jobs

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Kill Explorer in 2 Clicks [Quick Tip]

Posted by Stu On August - 1 - 20103 COMMENTS

explorer Kill Explorer in 2 Clicks [Quick Tip]

The usual way of killing Explorer for most users would be to spark up the Task Manager, right click explorer.exe and choose "End process". Previously we’ve covered how to add a context menu item to restart Explorer, which makes short work of the command.

Want an even easier way to kill it?  In Windows Vista and Windows 7, that’s no problem.

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clip image001 thumb Change the Start Up Sound in Windows 7 [How To]

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.

movies01 500x282 Windows Media Center Organize Your Movie Collection with Media Browser

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BSOD example Diagnose and Understand Windows Blue Screens (BSOD)If you get a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), your first inclincation may be to turn of your computer, turn it back on again and hope if never comes back. Sometimes, this is a good option because the blue screen may have been a freak accident and, because the stars aligned that one time, may not happen again. However, if you receive more than one blue screen, I suggest you take some time to diagnose the issue and try to come to a resolution. In this guide, I’ll show you what each part of the blue screen means, how to diagnose the problem, and where to go for help when you’re not sure what to do it.

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