Windows Tools, Help & Guides

If you’ve ever taken a look at Windows Task Manager, you’ve undoubtedly wondered what all the numbers mean. This guide briefly explains each value and helps you familiarize yourself with what these values represent.

The performance information is broken down into four categories:

1. CPU
2. Physical Memory
3. Kernel Memory
4. System

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If you’re looking for desktop wallpaper, the best way to make sure you’re getting wallpaper that will fit, not blur, and show the complete image is to get wallpaper at the right resolution.

What is Resolution?

Screens are made up of tiny addressable squares or pixels. If you look closely at your monitor, you’ll see these tiny squares made up of (usually) Red, Green, and Blue lines. The Red, Green, and Blue lights mix to produce a colored light; the collection of these colors work like a huge patchwork quilt to produce the image you’re looking at right now.

Resolution is the number of these pixels wide by the number of pixels high that your screen displays.

i.e. 1920 x 1080 resolution is 1,920 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels high and is referred to as “nineteen twenty by ten eighty.”

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You probably have a hard drive in your home that’s one terabyte or more. If you open Computer (Windows Key + E), you’ll see your terabyte hard drive might only show a capacity of around 930 GB. Where did all those extra gigabytes go? Aren’t there a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte? If you have questions like these, this guide answers them.

Terabyte vs. Tebibyte

Hard drive manufacturers use the International System of Units (SI) convention to when listing hard drive capacity. Kilo-, mega-, giga-, and tera- are some of the prefixes used in accordance with the SI and are base-10 (decimal.) “Tera” means trillion so a terabyte is one trillion, 1,000,000,000,000, or 10¹² bytes.

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If you like to use shortcuts to get tasks done in the most efficient way, there is a large collection of commands you can run from the run dialog (XP/Vista/7/8) or the Start Menu (in Windows Vista/7/8.) In this guide, I’ll show you how to run the commands and what effect they have.
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Note: To get a better understanding of Windows Registry basics, read this guide.

If you’re somewhat familiar with the Windows Registry, you’ve no doubt seen references to HKCR, HKCU, HKLM, HKU, and HKCC. These abbreviations represent the five root keys in the Windows Registry:

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (HKCR)
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER (HKCU)
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (HKLM)
• HKEY_USERS (HKU)
• HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG (HKCC)

This guide explains the basics on what each root key represents and what settings you can expect to find under each. I wrote this guide to help clarify the fundamentals of the registry and provide insight into what each root key does.

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If you use online banking, you may have noticed when you get your password wrong that the error in response is pretty generic i.e. “Wrong user name or password.” These error messages are pretty unhelpful; however, this is by design. If someone tries to compromise your account, do you really want them knowing they got the user name right and now just need to tackle the password? Probably not. The harder we make it to get in to our accounts, the less chance we have of opportunists getting to places we don’t want them to be. With that said, this guide will show you how to disable user name display on the Windows logon screen, for additional security.

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