Even when you tell Windows to always show file extensions that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will actually get to see all file extensions. There is a registry value for file extensions that can prevent their appearing even when asked to always show them. So how do we fix the Completely Hidden File Extensions so [...]

Older operating systems such as Windows 98 did not require that you set up separate logins for each person. Unless you took extreme measures someone could just hit cancel on the login screen to access the computer anonymously. Where having actual logins on such an old operating system does matter is where you have it [...]

The administrator account on your computer should be password protected and only used when you need to install new software or run system utilities to clean up your system. That means that if you don’t perform those tasks for a while that you might have forgotten the password by the time you next need to [...]

Networking different versions of Windows together may or may not be straightforward depending on which versions of Windows that they are. The older DOS based versions of Windows do not have the same inbuilt security as the newer OS/2 base ones and so may not have all the login/password configuration set up in advance that [...]

Some testing just requires that you have a file of a specific size to test with and doesn’t require that file to contain any specific content. Here’s how to create a file of a specific size on Windows XP (presumably it will also work on Vista and Windows 7). Creating a Dummy File

Hard drives on your computer need to be assigned to contiguous drive letters starting with C. If other devices such as your DVD drive are assigned a drive letter immediately following the hard drives then adding an extra hard drive will change the drive letter attached to the DVD drive and break any shortcuts you [...]

There is one folder on each hard drive where delete doesn’t work. That’s because the recycled folder is where Windows stores the files that have been deleted. Delete from Recycled

The context menu is the menu that appears when you press your right mouse button or the context menu key on your keyboard (the one to the left of the right Ctrl key). This menu is controlled by the operating system. Here are instructions on how to change which entry in the menu is considered [...]

One way of combining drives into a single partition is to use a hardware solution involving RAID. There is an alternative that will work with regular hard drives provided that you are running an operating system that supports it and don’t try to make the operating system itself span multiple drives. Two Hard Drives but [...]

One way of organising your hard drive so as to make backing up your own data much easier is to partition the drive so as to have separate partitions for the operating system, applications, and data. Windows has its own ideas on where to store data with a lot of it going into a folder [...]

The last time I encountered this problem it was caused by a bad sector on the hard drive and replacing the hard drive fixed the problem. This time it wasn’t the hard drive and even booting from a DVD presented the same problem. To track the cause of this type of problem once you have [...]

Despite all the security issues that Microsoft introduced into windows with hiding the extensions of known file types they persist in configuring this option that provides harmful software with a way to disguise itself. Here’s how to correct tis setting and make your computer more secure. Showing File Extensions in Windows 7