How do I Safley remove a Flash Drive?

Removing Flash Drives and other peripherals from you computer can damage the device. To safely remove these devices try a single left click on the the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the system tray and then click on the device you wish to remove.


Windows will shut the device down and notify you when its safe to remove.

My right click menu has disappeared?

You probably have a bad context menu handler interfering with your right click menu.

First download ShellExView and run it.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

This will scan your computer for the shell extensions. Give it a few seconds to complete and then click on the the "Type" column to reorder the list by Type. Look for the context menu handlers.

Disable non-Microsoft context menu handlers one by one while checking to see if the right click menu reappears after rebooting.

You can save time by disabling several context menu handlers at once by selecting multiple lines before rebooting. This will help you narrow the list, make sure you re-enable the good handlers.

Where have my task manager tabs gone?

Have the tabs on your task manager disappeared? The tabs can be hidden or restored by double clicking on the edge of the task manager in Windows XP.

To hide do this...

To restore do this...

Publish Post

Why is my QuickTime video displaying a green screen?

Your QuickTime player displaying a green screen instead of the movie may have something to do with DirectX hardware acceleration.
To fix this issue:
1. Open Quicktime and select Edit in the upper left.
2. Select Preferences then QuickTime Preferences...
3. In the Prefrences Control Panel that opens, select the Advanced tab in the upper right.
4. Uncheck the Enable DirectDraw Acceleration and the Enable Direct 3D video acceleration.

Why when I try to zip (compress) a file I get a File not found or no read permissions error?

Reciently I was working on a computer running Windows Vista and trying to zip (compress) a file that was testing positive for a Trojan virus. A "File not found or no read permissions" error kept coming up, preventing me from zipping the file. Using other compression software like WinRAR also threw an access violation error.
The problem I determined is related to the antivirus software, in this case AVG. Traditionally right clicking the AVG icon in the system tray and selecting Quit AVG Control Center will turn off the antivirus and allow you to proceed. But in this case AVG's background heuristics scan does not shut down. To do this:

1. Press the "ctrl, alt, delete" keys at the same time and select "Start Task Manager".
2. In the task manager select the processes tab and right click any processes running thats starts with avg and select "End Process" Once AVG has been totally shut down you should be able to zip, move, copy, compress, or whatever.

What is PCI-E?

PCI slots have been on motherboard for years, but some of you may have taken notice a newer trend in bus technology PCI-E. PCI Express slots are todays modern standard on most new motherboards and are blowing away older PCI standards and AGP graphic slots for speed. The new PCIe graphics cards are allowing higher speeds by utilizing 2 identical graphics cards placed in 2 identical PCIe slots. Brand names for this graphic solution include Nvidia's SLI, ATI's CrossFire. The new form factor can be confusing at first because unlike the old PCI slots PCI-E connectors are coming in X1, X4, X8, X16, X32.

Here are some more technically advance number on the PCI-E Revolution:
PCI 132 MBps
AGP 8X 2,100 MBps
PCI Express 1x 250 MBps
PCI Express 2x 500 MBps
PCI Express 4x 1000 MBps
PCI Express 8x 2000 MBps
PCI Express 16x 4000 MBps
PCI Express 32x 8000 MBps

It's worthwhile to note that any PCI-E card will work in a larger PCI-E slot. Meaning you can use a PCI Express 1x card in any PCI-E slot(2x, 4x, 8x, ect.)