Category: Windows 7

Most of the new netbook and notebook computers are coming the new SSD disk drives. The benefit of SSD disks over traditional hard disks is that they work faster and consume less power. The only problem with SSD disk drives is that they have a limited number of write operations. Though the number of writes are large enough to make an SSD disk last for many years, you can make it last even longer using a free software called SSD Fresh.

My teenager niece is a big fan of Lady Gaga. Yesterday when I came home she was looking for Lady Gaga wallpapers on Google Image search but seemed unsatisfied. She asked me if there is any way Windows can automatically find Lady Gaga wallpapers and use them as Windows desktop backgrounds. I told her about Wally. Wally can automatically query a multitude of web sites like Google, picassa, flickr, Yahoo! etc. based on your search query and download images.

There are so many ways to find out the hardware specifications of your computer in Windows, but most of them either use commands or you have to dig deep down in the Control Panel to use them. There are some third party software available but some of them are bulky and require to be installed inside Windows to use them. If you want to use a portable third party program to find out the information about your hardware in Windows then you can use Hardware Freak.

The other day I was chatting with my friend Veronica and I wanted to show her some of my pictures that I took during the vacations. The original pictures were very high resolution and therefore I wanted to resize them. I was disappointed to find that Windows offers no straightforward utility to resize pictures. Luckily, Veronica herself suggested me a cool software called Shrink-O-Matic using which you can easily and quickly resize your pictures.

I sent my vacation videos to my nana and was expecting that she would really like them. But she called me two days later to tell me that she could not open the video files – Windows did not recognize them. Often we come across such files which cannot be opened by Windows because there is no program installed in Windows to handle that type of files. You can Google and find out right application using OpenWith Enhanced.

Yesterday I saved all my work in my USB key, thinking that I would finish it at home. Then I shutdown the computer, had a cup of coffee and drove back home – only to realize that I had forgotten my USB key attached to my work computer! It was already late in the night and I could do nothing but clench my fists in anger. Well, if you have had such a terrible experience with forgetting your USB keys at work or at friends house, then you can try Free USB Guard.

When you insert a USB Key (pen drive) or a micro SD card in your Windows computer, sometimes the file operations are so slow that the file operation takes hours. If your brand new USB drive or SD card is working real slow, then it may be due to a setting inside the Windows 7. If you toggle this setting on, then you may experience a performance boost with your memory cards.

I have seen many times that people use Microsoft System Configuration Utility (msconfig) to boot into the safe mode and then they have no idea how to get out of it and boot back into the normal mode of Windows. When you select the Safe boot in the Microsoft System Configuration Utility and reboot, Windows is set to boot into the safe mode and keeps booting into safe mode. But you can change the settings in the Windows using the same MSConfig utility.