NTFS vs FAT32

A friend called the other day with a Windows XP computer that all of a sudden wouldn’t load Windows. Apparently it was reporting that a couple of key files were missing.
He booted from the CD into the recovery console (must not have had it loaded, I always load on any installs I do). But he [...]

Download Video – Don’t Sit and Wait for It!

Anymore, I almost always download video that I want to see. I got frustrated with too many videos starting and stopping, or maybe worse, stopping right before the end – with no way to restart at the point I left off!
So I did a little research some time ago and found out that most videos [...]

Multiple Partitions or One Big C: Drive

I answered a question on a newsgroup today that I thought might have general interest.
The poster asked about benefits to having multiple hard drives and multiple partitions. Again, my answer is for PC workstations, not servers.
Using multiple partitions is sometimes advantageous for organizing data. In the past there was efficiency (smaller data chunks [...]

Windows XP Shutdown or Hibernate?

Yahoo! tech had an article today about speeding Windows XP shutdown. See http://tech.yahoo.com/gd/how-do-i-speed-xp-s-shutdown-/200654.
In that article, the author suggested that XP can run reliably for days or even weeks without being rebooted, so why not hibernate instead – it doesn’t take as long.
Why indeed? Well, for starters because my experience is that Windows XP is more [...]

Illegal System DLL Relocation – Burned by Windows Updates Again!

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/935448/
Use the above link if you get:
Illegal System DLL Relocation
The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory
Apparently, a recent Windows XP security update was buggy (no, really?). So QuickBooks and a host of other programs are crashing now. Are we having fun yet?
Even though I have [...]

USB Flash Drive and Windows 98 – Just Say “No”

Yesterday I was duty bound to try to get USB devices, a USB Flash Drive and, if successful with that, a USB printer, to work on Windows 98SE (second edition – the good one!).
First, I tried an older Kingston 512MB drive. I downloaded the driver from Kingston’s website, installed it, rebooted and inserted the USB [...]

Dualview – Buy a Second Monitor and Double Your Desktop

Today I had some people really excited. It wasn’t the new Dell Laptop (see my Laptop Buying Guide), but the Samsung 940n that I set up as a 2nd monitor and configured for nVidia’s Dualview option.
With Dualview, the second monitor is an extension of the desktop. Just grab a (non maximized) window’s title bar and [...]