Toolbars gone AWOL

There is a bug in Windows XP that causes the toolbars in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer (the thing that opens when you double-click on My Computer etc) to disappear.

Doug Knox has written an excellent little program to fix this problem. Download it from his website here.

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Link to Bloody Computer!

If you wish to link to Bloody Computer!, copy the following code and paste it into your website's html file or add it to your blog. Please leave a comment if you need any help doing this.

<a href="http://bloodycomputer.blogspot.com"><img src="http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh148/stepterix/bcsmall.jpg" border="0" /></a>

The link will look like this:

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Three free video tools

If you have a TV tuner card or video capture card then you can do worse than give dscaler a try. This free software combats the problems of interlacing and other visual quirks in captured video. It enables you to capture video from a hardware source and apply a variety of effects and filters to it in order to improve the quality of the output video file.

Once you have captured a video from an external source, you may wish to edit it. For professional video editing you have to spend serious money, but there is a free alternative: Virtual Dub. Whilst it is not as fully-featured as professional video editing software, Virtual Dub is still a powerful piece of software for editing or changing format of a variety of video file types.

Real Alternative is a small package that enables you to watch RealMedia files without installing Real Player. After installing this codec pack (software that translates digital information into video or sound) you are able to open RealMedia files with various media players, including VLC and Media Player Classic (both excellent freeware media players).

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Keyboard shortcut of the week: search and find

If you wish to bring up Windows' file search minimise all your windows and press F3. You can also search within a certain folder too: open that folder up in Windows Explorer (the name for the program that opens when you double click on 'My Documents', 'My Computer', etc) and - you guessed it - press F3.

Pressing F3 opens search dialogs in many other programs as well: in Internet Explorer it opens (and closes) the vertical search bar; in MS Outlook it opens up the 'Advanced Find' dialog. Try pressing F3 when using applications that have some sort of search facility.

In a similar vein, you can open up the find facility in many applications by holding down the Control ('Ctrl') key and pressing F. To explain the difference between search and find, consider that you will search for a web page and when you have opened it you can find text within it. In MS Word Ctrl + F opens the 'Find and Replace' dialog. As with F3, try it out in any program that has a find facility.

Of course some programmers use slightly different standards. For example in Firefox both F3 and Ctrl + F open the find word dialog at the bottom of the screen.

Happy hunting.

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Four Hardware Tips: CD/DVD drives and scanning

Eject the CD or DVD drive when your PC is switched off
You will need some sort of pin (or straightened paper clip) which you can push into the small hole on most CD or DVD drives to manually eject the tray.

Stop your DVD playback stuttering
If Windows detects a problem with one of the drives on your PC, it may reset the disk controller mode to a slower level, causing DVD play back to halt intermittently.

To fix this, right-click on 'My Computer' and click 'Manage'.

This will open up the Computer Management console: click on 'Device Manager'.

Open up 'IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, and right-click on 'Secondary IDE Channel' and click on 'Uninstall'.

Restart your PC.

Windows should re-detect the controller and set it back to a quicker mode.

Prevent scans from showing details from the opposite side of the scanned sheet
When scanning some media, particularly newspapers, you will notice that text and images from the other side of the sheet appear on the scan. To prevent this place a dark piece of cardboard - preferably black - on top of the sheet that you are scanning.

How big?
Scanning software generally defaults to a fairly high resolution for scanning (measured in dpi - dots per inch). If you are using the scanned image or text in a word processing document or a slide-show you probably don't need the dpi setting to be all that high - 90dpi should be enough.

Setting a lower resolution means that your documents won't be so large, and if you do a lot of scanning into documents this tip will help save hard-drive space.

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How to make friends and influence your Technorati rating

"Money Shiok" are organising a Technorati Favorite Exchange project. So if you want to improve your Technorati rating, go and sign up.

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Time for a purge: reclaiming hard-drive space

If you are running low on hard-drive space it may be time for a purge of files that you no longer use, or have no wish to keep any more. In my previous post on this subject I suggested installing and running the excellent Treesize to find out the size of each folder, and I explained how to clear the cache in your web browser. In this post I will describe what steps to take in a more general purge of unwanted files.

Removing unwanted applications
From the Control Panel and open either 'Add or Remove Programs', or 'Uninstall a Program' (if you use Vista). Go through the list of programs and remove any that you don't use any more. This may sound like obvious advice, but the easy availability of freeware programs means that many of us have collections of applications installed on our machines that we played with once or twice and then forgot about.

Removing non-essential files
Over time, Windows collects various temporary files, logs and other non-essential files. To delete these, go to the 'Start' menu and select 'Search'. You may then have to select 'All files and folders.' In the search field type '*.gid' - without the quote marks - and hit the Return key. Windows will then search your PC for these index files, which help files generate. It should be safe to delete all of these, however, you may want to keep these files in the Recycle Bin for a while, just to be on the safe side. You can repeat the process searching for the following:

'*.chk' (these are files created by disk check process)

'*.dmp' (these are memory dump files created when certain versions of Windows crash)

'thumbs.db' (these are created whenever you look set the folder view option to 'Thumbnails')

Switching off thumbnail cache
If you have a lot of images stored on your PC, you may want to switch off thumbnail caching. This will prevent Windows from creating any new 'thumbs.db' files, but will mean that the thumbnail view of a directory containing lots of images will take longer to show them all.

To switch of thumbnail caching, open 'My Computer' (or any other Windows Explorer screen) and select 'Folder Options' from the 'Tools' menu. On the dialog box that opens, go to the 'View' tab and tick 'Do not cache thumbnails'.

Don't forget your emails
If you use an email application on your PC, rather than webmail, then your emails will be taking up some of your hard drive space. So, in order to recover some hard drive space it may be time for an email purge. If your email application has a 'Recycle Bin' or 'Deleted Items' folder, remember to empty that when you are finished purging. If you have attachments in the emails that you have also saved elsewhere on your PC, then you are storing the same thing twice: delete one or other of them.

Hopefully these tips have enabled you to recover at least enough hard drive space to stop those annoying 'Low Disk Space' messages. If any of the above processes didn't work on your version of Windows, please let me know as each different version of the OS has its own quirks, which I may have forgotten.

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