TJOtala

Over the Holiday BreakChristmas Break I decided to take care of some overdue maintenance on my home PC, a Dell Dimension 8400. The primary system disk (160GB SATA) that had shipped with the PC was consistently showing up in the WinXP Event Log with I/O errors during paging operations. Meanwhile, the primary data disk (250GB SATA) I had retrofitted into the system kept showing up in WinXP Disk Manager as having errors that would go away only to return next time. Several years of accumulated cruft in the WinXP installation was starting to show, suggesting that it was about time for one of those occasions where WinXP just needs to get re-paved.

Now, I’ve done more than my fair share of PC surgeries over the years, yet little did I know what Dell had in store for me… (more…)

This is a tiny Windows 9x/NT/2000 utility that synchronizes the desktop PC to the time/date of your mobile PC (i.e. PocketPC, Palm-size PC, etc.). (more…)

Both Windows 2000 and the upcoming Windows Millenium Edition feature a new standard shell folder called “My Pictures”. This folder is a perfectly normal file system folder, yet when the shell’s Web View setting is enabled it includes a convenient image preview window as shown in Figure 1. Simply select an image file and you will get an instant preview of it, along with the dimensions of the image as well as the usual vital stats such as creation date/time, etc. You can zoom in and out, fit the image to the preview window, view it actual size or full screen, or even print it. (more…)