EZ IT Fixes!! » Utilities

Restore Recycle Bin icon on the Desktop

Daman Dang — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:58:50 +0000

Did you just delete the Recycle Bin icon on the Desktop?? Can’t go to the Recycle Bin to restore the Recycle Bin itself!!

In Windows Vista, you can bring it back by doing the following:

1. Right click on the empty space on the Desktop and click Personalize.
2. Select Change Desktop Icons.
3. Check Recycle Bin.

and you are done.

The steps for Windows XP are a little more technical and involve registry manipulations which is not recommended unless you are an advanced user. Luckily, Microsoft has a tool that can take care of it automatically.

Link to Microsoft’s Fix it for me tool

Create Show Desktop icon for Windows XP and Vista

Daman Dang — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:43:29 +0000

Ever deleted the Show Desktop icon from the Quick Launch menu by mistake? I use it all the time and even with the Windows Key+D shortcut still available, the missing icon bothers me a lot. Here is how to bring it back.

1. Download the following zip file:

For Windows XP – show_desktop_xp.zip
For Windows Vista – show_desktop_vista.zip

2. Extract the contents of the zip file. It should be one file named Show Desktop.

3. Move that file to where ever you want to put the Show Desktop functionality. To put it back to the Quick Launch menu, copy the file to the following location:

For Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\

For Windows Vista:
C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\

That’s it. The Show Desktop icon is back in the Quick Launch menu!!

Source: Microsoft Support

The above link for Microsoft’s support website also has a tool to create this automatically for Windows XP. Check out the Fix it for me section.

Recover data from a Windows crash

Daman Dang — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:08:39 +0000

Your Windows crashed again and you didn’t back up your data anywhere else. When I used to work on a desktop, it never really was a big problem for me since I could just take out the Hard Drive and plug it in as a slave on another desktop and copy the data between the two drives. It used to be time consuming and painful but at the end of the day, I always had my data recovered.

Working with laptops is different. You can take out the hard drive (much easier as compared to desktops) but you cannot just plug it to another laptop or a desktop just like that. You may, if you have the right external hard drive enclosure but I had some bad experiences using them.

If you had saved all your data on a separate partition, your data is safe since you can just format your Windows partition and re-install the Operating System without harming the data.. What to do if that is not the case? Reinstall and forget the data? Not everybody can afford that. Luckily, you don’t have to!!

There are free utilities available that can create a CD with an Operating System on it. Then you can use that CD to boot your computer and access your Hard Drive and recover your data. Reatogo-X-PE and BartPE are two such tools that use your original Windows OS CD to create a bootable recovery CD. Once you have created the recovery CD, just connect a USB drive to the computer and boot from that CD. The system may bot detect the USB drive if you attach it after booting from the system. BartPE has a very basic where as Reatogo-X-PE gives you a more Windows like experience with some advance features. Once you are logged-in, just go to My Computer and copy the data from your Hard Drive to the USB Drive and Woala!!

Links:

Reatogo-X-PE

BartPE

Note - Please read the Licensing issues on BartPE website. Same should apply for Reatogo-X-PE as well.

Remote Desktop Troubleshooting

Daman Dang — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:55:40 +0000

Ever came across a situation when you are asked for help to fix some software issue and you are miles away from the troubled computer? Even more, the person asking for help is not much of computer literate!! I had this issue a bunch of times and I find it very hard to get it resolved. People are not able to describe the problem exactly and even if they do, your solutions may not be that straight forward for them. Guiding them step-by-step may also prove to be troublesome sometimes.

After going through numerous such occasions, I spent some time on Google and found this Free utility, TeamViewer, that can help you take control of a remote computer and do what ever you need to as long as the connection remains active. You just need to have this utility downloaded on both the machines and you will need internet obviously. The connection can be established by putting the auto-generated TeamViewer ID and Password of one system on to the other. Happy troubleshooting… Remotely!!

Link to TeamViewer website

Screenshot:

Spywares.. How to remove

Daman Dang — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 07:45:43 +0000

In last couple of years, I have a seen sudden increase in Spywares/Malwares attacks on my computer. Some of them look like they are softwares that fight against such attacks but that is not the case. You may see a message box in your Taskbar saying that your system is infected and click to download anti-virus/anti-spyware or click to scan the system. Once you do that, it will harm your system even more. One such common software that shows up for download is Antivirus 2008. If you run this, a screen similar to the one below will show up on your screen:

Prevention is Better than Cure!! Follow these steps to prevent your system from getting infected:

Install a Firewall
Firewalls may slow down your internet browsing a little by throwing in additional confirmations boxes but it may keep unwanted softwares out of your machine.

Install a AntiMalware
These keep a check on computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, most rootkits, spyware, dishonest adware, crimeware and other malicious and unwanted software.

You can download these tools from here: Download Utilities

Update your software

Whether it is your Windows Operating System, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware or the Firewall, keep the auto-updates on and update your software as soon as an update is available since this way your armory will be up-to-date to fight against all these Malwares.

Fianlly, browse the internet safely since sometimes what you see is not what you may end up with. Pay extra attention when opening attachments even if it seems to be coming from a friend. Install Active-x controls only from reputed websites.

Have fun browsing!!

Creating and Merging PDFs.. and much more

Daman Dang — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:11:41 +0000

PDF995 is a freeware that can create pdf files from any file that can be printed. It gets installed as a printer driver in your system. To create a pdf, just print the file using PDF995 printer driver by pressing “ctrl P” and choosing PDF995 from the drop-down list.

Ever wanted to merge two pdf files into one without paying a dollar !! Pdftk is a free command based toolkit that can do that and much more with pdf files. Pdftk allows you to manipulate PDF easily and freely. It does not require Acrobat, and it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris. It can Merge, Split, Decrypt, Encrypt, Apply a Background Watermark, Update PDF Metadata, Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages and much more.

Compressing video files

Daman Dang — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:22:42 +0000

I often make video clips with my Canon S2 IS. The quality is awesome but at the same time the size of the video file created is enormous. These videos were eating up all my hard disk space until I found these tools to compress those files. I won’t say that there is no loss in quality at all but I played with the settings to achieve the best possible results which I am sharing with you here.

The best video compressing software that I came across till date is Super. It is a Freeware that gives you complete control over the conversion process. I played with the settings and the following screenshot shows the settings that worked best for me.

My clips were shot at 30 fps so I selected that. Choose the same frame rate and the resolution as that of the original clip.

Stoik Video Converter is another free video conversion tool that is pretty simple to use with very decent output. There are few options when you convert the video but the output format “WMV for LAN (1 Mbps)” works best for me considering the quality vs size ratio.

Compress JPG Photo files – Batch process (Full Folder)

Daman Dang — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:09:55 +0000

Digital cameras brought a revolution in Photography. I don’t think about the processing cost of a photo anymore so there is no stopping when I start clicking. But it is a pain when I have to share hundreds of photos with my friends online because of the huge size of the JPG files.

I experimented with a few JPG compression softwares and found Visualizer Photo Resize to work the best. It can handle JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TGA, TIFF, PSD and PSP files. You can specify the resolution you want and it can process a complete folder at a time.

Visualizer Photo Resize

Another good image resizer is FastStone Photo Resizer. It is an image converter/resizer intended to enable users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode. It supports JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and JPEG2000 file formats.

FastStone Photo Resizer

These will help you save a lot of space with very little or no loss of image quality.

Network card problem in new Dell notebooks

Daman Dang — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 03:34:35 +0000

Problem: You turned your laptop on and connected the network cable but the system is not connecting to the network. The network card (NIC) is not there in the device manager either as if it is not installed.

Cause: When turned on with Power cable unplugged (running on battery), the Quickset utility in the newer Dell notebooks disables the network card by default thinking that you are on the go and won’t be connecting to a network cable.

Solution: Open the Quickset utility and select “Internal Network Card Power Management”. The “Internal Network Card Power Management” dialogue box will appear. Select the option “always activate on battery” and then click “Apply” and Restart your laptop.

Remove U3 software from your USB drive

Daman Dang — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 20:34:48 +0000

I heard many people don’t like the new U3 technology that comes with the USB drives these days (including myself). You can uninstall this U3 software from your USB drive.. its very simple..

Click on the link below.. it will take you to U3 Launchpad Removal page… and follow the instructions.

Remove U3 Launchpad !!

It will also free up some space that was being used up by the U3 software.. yayyyy !!!