Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Have you ever thought it would be nice to have a Windows Desktop on your iPad or Android tablet? How about the ability to create and edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files?
Onlive Desktop is a free download/cloud-based service that allows you to mimic the Windows experience right on your tablet, at speeds that make it hard to believe that you’re actually working in the cloud instead of natively on your tablet. Also included is 2GB of cloud storage. [Read more…]
As I explained in a previous post, when Microsoft designed Windows 8 they made drastic changes in the way we have always performed a number of common tasks. One of the most irritating of these changes is in how we initiate the Shutdown/Restart procedure.
With Windows 8, instead of needing just a couple of simple mouse clicks to shut down or restart our PCs, we now have to go through a frustrating process that’s about as intuitive as learning how to pilot a 747.
If you’d like to be able to shut down or restart your PC in a hurry again, here is a fast and easy way to add a pair of Shutdown and Restart tiles right to your Windows 8 Start Screen:
1 – Right-click on a open area of the desktop, then select New > Shortcut.
2 – In the “Location” box type shutdown /p and click Next.
3 – Name your new shortcut Shutdown and click Finish.
4 – Find your new Shutdown shortcut on the Desktop, right-click on it and click Pin to Start. You now have a Shutdown tile right on your Start Screen! Clicking on this tile will shut the system down right away.
5 – Repeat steps 1 – 4, replacing shutdown /p with shutdown /r /t 0 and naming the shortcut Restart. Finish up by repeating step 4. Now you now have a Restart tile on your Start Screen as well.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, Microsoft made some pretty drastic changes when they designed the look and feel of Window 8.
In this post I’ll show you how to activate another popular feature they decided to “hide” by default: The option to place the computer into Hibernation mode at shutdown.
First of all, I’ll spend a few moments explaining what Hibernate mode is and when you might want to use it instead of Sleep mode or simply clicking Shutdown. There are three primary ways of powering down your PC: [Read more…]
Do you want to install Windows 8 and still keep your existing Windows 7 installation too? Well, you can by setting up a dual boot system. Here’s how:
1 – Purchase a copy of your preferred version of Windows 8. In order to set up a dual boot system you’ll need to spring for a full retail copy, not a Windows 8 upgrade package.
If you buy Windows 8 in a brick and mortar store (say from Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.) you’ll be all set to proceed once you get home with it. But if you buy it online and download the Windows 8 ISO file you’ll need to burn it onto a blank DVD. Either way, once you have a Windows 8 installation disc at the ready, proceed to step 2. [Read more…]
For me, one of the biggest annoyances of Microsoft Windows has always been the Clipboard utility. Well, it has for me at least.
Why? Because it can only remember the contents of the last “Copy” or “Cut” and if the computer crashes or gets shut down for any reason, whatever is on the Clipboard at the time is lost forever. If you do a lot of Copying, Cutting and Pasting like I do that gets really old in a hurry.
There are a number of good Clipboard replacement programs out there, but the one I like the best is called Ditto. This little gem runs as a stand alone program. It runs in the background, waiting patiently for you to call it up by clicking on its icon in the System Tray. I’m pretty picky about which programs I allow to load automatically every time Windows boots up, and this is one of them. [Read more…]