Jan’s blogs about life

John did something to Victor’s laptop and Windows Vista couldn’t hibernate. At first I thought it could be enabled by going through the advance settings in the Power Options from the Control Panel. Going through the list, I just couldn’t find either of the Hibernation or Hybrid sleep feature. Read more »

For the previous incarnation of Windows, you could use the little powertoys called tweakui provided by Microsoft to tweak your system including the autologin feature. It helped automate your startup process and frees up your time to do something else like mix a cup of coffee while the computer boots up. Read more »

I have always wondered what the sleep vs. hibernate vs. the shutdown mode in Windows Vista meant. The last time I used the sleep mode it frozed my PC and it wouldn’t shutdown or startup properly. So while visiting a relative in Kuantan with nothing else much to do, I decided to explore the above three shutdown mode with my Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop. Read more »

Since I don’t see my current slow and sluggish office PC will be upgraded any time soon. I’ve decided to do a full trial of using Linux, specifically Ubuntu Linux and see how it will compare against the Windows XP. Naturally, there will be lots of incompatibility, but I do need to boost some of my productivity and keep some sanity from a slow and sluggish computer. Read more »

I don’t know how it happened, but it happened twice to me already. Somehow something happened and the menu toolbar on the Windows Explorer disappeared. I tried several ways to restore it but was not successful. In the end I had to check the Microsoft support website for remedy. Read more »

I came across this from PC World and it looked intriguing. So I gave it a try and formatted my USB flash drive from FAT to NTFS file system. The steps were easy to follow, and by using NTFS I could get some additional features which the FAT or FAT32 did not provide. I could compress folders, encrypt folders or even set user quota, though setting user quota would not be very useful since I will be the only one using it. The files inside the USB formatted in NTFS system could also be indexed for faster file searches. Cool!

So here are the steps to format the USB flash drive into NTFS file system. Read more »

Finally, I upgraded my CD-RW to a DVD burner. Prices has been coming down, in fact it was cheaper than my DVD-ROM drive when I first bought it two years ago. Since my dad would like to learn a thing or two about burning CDs, I may as well start him easy with a CD-RW first. It takes time for seniors to learn. It was a good thing too, because there were so many DVD storage format that even I was initial bewildered about all the formats available. Read more »

Microsoft has come up with a way to measure your hardware and software performance based on its configuration with Windows Vista. I didn’t really pay much attention to it till one day I happened to noticed that my Vista in my Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop was not showing any numbers at all. It took me several days to figure out why it was not working. It turn out that I have accidentally disabled this feature from the TweakVI software. Read more »

I think I really messed up my Windows Vista installation yet again. Without using Dell PC Restore, I found out to my dismay that some drivers were missing from a clean reinstall of Windows Vista and was not included with the CDs that came along with my Dell Inspiron 1501 package.

To kill a bird in the bush I had to ravage the whole forest so to speak. My McAfee VirusScan Plus was having a conflict with the pre-installed trial version of Norton anti-virus despite the fact that I uninstalled it before installing McAfee. Read more »

Installing Windows Vista was a breeze. I’m able to dual boot to windows XP without any hitch. However stuffing it up with software to make useful is another matter. It seems like many of my software that worked in XP is now not able to work in Vista. What a blow! Now I have to get all the upgraded version for those software that wouldn’t run in Vista! Ouch! An expensive affair indeed. No wonder I see some people in the USA who would want to sue M$. Best of luck, my dear! Read more »