Jan’s blogs about life

I inadvertently switched on the On-Screen Keyboard when I resumed the Windows Vista PC from its sleep / hibernation mode. Somehow the sleep / hibernation mode disabled my Dell Vostro 200 USB keyboard whenever I resumed from it (this makes another minus point for using sleep / hibernation mode). I had to switch on the On-Screen Keyboard to key in my password to access my PC. However after enabling it, every time I start up my PC, the On-Screen Keyboard would start up too. How irritating. There is no settings on the On-Screen Keyboard to switch it off. The only way to do it was from the Ease of Access Center. 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 »

Working for somebody, you could only use what equipment was given to you. An old PC is not a good way to boost your productivity, but what to do? Bosses can be such a miser even if the money does not belong to them and the company is making so much money only to be given away to the taxman. A case of penny wise pound foolish. 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 »

One thing about technological progress, your legacy devices will no longer work with the ever newer hardware incorporated with the new computers. Take for instance the PCMCIA PC Card, the new laptops do not support them anymore. They have come up with a new type of PC Card slot called the ExpressCard. Read more »

My dad’s been complaining of slow internet connection despite having signed with Streamyx broadband service. He was expecting a better user experience with the cyberworld with the broadband but unfortunately it was not the case.

In most cases like this, it is usually the old PC system that was the culprit. Read more »

Alright! Wasn’t too difficult to revert back to IE6 from IE7 beta preview 2. Instead of using uninstall, I used one of the restore points in the Microsoft System Restore program.

And now, my McAfee Viruscan 9 is working properly again. Trust Microsft to always go their own way against the standards they set as well as the industry standard. Just because their desktop operating systmem is the dominant platform for 80-90% of the world user doesn’t mean they can at a whim do what they like. No wonder so many developers and expert users rant and rave in the net about big brother Microsoft. Can’t do much with all the rant & rave, ’cause M$ has the big bucks and they can do just what they please. Read more »

It was slow first week after the New Year, but after that everything seems to get clog up with heavy rush hour traffic; customers request for speedy delivery of goods, unreasonable demands from work sure bogs you down.

Fortunately a New Year also brings new cheer and I got myself a new computer system freshly assembled from the local All IT Hypermart. Took me a few days to research a proper system and comparing cost vs. performance to finally getting a brand new system. 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 »

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 »