How to get a totally wicked awesome desktop, dude.

Generally if I have friends or colleagues over and they see my computer, they remark that my desktop is like nothing they’ve ever seen before, especially for a Windows environment. I am going to teach you how to get a wicked awesome desktop, without spending too much bank. First off, lose the desktop icons. Right [...]

The lost art of scraping your face with sharp bits of metal, and how to make it suck less.

Those of you that know me in real life know that, at any point in time, my facial hair is somewhere between “five o’clock shadow” and “hobo”. It’s not that I enjoy looking that way, it’s the simple fact that if I shave more often than about once a week, my face and neck become [...]

Thumbnails Kill Explorer.exe Dead

Summary: Explorer crashes can be caused by malformed thumbnails, and prevented by disabling Data Execution Prevention for Explorer.exe. WTL writes that quite frequently, while browsing files on his computer in Explorer, an error message pops up reading “Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.” Having encountered [...]

Questionable Contributions

The only thing I can really think of that is truly American, and nobody else in the world is doing, is country music. And that sucks. If someone can think of something else (and don’t give me the idealistic bullshit like the Bill of Rights, which also isn’t uniquely American), leave a comment and we [...]

Filter Keys

Alice writes that on Windows Vista, she was typing a message in Windows Mail and inadvertently turned on…something. She writes that “Since I did this, when I type a word I have a click sound when typing each letter. If I make a mistake and backspace it won’t backspace. I have to hit the backspace [...]

Crysis on a new Vista install.

joeitalo writes that after reinstalling Windows Vista, the system’s performance of the video game Crysis became significantly worse. After checking that it wasn’t a DirectX issue (always checkable by hitting Win+R and typing in “dxdiag”) he realized that he was running an antivirus, and temporarily turning it off restored the performance of the machine. That’s [...]

Renaissance

Today is a red-letter day. The rebirth of the blog (and cleaning up and whatnot). I’ve sorely neglected my own website and will be taking steps to correct that. I deleted the old posts about WoW, and websites that don’t exist anymore, basically everything. I did leave my most recent how-to up as I noticed [...]