Technically Easy

Category: Software

  • Play Classic Games on Your PC

    I am a child of the eighties, and grew up playing many of the early computer games. The games were smaller and simpler back then, and at times, you had to manage everything on your computer, including disk space usage and conventional memory. I started on a 8088 with 20 MB of disk space and 640 KB of RAM. Oh, and a CGA graphics card that could display 4 colours.

    At times, I do enjoy trying to get some of the older games to play on my current computer. Sometimes they work, many times they don’t even want to try to work on XP or Vista. Then again, I’d rather not work on Vista myself. About a year ago I discovered a great site that sells old computer games, that will also play on the current Microsoft operating systems. I purchased one game back then, and I wasn’t disappointed.

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  • Protect Your Computer with Sandboxie

    Protect Your Computer with Sandboxie

    Keeping your data and computer secure is very important, especially if you spend much of your time online. There are many ways for hackers to gain access to your computer while you download files from web sites. This is why it is important to always install and use anti-virus and anti-malware software, a software firewall, and a hardware firewall.

    I recently came across another utility that can also help protect your computer. This utility allows you to isolate all your internet activity so everything can be easily deleted if needed. It is a really small tool that I have been using for a few days called Sandboxie.

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  • Microsoft Word 2007 Keeps Registering

    Microsoft Word 2007 Keeps Registering

    My trials with Microsoft Vista continue. I had issues in the past with iTunes continuously configuring itself, and now Microsoft Word 2007 doing something similar. I never had these problems with Windows XP, only on Vista.

    This time Microsoft Word continued to auto-register itself whenever it was launched. I wouldn’t mind it so much, but it caused a 2 minute delay from the time I clicked the icon until it finally opened. Back to Google’s search I went and found a solution that worked.

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  • Convert a Microsoft Word Document to PDF for Free

    Convert a Microsoft Word Document to PDF for Free

    Most people who have used a computer in the past have probably seen and read a PDF document. Many software and hardware manuals now come in a PDF version, or you can download them from their vendors. For those that don’t know about a PDF document, they are documents that will be displayed the same on any computer.

    One popular question is how to create PDF documents from other applications. Microsoft Word is a popular word processing application, but it can’t natively save a PDF document. In this post I will walk you through the steps that will convert any Microsoft Word document to a PDF file for free.

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  • Microsoft Vista: How to Disable UAC Warnings

    Microsoft Vista: How to Disable UAC Warnings

    Since I have been using Microsoft Vista I have kept UAC disabled since I was repeatedly bombarded by warnings. These messages were constantly displayed on the screen whenever I wanted to change some system settings, and became annoying very quickly. The quick solution, therefore, was for me to disable UAC.

    Everything had been working fine until recently. In the last few months I began to experience a few issues with some of the installed applications. After doing some research, I decided to enable UAC and since then the problems have disappeared. I also decided to find a way to disable the UAC warnings, and after some quick research found out that you can. So now I have UAC enabled and no annoying warnings. This post explains how to disable the UAC messages in Microsoft Vista.

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  • Access is Denied With External Hard Drive

    Recently I received a phone call from someone I know that had recently purchased a hard drive enclosure. This allowed them to use an internal hard drive as a USB 2.0 external hard drive. He was attempting to connect the hard drive on a new laptop with Microsoft Vista installed.

    Every time he connected the external hard drive, he was always greeted with a message on the screen stating: “Access is denied”. He mentioned he was logged in with an administrator account, so I couldn’t see why he wasn’t granted access to the hard drive. That is when I thought about a good reason why he wasn’t given access.

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  • Microsoft Word: Can’t Create File

    Microsoft Word: Can’t Create File

    I recently had problems when opening Microsoft Word attachments that were sent through e-mail. When I attempted to open that attachment Word produced a message indicating it can’t create a file and provided a path to a directory. The directory itself was a temporary directory that Word was using to open the attachment.

    While the error itself wasn’t hard to temporarily fix, I wanted a more permanent solution. I decided to search me computer to find where this value was stored and change it. I outline how to find and change the value in this post.

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  • Microsoft Outlook: How to Recover Hard Deleted Items

    Microsoft Outlook: How to Recover Hard Deleted Items

    For many that use Outlook at work, you are probably connected to an Exchange server that manages your e-mails. In many instances, the administrator of the Exchange servers has probably configured the server to retain deleted items for a specified period of time. By default, Outlook sends any deleted e-mails to the “Deleted Items” folder, where you can restore the item or permanently delete the item. But what if you hard delete an item that doesn’t goto the “Deleted Items”?

    There is a simple change that you can make in the Windows registry to make use of the Exchange Server’s retention period. This will allow you to recover any items that you have hard deleted. Let’s see how to do this.

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