Making Windows Require a Password When Waking Up

Windows by default guides you to set a password for each account that you set up. It does not force you to set a password, though. Even if you set a password, Windows will allow you to change your settings to automoatically log-on without having to enter your password. Some people like that. Others want [...]

How To Create Your Own Windows Theme

One of the things I like about Windows 7 is the Windows Theme concept. A theme is a combination of Windows Desktop background images (including changing backgrounds every few minutes), sounds, screen saver, and even selection of the border color and transparency. Microsoft has a large number of themes that you can easily download and [...]

Terry’s Computer Tips Newsletter – June 16, 2013

This week’s email newsletter articles are: How To Create Your Own Windows ThemeOne of the things I like about Windows 7 is the Windows Theme concept. A theme is a combination of Windows Desktop background images (including changing backgrounds every few minutes), sounds, screen saver, and even selection of the border color and transparency. Microsoft [...]

3D Printers Are Really Available!

I’ve read about 3D printers (3-dimensional printers!) for a couple of years. They always seemed super expensive and more of a laboratory toy or high-end specialty modeling tool. If you haven’t heard of these, it’s basically printing and “over-printing” (printing on top of previous printing) to build 3-dimensional items. Sometimes, those items are often models [...]

Replacing or Adding a Hard Drive

Almost no matter what our initial thoughts were about an appropriate size for a hard drive, we tend to out-grow them. With today’s huge available hard drive sizes, as well as today’s programming practices, programs are becoming bigger and bigger as well as more bloated with "features" that no one uses. Windows is getting bigger [...]

Speed Up the Feel of Windows

Windows has all sorts of cute animations such as fading menus into view and out of view. Of course, all of these tricks take time — time that we’re waiting while we watch (or tolerate) Windows doing its thing… Fortunately, the versions of Windows all the way back to Windows 3 offered ways to fine-tune [...]

Terry’s Computer Tips Newsletter – June 9, 2013

This week’s email newsletter articles are: Replacing or Adding a Hard DriveAlmost no matter what our initial thoughts were about an appropriate size for a hard drive, we tend to out-grow them. With today’s huge available hard drive sizes, as well as today’s programming practices, programs are becoming bigger and bigger as well as more [...]

Followup on Program ‘Not Responding’ Messages

Reader Noel Evans wrote from New Zealand after my article on Program ‘Not Responding’ Messages recently: Hi there Terry Many thanks for your prompt reply. I was surprised to see that I made your newsletter the very next day! I’ve tried re-booting more frequently like you suggested, and while the problem is not completely gone, [...]