As Windows operating system gets more and more complicated, there are also a lot of troubleshooting steps that a computer technician will have to learn. From my experience, one of the most effective method to learn and remember how to fix a computer problem is to purposely break it and then try to figure out the solution before looking for it in Google. We may not be able to learn and memorize all of them which is why automated solutions by utilities such as Windows Repair and FixWin that are easy to use can be a great time saver. Another utility that should be added to the list is Fix it which is created by Microsoft. You can search for the Fix it tool from the official Fix it website to help solve the problem on your computer but here is how you can download the portable offline version of Microsoft Fix it utility so you can use it on computer that is without an active Internet connection.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that just like everyone else, the people who come and visit Raymond.cc have had their fair share of Windows programs hang or lock-up on them. It seems to be part of computing life these days that you just have to accept. Most of the time once something has decided to crash, there isn’t really an awful lot you can do about. On occasion, you might be lucky if you let the program wait a while and it might actually come back to you, but most of the time it makes little difference.

The real frustration comes when you might be in the middle of actually doing something that you really don’t want to lose, but most of the time, it’s in to Task Manager, find the Hung program and ending the process. Anything that wasn’t previously saved, has now been lost, leaving you with no idea what caused the crash or why.

A new project which I have in mind is in progress and I guess only hal9000 knows about this. One of the task that I need to do is embed the program’s icon to the post. At first I was thinking of using Google Images to look for the icon of the software but the quality seemed to vary so I’ve decided to make it a standard by extracting the icon directly from the executable file and then saving it as PNG image format. The reason why I’ve chosen PNG is because the file size is small, support transparency and all web browsers is able to view it. There are many free third party tools such as IconsExtract by Nir Sopher that I can use to extract icons from EXE files but most of them is only capable of saving the output as icon file format (.ico). After looking around, I found just the tool that I need called BeCyIconGrabber that is able to extract the icon from EXE and save it as PNG.

Taking notes and saving them as text files in computer is something that I normally do everyday. In fact my desktop is filled with text files because I prefer to save them there so that it is easier for me to access the text files. One way to keep my desktop less clutter is to combine all the text files into one. There are also many other reasons as to why you would like combine all text files into one. Perhaps you have CD filled with readme’s and you’d like to automatically search and combine all of them so that you can read them all at once, or if you are on a working environment, you may want to combine reports, backup or network log files. Or perhaps you come across a very special situation where you are given a task to look for non repeating keywords from thousands of text files and you can easily complete the task by combining them into one text file and use a duplicate lines remover to show only unique words.

The other day when I was in Windows 7 doing a few things, a file requester came up with the Places bar down the left hand side, and then it suddenly struck me. When I used Windows XP, the Places bar had been customised to make better use of those five shortcuts that are available making them a bit more useful to me. The only problem is, the utility used to do it was that indispensible little tool, TweakUI. As TweakUI is not for Windows Vista or 7, that meant having a look around to see what I could use instead to do the job.

It was quite a surprise that after a little search, there seemed to be very few tools about to do such a thing and found none for Vista and 7 in particular. Most of the answers that came up for Windows 7 and Vista were to edit the registry manually as the Places bar is only five registry entries, but that really doesn’t seem like the quickest and easiest solution. Then there is the option to edit the Places bar through the Group Policy Editor, but again, that seems like a rather odd thing to have to do just to edit a couple of shortcuts. Also, the Group Policy Editor is not available in versions of Windows ‘Home Premium’.

Eventually, I came across a few small utilities which claim to do the job, although even the newest one is only from 2008, but thought they were worth a try anyway. And because of their age, they each have one or two little quirks.

Organizing giveaways on the blog is quite troublesome because it involves a lot of manual work such as extracting all the users and IP address from the comments, then scan and remove the duplicate entries, and finally enter the participants in a list randomizer at random.org to randomly pick the winners. Although there are giveaway plugins for WordPress to do all that, but I don’t like the idea of installing too many plugins on my server when it is not going to benefit the users. One of a very powerful freeware that has helped me greatly in those task is TextCrawler. I’ve previously written an article on how you can search a particular word in multiple editable text files with TextCrawler and today I will be sharing with you on how easy it is to remove duplicate lines in text files with TextCrawler. In fact Notepad++, my favorite text editing software is also capable of deleting duplicate lines.

Some of you may not be feeling comfortable in using Toolbar Cleaner because it comes with adware in the installer itself. Moreover it lists all plugins, BHO, and toolbars found on the web browser rather than displaying only potentially unwanted programs. A wrong decision could cause you to lose some of the legitimate plugins which you will have to manually reinstall again. Leofelix has suggested another adware cleaner for web browser that is called AdwCleaner. It is created by Xplode and it doesn’t have an official website for the tool but is officially hosted at a French website called Général Changelog Team.

AdwCleaner is a free and portable adware cleaner that claims to delete adware, PUP (Potentially Unwanted Programs), toolbars and homepage hijackers. If AdwCleaner works as claimed, then it is much more powerful compared to Toolbar Cleaner.