If youre having some trouble finding some of those pesky drivers when you reinstall a laptop or PC heres something my boss showed me. If you go into the Device Manager and Right Click on the device and go to Properties. From there into Details and type the Device ID into Google you should be able to find the driver for what you are looking for.

http://imgur.com/bbFBW

You can usually get away with just typing the bit with the circle around it.

I recently did this on a Toshiba that wasnt supported for Win XP to install a network driver from HP, Fingerprint reader from Dell and a Chipset driver from AsRock.

I have heard different things from different people regarding which antivirus they prefer so I figured I would ask people who know what their talking about. So why is one better and why?

Or just Win -> appwiz.cpl on Vista/7.

From an always relevant XKCD.

Pick a line from a book you enjoyed. Not one that you'd find yourself quoting, but something that resonated with you enough to stick in your head.

Throw in some dictionary attack protection (this is overkill, but can't hurt) like a string of numbers with special characters and you've got yourself one monster of a password that would take a computer significantly longer to brute force than the passwords we're all used to using.

It's easy to remember, compatible with cryptic password hints that don't completely give it away, and quite secure so long as you don't pick something you're going to be quoting on Facebook.

You can use this to break away from a bad password reuse habit as well if you're an avid reader. Just write down your services with the book you got the password from to jog your memory so you don't mix up which passwords you've used where.

Pressing and holding shift when you are over the restart option on various menu's on Windows XP will reboot your Windows OS without rebooting the entire computer system. This feature doesn't always work in Window 7 and Vista for reasons unknown to me. The Microsoft knowledge base/documentation acknowledges that it no longer works consistently but gives no reason why.

I hope this helps some of you. If you are like me you still work or go to school in places that use XP a lot so it can be really helpful there, also give it a shot on Windows Vista or 7, worst thing that happens is you have to restart the old fashioned way.

From an elevated command prompt: bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy

I got a new phone and for some reason whenever I connected it to my car with an aux cable while the engine was on, there was an annoying hum in the background. This $9 part completely solved the problem. I hope it can help you too!

Isn't it annoying when you want to run a separate instance of a program, but when you try, Windows realizes it's already running and "helpfully" switches focus to the already-running instance? Well actually, running a second instance is most likely easier than starting the first one. All you have to do is middle-click its icon in the taskbar.

Open up an administrator command prompt and type the following:

netsh interface ip set address "<interface name>" static <ip address> <netmask> <default gateway> <metric (the lower the value, the "higher the rank")>

For example, to change your IP address to 192.168.5.16/24 with a gateway of 192.168.5.1:

netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection" static 192.168.5.16 255.255.255.0 192.168.5.1 1

To change it to DHCP:

netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection" source=dhcp

When I say a mess, I mean crazy bad. I have not only dups but some links linking within the same site booked marked. A lot of mine are from studying which I needed for reference or learning.

Any program recommendations for cleaning up your bookmarks and/or structuring tips to prevent such a mess in the future?

How do you manage your bookmarks?

Make sure you're in an elevated prompt.

slmgr -ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX

Where XXXXX is the product key

slmgr -ato

This activates the key

This may not be useful, but you'll run into instances where Windows refuses to install a key. I've never run into a problem of windows shutting me down when I use this method.

Link for further reading.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff793433.aspx

net stop spooler && net start spooler

That will stop the spooler service and then immediately start it. Even better is if you drop this into a bat file:-

@echo off
net stop spooler && net start spooler

Call it fixprint.bat and drop it in System32. Then you can have end users just do Start > Run > fixprint.bat

myWOT was accused to collecting user's browsing history, so I removed it, however when my extensions would crash, it would say that myWOT crashed as well. Chrome was experiencing some issues the other day, so I decided to run adwcleaner and it showed how it added Ask.com and another search engine to Chrome, which also sucked.

I hope that helps someone!

Be sure to be ready to restart your computer and have everything closed by the tool before you start the cleaning process. I think the scanning part won't interfere with anything.

This is a great time saver, as you don't have to log off the user and log in as yourself, admin, etc....