It's not great security but it is more practical and a better end-user experience to have Windows automatically login on a single-user computer. Instead of waiting for the person to enter their password, Windows can get right to it and load the profile and startup objects all in one fell swoop. A person might power on their PC, walk away or start doing something else, and this … [Read more...]

When using Microsoft word, have you: had a multi-page document that needs some pages to be landscape and others portrait? needed page numbers to change throughout the document? encountered frustrating formatting issues in a document that were solved by putting pages in a separate document? You might be interested to learn about using Section Break in Word 2010 instead of … [Read more...]

I encountered a client's computer that would not start up any of the Microsoft Office 2010 components. For each application (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher, etc.), a different error message might be given. Finally, it was decided that an uninstall/reinstall would probably be for the best. Unfortunately, upon trying to uninstall the application, I received an error … [Read more...]

I encountered a PC earlier this week where the notification area was full of blank icons. It acted like it had icons in the system tray but they didn't react to clicks or right-clicks. It wasn't that alarming when the notification area was collapsed but when it was spread out on the task bar, it certainly looked odd. … [Read more...]

I was seeing inconsistent blue screens of death and other symptoms on my computer that needed to be investigated further. In addition to the BSoDs, I was also seeing a variety of other quirks like going to the "Turn Windows features on or off" window appeared blank instead of the usual list with checkboxes. I performed a variety of diagnostic steps and came up with nothing … [Read more...]