CHRISdotTODD

Ars technica reported yesterday that a recent Microsoft update, with its Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), removed nearly 1 million fake anti-virus programs from users' machines. This is a good reminder to us all -- make sure you're keeping up with the Microsoft patches, which are typically released the second Tuesday of every month. Unless you're technically astute enough to critically review each and every patch, I would recommend you set it for auto-update. Here's how to do it. Go to Control Panel Click on Security Center If not already set to "ON", click on "OFF" next to Automatic Updates to change it In the "Manage security settings for category" click on "Automatic Updates" Click on the radio button next to Automatic (recommended) and set the frequency to every day at an hour when you rarely or never use your computer This is a great example to why security protection is the number one reason you should be running a

Excel provides an easy formula to set text values in cells to the correct or proper case. This is very helpful when cleaning up data before entering into a database. If the source was from a third-party -- perhaps from user registrations, it's not unusual to have users not capitalize proper names. Here's an example: You want st. paul to read St. Paul You want project manager to read Project Manager Here's the formula: =PROPER(A1) where A1 is the cell of the value you want to convert If you are going to reference the value later, remember you can use the Text command too. =TEXT(PROPER(A1),"#") If you want to convert the entire value to upper case, use the UPPER function. =UPPER(A1)

Here are the steps to get your free AT&T Wi-Fi on your iPhone: Activate Wi-Fi from the settings icon on your iPhone Select "attwifi" from the list of available networks Enter your 10-digit mobile number and check the box to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy. Tap 'continue' You will receive a text message from AT&T with a secure link to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot. You will not be charged for the text message. The SMS link will only be valid for 24 hours at the location it was requested. Another request must be submitted when using another hotspot location. Open the text message and tap on the link for 24-hour access to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot. Enjoy! Credit for the documented steps goes to my great colleagues at work.

For most of us, we bought our XP computer from a vendor who customized the display of the Systems Properties General tab (Control Panel >> System Properties). Microsoft has made it easy to put your own custom logo and Support Information on this tab. Go to "C:\WINDOWS\system32" and search for oeminfo.ini. Open oeminfo.ini with a text editor such as notepad to make changes. If the file does not exist on your system, you can create the file. Here's the syntax: [General] Manufacturer=The Company Model=The Model supporturl=http://CHRISdotTODD.com [Support Information] Line1="Customer Care provides support" Line2="for basic Windows XP questions." Line3="Please refer to the Warranty and Support Guide" Line4="for complete support information in your country." Line5 = "" Line6 = "" Line7 = "In the United States, call 1-800-652-6672. " Line8 = "" Line9 = "Support is available 24 hours per da

I found a great, free site that will take my mp3 music and create ringtones. With audiko.net you can search for existing ringtones, upload your own mp3 or enter a URL of an mp3 or YouTube video. The ringtones should work with most phones including the iPhone. When you upload a file, it takes only a few minutes to process, and then you can select the music segment that you want converted to a ringtone. The one problem with the entire process is that you cannot play your uploaded file, so you need to determine on your computer or mp3 player the time mark to start and stop the clip. Audiko.net is able to process files so quickly because they only use the first 75 seconds of a clip, which should be fine in most cases. If you opt to use a YouTube file, the process takes a bit longer, but still works. Of course with YouTube, the audio is not likely to be as good as what you can get from an mp3 file. When the ringtone is ready to download, you can get it in mp3 format, m4r, (the iPhone forma

Here's just one way to improve the performance of Firefox, through enabling pipelining. Pipelining is having the browser send a subsequent request before receiving a response from the prior request (standard behavior). Pipelining also provides the facility to include multiple requests within a single packet. Mozilla reports the highest potential performance gains for those web pages that have a higher latency rate. Here's how to configure Firefox: Enter about:config in the URL bar Click the warning button Enter "pip" in the Filter -- this should reduce the list of options to four items Click on the Value field for the following two entries and change from False to True network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining Click on the Value field of network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set the value to 8 Start enjoying a faster Firefox If you set the maximum requests for pipelining too high, you could actually see or just perceive a slower response time, so if y

If you have ever tried to switch to a UNC name while working with the Command Prompt, you have found that it can cause you a problem. What you need is a mapped drive to the UNC path. Using pushd , you can accomplish this. pushd will map to the last available drive (i.e. Z:) and automatically switch you to that drive mapping. Here's the syntax: pushd \\server\share\path For example, \\mycompanyserver\commonfiles\project1 Of course when you're done, you may want to unmap that drive. No problem, use popd . With popd , it will switch you back to the path you were on and unmap the drive letter. Here's the syntax: popd z This is a great solution for those batch files that require a drive mapping, but you do not want to keep the mapping alive all the time.

Most of us who have purchased iTunes music know that we can remove the DRM from the M4P audio files by burning the music onto a CD. But if you have a large collection, this can be very time consuming -- though having your music backed up to CD isn't a bad idea. For those of you who do not relish the idea of bacing up each every track, there might be a solution available for you. This first program, MagicISO , will convert up to 3 minutes per song for 14 days without purchasing -- I tried a song under 3 minutes and it seemed to work fine. You can buy it for $30 or get it free when you buy a 3rd party item or service through their site. For example, you can get the 2009 Entertainment Book for $25. Your second option is NoteBurner -- a $35 software that will allow you to burn to a virtual CD, and then back to MP3s. This batch converter works with iTunes, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, Winamp, and SonicStage. Another option is TuneBite . TuneBite appears to play and capture, getti

Many applications we use come with built in spell checkers; with F7 being the most common way to execute the spell checker. With more and more web based apps, I seem to find myself occasionally not having a spell checker or the spell checker is cumbersome. For me, this no longer is a problem. I have been using a free product called Enso Words from Humanized for over 6 months as my spell checker. Here's how simple it is: Highlight what you want to check (ctrl-A to select everything) Hold the Caps Lock key down and start typing "spellcheck". In my case, just an "s" is enough to put spellcheck in the top of the Enso list. Release the Caps Lock key If there are no misspellings, Enso Words will tell you so. If there are, a window will open with your text, and the misspelling will be highlighted. Click and hold on the misspellings to see possible correct spellings. Select the correct spelling or select Learn. Alternatively, you can type the correct spelling. When you

In Excel, I will use formulas quite frequently for my analysis. At times I want to reference the resulting value of the formula for comparison or to feed another formula. Unfortunately, if you are doing a comparison, Excel will try to compare the formula instead of the formulas results. Well, turns out there is an easy way to correct this. If you want your formula result to be a number, then use the VALUE function. If you want the formula result to be text, use the TEXT function. Here is the syntax for each: VALUE(text) TEXT(value,format_text) -- The format_text value can be any format from the Category box on the Number tab (in the Format Cells dialog box) except General. Here is an example of each: =VALUE(MID(A2,46,FIND("&",A2)-46)) -- this actually finds a number beginning with the 46th character of a string, and continues until it finds the ampersand character. By wrapping the formula with VALUE, I can now compare the number to other numbers in my looku

With the release of Google Chrome just weeks ago, speed tweaking tips are popular topics for Firefox. I found a list at TechRadar to be fairly good. Of the 8 tips offered, I am trying the following: 1 - 3, 6, and 8. Not that some of these are as much about perception as really making any difference. But isn't perception all we really care about? If we perceive it to be faster, it must be faster.

I recently got a new laptop with Windows XP and I'm slowly getting it configured to all my preferences. One thing I noticed is that everytime I rebooted, the Language Bar would reappear in the Taskbar. No matter how many times I removed it, it would rear its ugly head again. With a little research, I found out how to stop this nasty behavior. You need to un-register and re-register a DLL that controls the behavior. Specifically, here's what you do: Go to Start and click Run... Enter"Regsvr32.exe /u msimtf.dll" and click OK Go to Start and click Run... Enter "Regsvr32.exe msimtf.dll" and click OK Next time you reboot, it wont show up.

You may have the need to open and view more than one Outlook Inbox at the same time. Take for example an employee quitting... who's going to monitor his inbox until a replacement is hired? In my office, email support is handled through a shared email account, with designated individuals watching it at various times. Here's how you can add additional inboxes to Outlook, so you do not have to switch back and forth between accounts: Start Outlook Go to Tools | E-mail Accounts... Make sure View or change existing e-mail accounts is marked and click Next Make sure your Microsoft Exchange Server is highlighted and click Change Click More Settings... Click the Advanced tab Click Add Enter the name of the additional inbox you want to add. This is the same name you find in the Outlook Address Book. Click OK -- you may have multiple choices, if the name you gave matches more than one account. If so, select the account you want and click OK , again. Click OK Click Finish Here's a

How often do you use the right-click on your mouse a s a shortcut to tasks that otherwise would take much longer? Sometimes I find I want to open a file in an application that is different than the default application. For that purpose, I right-click the file and hover over Open With Other times though, I may want to send the file in an email, or zip it up, and sometimes, OpenWith is not even listed. For these times, I use SendTo . Microsoft has made it very easy to customize SendTo to meet your needs. The default options include all the drives on your computer, zip, shortcut on the Desktop, an attachment in your default email, or to My Documents. For my own list, I have added all my web browsers (except the default), because when I right-click on an HTML file shortcut (URL), there is no OpenWith option. I also added Dreamweaver, as it does not always show up in the OpenWith dialog for file formats. Notepad has also been a good addition, as often times there are file formats I want to

Windows XP (like all Windows operating systems) uses a technique of storing some content of its system memory (RAM) to the hard drive, therefore using less memory for functions that are used less often. So what Windows is doing is keep functions used most often in RAM and "swapping" out less used functions on to your hard drive. Though great in principle, if/when a function is needed that is stored on the hard drive, the system must reload it in memory before it is used, which makes things work slower. This is particularly true when Windows stores central parts (referred to as the kernel) of Windows itself on the hard drive. If you have 256 MB or more of RAM, a simple Registry change keeping the kernel from being swapped to the hard drive can give you some performance improvements. Here's how you do it: Click Start Click Run... Enter Regedit and click OK (opens the Registry Editor) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ M

This is a simple Registry setting that will speed up your Windows XP menus. Click Start Click Run... Enter Regedit and click OK Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop \ MenuShowDelay Change the default value of 400 A value of 0 would open a menu even if you just pass the mouse over it, so try a value of 100 or 200.

I just got a new laptop and was reminded of a common annoyance in MS Office products. The menus never fully display immediately -- you either have to click the arrow at the bottom of the menu or wait a few seconds. There is actually a fairly easy way to keep them expanded all the time. Right-click any toolbar Select Customize Check "Always show full menus" That's it.

Tip 1: When the phone is locked, double-click the Home button to access your "iPod" volume, play/pause, forward, and backward features Tip 2: When the iPhone is unlocked (you're using it), double-click the Home button to get to your Contact Favorites Tip 3: ( Repeat from a prior post ) When apps are crashing, power your phone off and on or start and stop airplane mode

before I find that the My Computer view is much less helpful when interacting with files than the Explorer view. By default, when you click on My Computer or My Documents, and folder and drive shortcuts, the left pane contains links to Make a new folder, Publish this folder..., and other not-so-helpful links. I like the Explorer view which has a tree of all folder, open to the folder that I've selected.. Well, with an easy Registry change, the behavior of My Computer and the like can be changed to open in an Explorer view. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell and set the default value ( Value data ) to "explorer" -- that's it. after

I recently started having a problem where my Excel 2003 and Word 2003 files would not open when clicked, unless Excel and/or Word was already open. If the application wasn't open, it would open the application, but not load the file. I did quite a bit of searching, but couldn't seem to find the right answer. Some sites recommended checking a setting to Ignore other applications -- a setting that wasn't even available in Word. Turns out for both applications, it was the Addins that were causing troubles. To remove the offending Addin, you need to edit the Registry. Here's the process I used. Go to Start > Run... , enter regedit, and click OK . Go to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\ Addins . Right-click on Addins and select Export . This will let you re-import the keys. Delete the individual Addins one at a time, testing each time to find the offending Addin. Once you identify the offending Addin, re-import all Addin keys, and de