In the fast few days, you may have heard from some news source that some nice hacker(s) targeted unprotected routers with good intention. After hacking the router to gain access to user’s network, the hacker(s) installed some protective software that will look for spyware and remove it once found. The software can also install important updates on user’s computer and even force the user to update their computer so their computer will be up to […]
Tips & Tricks
146 posts
When Google first released Inbox by Gmail, they removed a common feature in email management: empty emails from the trash, or permanently delete the emails in trash. Their intention of “delete-it-and-forget-it” was good so we can focus on more important things than emptying trash because the emails in trash will be automatically and permanently deleted after 30 days, however, they missed one important thing which make their good intention a big complaint: We, as email users, process […]
If you are a e-Rewards member, you may have received an email at some point inviting you to install e-Rewards Notify desktop application. If you ever wonder it is OK to install it, then the short answer is “No, don’t install it”. The invitation email describes e-Rewards Notify as a desktop application which delivers survey invitations straight to your desktop, but if you read the detailed information about the application on e-Rewards web site, you […]
One of the two simple tips I mentioned in my previous post is to always log in your Windows computer with a Standard User account and the benefits of doing this include: 1. No software can be installed without your permission because you will be prompted to enter the password of an account with administrator privilege before software is being installed. 2. No system setting can be changed without your permission because you need the password […]
My HP Envy 15 laptop comes with an Intel Wireless-N 7260 wireless card and recently I noticed that it causes weird connection issue. Every time when my laptop wakes up from the sleep mode or the hibernate mode, it loses the WIFI connection. Although the WIFI connection icon on the taskbar shows it is connected, it does not allow me to access any site. When this happens I have to reboot my computer to get the connection […]
Intel Driver Update Utility is a handy tool developed by Intel that can automatically detect, download and install the latest drivers from Intel. It is very useful because you don’t have to go through Device Manager in your computer to figure out what Intel products you have in your computer, and the utility will check all Intel products for updates, and give you a list of products with the installed version and the latest version, then you can […]
When I get a new computer, the first thing I usually do is to uninstall the junk software pre-installed by the manufacturer. I find the most annoying software bundled in new computer is McAfee security products such as McAfee LiveSafe, so when I first got my new HP Envy 15 laptop, I immediately removed all McAfee products. I thought the removal should not leave any trace behind, but how wrong I was. Recently I noticed […]
First of all, as .NET developer, you should NOT use COM components in your .NET applications any more, because it is old and unmanaged. The detailed error message usually looks like this: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {000209FF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following error: 800xxxxx The error code may be different, but the cause of the error is usually the same. The most common cause of the error is that most […]
When you first set up your Windows computer, the first user account you create will be an administrator account by default, and all additional accounts created will be standard accounts. However, there is also a built-in administrator account called “Administrator” in Windows, but it is disabled by default for the security reason. If for some reason you would like to enable this built-in administrator account (even though it is not recommended to enable this account), […]
In my previous post, I described how to fix the problem when your VirtualBox on 64-bit host OS only supports 32-bit guest OS. If you are using Windows 8.1, you may find that enabling the hardware virtualization in BIOS as in the aforementioned post does not help. The reason is that by default Windows 8.1 enables a feature called Hyper-V, which does not work well with VirtualBox, so if you want to use VirtualBox to install 64-bit […]