Dell System Restore with Vista

July 8th, 2007

I was recently “working on” a new Dell Dimension C521 running Vista Home Basic. I wanted to do a system restore to the original factory condition. The documentation provided with the machine tells me that CTRL+F11 is the magic key combination at boot, but that probably only applies for Windows XP. Apparently they haven’t updated their documentation yet.
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PC Decrapifier v1.8.1 Released

May 17th, 2007

Check it out over here.
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Function Lock?!

April 17th, 2007
flockkey.jpg

Ok, this has been something that’s been annoying me for quite some time. Who’s bright idea was it to come up with the Function Lock key? Apparently it was Microsoft. No surprise. If it was just another useless key like SrcLk then I wouldn’t care. But the fact that it totally changes purpose of ALL of the F-Keys and others. It’s really annoying. Here I’ll talk about my experience with a couple F-Lock “enhanced” keyboards and what I did to “fix” them.
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Mac vs PC Video

April 15th, 2007

This is awesome. It’s a Mac vs PC video making fun of how the pre-installed software bloats the PCs.

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v1.8 Released on PCDecrapifier.com

April 12th, 2007

The site’s been up for almost a week now, and I’ve been letting it slip out here and there to see what happens. I was going to wait until next week to make an official announcement, but here it is: www.pcdecrapifier.com.
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PC Decrapifier on the Air!

April 11th, 2007

This was pretty cool. I was asked to do an interview for the Computer America radio show last Monday (April 9th, 2007.) I was waiting for the podcast to become available so I could listen to it first before posting this… just in case I sounded like a total dork. Perhaps I may have chosen to neglect to mention it. But, I thought it went really well and had a great time.
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KnoppMyth DST Update

March 16th, 2007

Although I was diligent to update my Pocket PC for the new Daylight Savings Time, I failed to update my KnoppMyth MythTV box. Fortunately, I didn’t miss any recordings. Here’s my update instructions.
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Cellink BTG-7000 Bluetooth GPS Review

February 22nd, 2007

Here’s a nice little Bluetooth GPS that I picked up on a great deal over at Geeks.com. I’ve been keeping an eye out for one for awhile and this came up with the features I wanted at the right price. For $40 I really couldn’t go wrong. Read on for the review.
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Windows Mobile DST Update

February 15th, 2007

Microsoft today released a patch for Windows Mobile to update for the the 2007 Daylight Savings time changes that go into effect in March. Here’s how my update went. I thought it would be very simple, but leave it to Microsoft to over complicate things and screw it up.
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PC Decrapifier: Vista Support - Attempt 2

February 13th, 2007

Ok, here’s another go at the Vista thing. The 1.7.1 beta works, but you have to explicitly tell it to run as administrator. I also found this other article on the AutoIT website that allows you to add a directive so that the user will be prompted for administrative privileges.
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