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Information and articles about doing stuff in Windows

Microsoft Windows is the world's most installed operating system, used on desktop computers and servers all over the world. I have been using Windows since the Windows 3.11 days and have worked with most versions (Windows 3.11, Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7).

Although I currently use OSX as my desktop computer I also have Windows 7 desktop and laptop and a Windows XP netbook and also run XP virtualized for testing Internet Explorer.

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How to see which ports Windows is listening on

Posted January 2nd, 2012 in Windows

In my last post I looked at how to create an SSH tunnel using PuTTY on Windows, which I used to create a tunnel through to a Microsoft SQL Server. I had some issues and needed to work out if the tunnel was actually open, so this post shows how to see which ports Windows is listening on.

Posted November 18th, 2010 in Windows

This week I have been both blown away by some actual (and quite amazing) innovation by tech's most un-innovative company (despite how much they like to tout how "innovative" they are) and frustrated by the same company when reinstalling their flagship operating system. No, this isn't a rant about Microsoft so read on.

Posted August 14th, 2010 in Offsite Articles, OSX and Windows

I started using an Apple Magic Trackpad yesterday and already far prefer it to a mouse (I'll do a review of it next week once I've used it a bit more). This post has a link to a page which shows how to connect a Magic Trackpad to a Windows machine that's not on Boot Camp and a few observations I made when attempting to connect.

Posted June 26th, 2008 in Windows (Updated June 28th, 2010)

I have been having issues with my Windows Vista desktop giving me a black screen after logging in and not being able to do anything at all other than switching the computer off and on again. Yesterday I installed some security updates and the same thing happened again but I finally managed to work out the solution and now can safely reboot and log back into my profile each time.

Posted September 27th, 2009 in Windows

It's possible for a system adminstrator to prevent access to the "Connections" tab in the Internet Options in Internet Explorer (which is also accessible from the Windows Control Panel). It's trivially easy to restore the tab as shown in this post.

Posted March 20th, 2009 in Windows

The final release of Internet Explorer 8 has been made available today. I'm currently running the beta version of Windows 7 and downloaded the IE8 version for Vista, thinking it would be the correct version. I was surprised when I went to install it that the message "Internet Explorer 8 is not supported on this operating system".

Posted October 18th, 2008 in Windows (Updated December 13th, 2008)

Windows Vista appears to have an annoying bug where sometimes if you insert a DVD-RW with data on it it appears to think it's a blank disc that needs formatting, and you get the "Prepare this blank disc" message. This post looks at how to solve the problem.

Posted November 21st, 2008 in Windows

I run Windows XP in a virtual machine with Internet Explorer 6 so I can easily test websites in that browser version natively. I noticed Windows XP Automatic Updates wanted to automatically update Internet Explorer to version 7 so thought I should post about this here to warn people if they need to ensure IE6 remains on a particular machine.

Posted September 5th, 2008 in Windows

It is possible on Windows to display the DNS cache from the command line. This can be useful for diagnosing DNS issues where an invalid or out of date DNS record might be cached. This post looks at how to displayed cached DNS records on Windows.

Posted September 3rd, 2008 in Windows (Updated September 4th, 2008)

If you are having issues on Windows when a DNS entry is being cached when it shouldn't you can easily flush the DNS cache from the command line. This post explains how to flush the Windows DNS cache.

Posted August 21st, 2008 in Applications and Windows (Updated August 29th, 2008)

This post contains a list of 10 useful free Windows applications that I usually install on my Windows machines. They are all available for free and I haven't included obvious stuff like Mozilla Firefox.

Posted August 28th, 2008 in Applications and Windows

A week ago I posted a list of 10 Useful Free Windows Apps and discovered as the week went by that I forgot about a number of other useful free Windows applications that I use. This post looks at another 9 freeware Windows apps, two of which are Firefox plugins.

Posted July 25th, 2008 in Applications and Windows

I have Windows Media Player 11 installed on my Windows Vista desktop and was surprised when I went to play a DVD and a dialog window popped up to tell me that "Windows Media Player cannot play DVD video". You have to ask what sort of media player WMP is when it can't play DVDs (and many other useful codecs like MP3 and xvid/DivX). A quick search on Google provided the answer which I will show in this post.

Posted July 4th, 2008 in Windows

A few days ago a friend of mine found her old Windows XP laptop and decided to use it, but couldn't work out what her password was. We needed to reset the password so I searched the Internet for a solutionand found Petter Nordahl-Hagen's Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista offline password editor.

Posted May 29th, 2008 in Windows (Updated June 26th, 2008)

This morning I came down to the office to check my email and my Windows Vista machine presented me with a nice blank screen. I leave it running all the time and have auto updates/reboots disabled so was a little surprised. I powered it off and started it up again only to discover it was completing installing updates. (Never mind that I have auto updates disabled...) When it started up again I got that lovely Windows Vista black/blank screen after logging in to my profile. This post looks at the blank screen issue and the only solution that has worked for me, which is to create a new user profile each time it happens.

Posted May 7th, 2008 in Windows

Windows Vista comes with a built-in "Administrator" account which is disabled by default. It is possible to enable this account if for some reason you need to. This post looks at how to do this.

Posted April 20th, 2008 in Windows

On Windows Vista the hosts file has a higher level of default security than earlier versions of Windows and it cannot be edited by a regular user unless the permissions are changed, or you run your text editor as administrator. This post looks at how to edit the hosts file on Windows Vista using notepad.

Posted August 8th, 2007 in Networking and Windows

After adding a new network interface to my Windows XP computer networking stopped working completely. I uninstalled the McAfee Security Center but that didn't help. This article looks at the steps I did to uninstall and reinstall TCP/IP networking on Windows XP.

Posted February 13th, 2004 in Networking and Windows (Updated June 12th, 2007)

To connect to MSN Messenger and ICQ instant messaging servers through a firewall you will need to open up outbound ports to connect to them. This article describes which ports to open and has an example of how to do it using a Dynalink RTA200 ADSL router.

Posted February 13th, 2004 in Networking and Windows (Updated May 24th, 2005)

To connect to a remote Windows Virtual Private Network you need to open up TCP port 1723 and IP protocol ID 47. This article explains about this with an example of how to do it using a Dynalink RTA220 ADSL router.