Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Restore the system/boot drive letter

How to restore the system/boot drive letterSometimes when you change the configuration of your hard disks, Windows may get confused and mix up your drive letters. If the drive letter for your system/boot drive (where Windows is installed) gets changed, you may not be able to boot into the operating system when you restart. To restore the old drive letter(s), you can follow the procedure in KB article 223188, which involves editing the registry. As always, be sure to back up the registry before making changes to it. Click Here

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Option to change wallpaper is missing or unavailable

Want to change your desktop wallpaper, but finding that the option to do so in the Display Properties dialog box on your XP computer is not there, or grayed out? This can happen if a registry key is set to hide or lock the display settings. Did you say you never changed such a setting and nobody else uses your computer? Well, it can be done by malware, too. To find out how to fix the problem, see KB article 921049

Vista and XP playing together

From time to time you may have difficulty accessing your Windows XP computer from your Windows XP computer. Here are some suggestions to ease your pain.

The first step is to be sure Printer Sharing is enabled on the Vista computer. Click Start, right click Network and select Properties to open the Network and Sharing Center, then scroll down to the section labeled Sharing And Discovery and turn Printer Sharing on. Now under the Sharing and Discovery section, click "Show me all the shared network folders on this computer" and ensure that the printer is listed.Here's the trick: the default workgroup name in Vista is WORKGROUP. On XP Home computers, the default workgroup name is MSHOME. Both computers should be members of the same workgroup to more easily share resources with one another. If your Vista computer is the new one, you can change its workgroup name by clicking Start Control Panel System and then Advanced System Settings in the left pane. On the Computer Name tab, click the Change button where it says "To rename this computer or change its domain or workgroup, click Change." Under the section labeled Member Of, select Workgroup and type in the name of the existing workgroup to which your XP computer belongs (alternatively, you can change the workgroup of the XP computer to match that of the Vista computer; what matters is that they both belong to the same workgroup).Now you should be able to access the Vista printer from the XP computer.

For lots more info on sharing in Vista, see: Click Here