David Vielmetter

Category: Tricks

  • Paranoid about hard drive crashes? Just clone it!

    Working in the help desk and computer support industry for past 10 years has taught me one important lesson about hard drives – they will fail! Some fail after 6 months, others take longer, but eventually that photo and music collection is going bye bye. Here’s what you can do to protect your stuff without…

  • Dell bloatware slows down Microsoft Outlook

    I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron E1405 Notebook loaded with Windows XP Professional and Office 2003 Professional. Everything on the notebook worked as expected, except Microsoft Outlook 2003. Almost every task in Outlook took much longer than expected, especially when opening calendar events or displaying reminders. Turns out the fix was removing software pre-installed by…

  • Fix DST appointment times in Microsoft Exchange

    As you may have heard on the news and/or radio, the DST (Daylight Savings Time) change will occur 2 weeks ahead of time in 2007. Unfortunately this change is apparently also causing a chaotic panic similar only to the Y2K frenzy in IT departments everywhere. So if your IT guys like many out there haven’t…

  • My computers svchost.exe is 0x745f2780ed

    So the other day, I’m playing around with my new Bluetooth headset and skype when my computer decides suddenly decides that I’ve had enough fun for the day. It gives me the following error and slows to the pretty much UNUSABLE speed setting. (X) svchost.exe — application error the instruction at “0x745f2780” reference memory at…

  • Remote desktop connection 6 authentication fix

    My last trip to Windowsupdate resulted in Remote Desktop Connection version 6. For those of you not familiar with this tool, it basically lets you remote control other desktops or servers from your computer using Microsoft RDP or Remote Desktop Protocol. To my dismay, I discovered that the updated RDC added an initial authentication prompt…

  • Transfer mp3’s from a friend’s iPod to your iTunes Library

    I recently got my sisters iPod Mini and wanted to get its songs onto my iTunes. Unfortunately iTunes doesn’t let you just copy music from a strange iPod to your library…or does it?

  • Selecting text block wise

    Another great way of quickly grabbing vertical sections of tables, lists or log files is the select block wise feature in Microsoft Word and some other editors. Basically selecting text block wise allows you to highlight columns of text vertically. It’s great for modifying log files and reformatting sections of code where more or less…

  • Transposing cells in Microsoft Excel

    I work with lots of Log files and lists. I’ve had many situations in which I’ve had to change a list in order to quickly compare, add, or remove entries. The transpose feature in Microsoft Excel was made just for this purpose.

  • Build your own HD TiVo with Automatic Commercial Skip

    Since my last post on how to make your own DVR, I’ve gotten lots of emails asking about a HOWTO on building a HDTV capable DVR. So I decided to build one…and of course I documented my progress with all the screen-shots and pictures that made my first post so popular. Thanks everyone for your…