David Vielmetter

Tag: Windows 7

  • Empty Favorites in Windows Explorer Navigation Pane

    When you delete the Links folder from your user profile folder in Windows 7, strange things happen. First you’ll still see the Favorites icon in the Windows Explorer navigation pane, but it’ll be an empty heading. Right clicking the empty heading offers to “Restore favorite links”, but this feature doesn’t work if you’ve deleted or…

  • Hotkey toggle the default audio output device

    So I got this beautiful Sony TV and hooked it up to my work computer via HDMI. It’s great for watching movies and SageTV Client from my computer and every once in a while I even use it as an extended desktop. I also have a set of speakers on my desk that I use…

  • Downloads folder is slow to list items

    To me, there are few things worse than an intermittent computer problem…yea I know that’s a first world problem, but the occasional listing delay on the Download folder in Windows 7 definitely qualifies as one of those annoyances for me. I’ve just never had enough time to really analyze the problem and figure out what’s…

  • Print dialog is slow to come up

    So I ran into an issue the other day where a system would take up to 30 seconds to display a print dialog on any installed printer. Almost as if the system was encountering some kind of timeout when trying to render the print dialog. Turns out the problem manifested itself only in applications like…

  • Xerox cutting footer off printed pages

    When printing scanned PDF documents to a Xerox WorkCentre 5665/5675/5687 from Windows 7 x64 the printout may appear cut off or seem as if the document margins have been changed. Said documents appear fine in print preview and even if the option Fit to Printable Area or Shrink to Printable Area is invoked, the printout…

  • Redirected folders and offline files

    In a Windows 2003 Active Directory forest with group policies disabling offline files, Windows 7 systems can have issues if you’ve redirected folders via GPO. In my experience new Windows 7 systems joined to the AD domain would automatically start syncing re-directed folders such as My Documents and Desktop as if they were made available…

  • Dell Latitude E6400 Bluetooth woes

    So apparently Dell’s new Latitude E6400 series notebooks come with optional built-in Dell Wireless® 375 Bluetooth (BT) Modules. Unfortunately when the notebook arrives from the factory, the generic Windows BT driver is installed. Although everything looks clean in the device manager, the generic Windows driver is incompatible and you’ll notice this when you try to pair…

  • PresentationFontCache.exe hogging 50% CPU

    Ran into an issue where in Windows 7 x64 the PresentationFontCache.exe process was taking an excessive amount of CPU resources and would not stop even after a clean boot. Here are the steps I took to resolve this: [step 1] Click start and type services.msc into the search bar. Now find the Windows Presentation Foundation…

  • Export iCloud contacts to Outlook

    How to export icloud contacts to outlook