Mostly to do with PC fixes, though it may also include other personal technology such as iPod, Wii, etc.
I often save web pages as Word documents for different reasons, and sometimes need to disable the links. Finding no help in Help, I did the usual search and found the trick elsewhere.
Here’s what I found:
If you just want to remove the hyperlink property of the entry, select the document—[Ctrl]A—and unlink the field—[Ctrl][Shift][F9].
I’ve been wanting a 1 TB drive since Seagate started selling them at a reasonable price. Besides being budget conscious in the current economy, I also got paranoid with all the reports of problems. I trusted Seagate to fix them eventually, but it still left me with some hesitation. I finally got to the point where every time I looked at my main and back up drive free space, I was getting concerned (I like to have 50% free). Then New Egg had a sale. I hemmed and hawed for a couple of days and finally bought the Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB. It is cheaper than the Caviar Black, though not by much. Reading the reviews, the price difference has to do with speed. I also read the reviews of unhappy customers to see what the complaints were, and the only problem with the Green was speed. The other drives had issues with noise, or failing within a short period of time. I’m in agreement with most reviewers, in that a drive that big is only for storage, so speed is not as important. Good thing, too, because the drive is not fast. It is quite, though, which is appreciated in my home office where there are two towers and one laptop running all the time with a combined 6 to 7 drives running (depending on if the portable is plugged into the laptop) and 14 fans running. I look forward to summer just so my window A/C will drown out the noise.
Installation was a breeze, which is good because the OEM one comes with no instructions. No I just have to stay patient and test the drive for a couple of weeks before I wipe the 500 GB Seagate it is replacing and move it up to my main drive.
Over in my old blog, I recently had an entry about cleaning up the context menu in XP with PowerToys to fix a problem where Windows Exlplorer was even slower than usual.
Alas, Power Toys are not available for Vista, and even cleaning out the context menu will not speed it up. But, cleaning up the context menu does make it easier to use simply by narrowing down the choices by eliminating those you don’t use.
One habit I am trying to get into is adding a link to my Google query so folks can a) point out how I could have got better results and b) teach the less sophisticated Googlers how to improve their own results.
For the curious (and those who have not done much with Windows under the hood), there is a good summary of why your context menu may be annoying in an article at My Digital Life. The article includes a link to a ShellExView v1.37 by NirSoft. ShellExView is a cool tool if you are computer savvy, but not something I would recommend for your grandmother.
Of course, you can always do it the old fashioned way, i.e., regedit. Instructions on where to make the changes can be found at The WinVista Club.
On a related note, there is a good article at Computer World on how to manage your context menu in the “normal” way.
The point of this post is getting rid of that annoying incompatibility notice about Real every time an update is made to FireFox. But first, a rant…
I am not a fan of the Real Player to begin with. I certainly give it credit for being one of the early multimedia players. I also give them credit for being one of the first major abusers of the installation process, changing extension mappings without asking, installing itself as a service when it is only used occasionally, and being really obtuse in how to fix these problems afterward. When I did PC maintenance service (before the Geek Squad, which people keep reminding me that I thought of four years before they did) I routinely removed the RealPlayer service and was always thanked for speeding up the machine.
I even tried to give the Real Player a second chance when they bought the Napster name. That lasted about 2 minutes past the installation where it still did all the things that annoyed me about the their 1.0 version. The Real Player is not installed on my personal machine. I used to routinely uninstall it from my work machine until my current employer decided to build their compliance training application using it. Which brings me to my point.
After updating the excellent password manager I use (RoboForm), I was once again confronted with this annoying screen.
My first shot in Google (remove incompatible firefox extension) got me pretty close to a solution with a Mozilla Support thread. The last entry in the thread did the trick for me. In case that link is dead, the entry was:
Ok, run the program “regedit” and goto “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMozillaFirefoxExtensions”
If there is nothing there try “HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMozillaFirefoxExtensions”
There you should see the extension… delete the registry entry.
That worked for me…
The first path worked for me, too, specifically the key {ABDE892B-13A8-4d1b-88E6-365A6E755758}, with the value of “C:Program FilesRealRealPlayerbrowserrecord”