When you try to add a new printer by clicking the Add a printer or scanner in the Printer & Scanners page, old printers you added earlier but no longer use may be listed.
This post tells you how to completely remove old, uninstalled, or obsolete printers from the Add a Printer and Printers & Scanners pages. In addition, the leftover printer drivers, driver packages, and registry entries need to be removed.Read more
Every now and then, my PC located in the bedroom emanated a sound at random intervals. This was caused by an application playing a short media file. And I noticed it twice when entering the bedroom, which I thought was a mere coincidence, but wasn’t. I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Control Panels → Sounds was the first place I checked. It was not the Sound Scheme as it was already set to “No Sounds”.
I then opened the Volume Mixer to find out the program responsible for playing the unidentified music on my computer. But when I looked through the Volume Mixer, the 3rd column said: “Name Not Available”. Randomly, the music just popped right up into the speakers. It lasted for a few seconds.
With almost a dozen applications running and I didn’t want to disturb them, I fired up the excellent Process Monitor right away and configured the filters so that any entry with “.wav” in the Path is captured.
It may not necessarily be a .wav file (it could be .mp3 or any audio file type, as well), but I had a suspicion that it could be, in this case. So I included “.wav“, to start with.Read more
You may have come across situations where a continuous hard disk activity taking place although your system being in an idle state. If you open Task Manager out of curiosity, you may find several processes starting and exiting of their own without you doing anything. It could be a scheduled backup task, third-party system maintenance program or anything that could be churning your hard disk. It could be even a Malware. But which application or process launches them?Read more
RegFileExport is a useful console application from NirSoft, which helps you extract data from offline Registry hives that are not currently in use by the Operating System. RegFileExport reads the registry hive and then exports the specified branch or the entire branch to a .reg file.
We know that the Registry Editor in Windows lets you load a registry hive via the File menu – “Load Hive…” command, and extract data offline from the registry hive.
The advantage of RegFileExport over Regedit.exe is that RegFileExport can export data quickly using a single command-line, without needing to load the hive, export the branch, update the paths in the REG file using a text editor, and unload the hive manually… which you would otherwise do if you use Regedit.exe or Reg.exe.Read more
We’ve covered the excellent multi-purpose command-line tool NirCmd from Nirsoft earlier. This post talks about the new command-line switches added in the current version of NirCmd. Earlier this month, I sent a NirCmd feature request to Nir Sofer, asking to include an “elevate” switch, which should launch an application elevated (Windows Vista, Windows 7 & 2008.) Nir was kind enough to incorporate this feature in the immediate version update (v2.40). Later another update, to fix a bug I reported, v2.41 was released.Read more
This article explains the different methods to create a bootable USB Windows Setup disk from a Windows 10 or 11 ISO image.
Follow one of the three methods in this article to create a USB Windows Setup Disk from the Windows ISO.
Default Programs Editor is a very useful tool which helps you to edit file type associations, add or remove AutoPlay handlers and static context menu entries. In Windows, there is no built-in option provided to add or edit context menu entries and static verbs. Here is where the Default Programs Editor comes in handy. This … Read more
Both Windows Sysinternals and Nirsoft offer a fantastic set of tools to tune up and troubleshoot PCs. The combined total of such tiny tools from those two sites certainly exceeds a hundred. Unfortunately, most, if not all, of the tools in the suite don’t have an automatic update feature, which makes managing them slightly tricky. … Read more
Did you download a movie video recently and found that the movie’s audio or video part does not play? This could be due to missing audio or video codec. To know which codec your system needs, to play your favorite video files correctly, you may use one of these tools discussed in this article.
Even if you have a good codec pack installed on the computer, you sometimes get only audio and no video (often on .avi files). The following programs will help you to identify the missing codec.
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The amazing NirCmd utility now has a new “speak” command that allows you to easily cause your computer to speak the text that you wish. In this command, NirCmd uses the Speech library (SAPI) that is installed in Windows. Here is a fun tip on how to add the Speak command to the context menu for Text Documents (.txt).Read more