After you upgraded to Windows 10 in VMware environments, the shared folders feature may not work any more. Follow this link to resolve the problem.

When you encounter problems connecting your Android phones/tablets to a PC, the cause could be that Windows is not selecting the proper driver for the device. Normally you would connect your portable device to a PC using Media Transfer Protocol (MTP). You may want to override the driver that Windows chooses if problems occur during installation of default driver, unknown device detected, etc. To override the default driver, simply choose to update the driver, pick your own driver and select ‘MTP USB Device’.

A good read on ‘Android USB Connections Explained: MTP, PTP, and USB Mass Storage’.

If you have a high-resolution display, you’ve probably noticed that some apps have blurry fonts when scaled up. Even stranger: some apps that used to scale well are blurry in Windows 10. Here’s a fix.

When applications are installed and updated on the Windows Operating System a hidden directory “c:\Windows\Installer” is used to store the installer (.msi) files and the patch (.msp) files.

Generally these files are important as during updating, patching or uninstalling software it will use the .msi/.msp files. If you blanketly delete all the files in this folder, you will find yourself needing to rebuild windows.

Over time as your computer is patched and patched again, these installer files become outdated and orphaned. They are no longer required, but they can take up many gigabytes of data…..(click here for more information and download the nice little utility to free up space on the Windows OS Drive).

TeamViewer has always been a popular tool to remote control or trouble shoot a client’s computer. The platform that this software supports now expands to non-PC arena like Android. This opens up a whole lot of new perspectives on how this tool can be utilized, e.g. controlling your phones from a computer and vice versa controlling your computer from a phone remotely. Try it out and see if these new features make sense and apply to you (free for personal use).

If you have an older scanner that still works but the software does not behave properly in newer versions of Windows, you may want to give NAPS (Not Another PDF Scanner 2) a try. It has a clean user interface and works with most WIA and TWAIN scanners, and it is free.

If you encounter problems when booting an Acer laptop (no posting, no screen, fan is running), you can try the following power drain procedure, it may do the trick.

1. Remove the ram sticks (Clean with a soft lint free cloth while they are out)
2. Remove the power cord and battery
3. Hold the power button for 58 seconds
4. Replace everything.

“Connected Standby” is a new feature in Windows 8. At first, only ARM devices with Windows RT supported Connected Standby. Some Intel Atom PCs with full Windows 8 now support it, too — and it will only become more common.

This is Microsoft’s attempt to give Windows 8 and 8.1 the “always-on” state people get from iPads, Android tablets, and smartphones. A PC with Connected Standby can’t use other power-management states like Sleep and Hibernate……(read the whole story)

If you try accessing ‘Devices and Printers’ from Control Panel and the system hangs or does not return any device, this could be caused by a not-so-perfect driver written for a Bluetooth adapter. The problem may cause other seemingly unrelated symptoms such as printers being offline for no reason.

Try the following and see if this will resolve the issue:

Click Start button, type “services” into the search program and files box. This brings up a list in the menu, select Services. This should open a list of local services on your system. Find ‘Bluetooth Service” and make sure it has started, right click and set to ‘automatic’. Select “Bluetooth Support Service” and start, set to automatic. Restart the system.

The above steps apply to a Windows 7 system. Similar procedures are available for other versions of Windows.

If you experience problems viewing online videos, e.g. in Facebook, which are Adobe Flash based, using Internet Explorer, you can try setting on ‘Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering’ in Internet Options under the Advanced tab.

One of the most common problems is that the video plays but it is blank; audio is fine. You will need to restart the browser for the option described above to take effect.