The programmers at Microsoft must think that it’s really fun to torture their users.

If you even try to login to Windows Live service once (definitely including such original titles as Windows Live ID, Windows Live Messenger, but probably others too), they setup your computer to automatically prompt you to log back in the next time you reboot. Not only that but clicking on the Big Red X doesn’t make the program go away, it merely minimizes it (for your convenience they say) so that it’s at the ready for you the next time you want to use it. Not only that, but they don’t provide any obvious way to prevent it from prompting you for your password the next time it reboots. Not only that, but if you search for a way to uninstall said program, you won’t find anything called Windows Live Messenger or Windows Live ID. Their are other Windows Live components in the Installed Programs list, but nothing obviously related to these pieces of garbage.

Very nice Microsoft. Thanks. It’s no wonder people hate Microsoft so passionately!

If you really want to uninstall this garbage permanently, do the following:

1. Open the Start Menu and click on Control Panel
2. click on “Uninstall a Program”
3. Scroll all the way to the bottom and find “Windows Live Essentials”
4. Click Uninstall/Change
5. Select the radio button beside “Uninstall” and then click “Continue”
6. Tick the boxes beside for the Services you want to prevent from harrassing you. High on your list should be “Messenger”. Note that some of the Live services are actually useful and you may want to keep them.
7. Click “Continue” and the annoyances will go away.

It should be a lot easier for users to identify the programs that they want to remove and/or to prevent from harassing them. Microsoft, fix this.

I have several old laptop hard drives that I use in cheap USB drive enclosures for backing up or sharing data. These things are great and then generally just work, even though you can buy them for as little as $3.82 from Amazon!

I recently plugged one of these drives into a new computer and, although the drive initially worked, it randomly disconnected after only a few minutes of use. I was only able to get it working again by unplugging it and plugging it back in. Once again it disconnected a few minutes later. This cycle continued as I tried to troubleshoot the problem by changing power settings, switching USB cables, switching USB ports, and testing the connection of the drive in the enclosure. Nothing I changed made a difference and the random disconnections continued every few minutes.

It finally occurred to me to try reinstalling the device driver for the HDD. So I uninstalled the driver and rebooted Windows. After starting back up Windows found the drive, installed the driver, and the problem went away.

I don’t know what caused the issue in the first place, but uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers worked perfectly. This is a good reminder that many USB device issues are driver related and can be resolved by reinstalling the drivers. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Device Manager (click the Start Menu and type “Device Manager” in the search window)
2. Navigate the Device Manager menu to the device in question. For me this was a “Disk Drive”
3. Select your device, right click on it, and choose “Uninstall”
4. Reboot and see what happens.

Note that this issue and resolution is essentially the same for all recent versions of Windows, including XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (at least ).

My wife recently decided that she wanted to get a bunch of images of the kids printed. I wasn’t around and she didn’t know what the best way would be to make a list of those images for me to print. She had lo res copies of all of the images of the kids that I’ve put out for public display over the last year and so she decided to copy the ones she wanted printed into a new folder on my hard drive. I then had to find all of those images in Lightroom in order to prep print quality versions to send to the printer.

In this case there were only a few images so I could have manually searched for them all pretty quickly. But I didn’t do that. Instead I figured out the “right way” to do it so that I could very quickly repeat the process in the future…

There are two broad steps involved:

1. Create a text file with a listing of the directory contents. I use “Karen’s Directory Printer” for that.
2. Tag the images in Lightroom so that they can be sent to the printer. I use a Lightroom plugin from Timothy Armes called LR/Transporter for that.

Note – If you haven’t used any of Tim Armes’ plugins before, you owe it to yourself to check them out. They are all free for limited use, or by donation for the full feature list. You can find them at Photographers-Toolbox.com. My personal favorite is LR/Enfuse, which allows you to blend multiple images made with multiple exposures (somewhat like HDR photograpahy, only not quite).

Windows 7 is due out on October 22nd and many people will be planning to install it as soon as possible after it arrives. I know I will be as I’ve completely had it with Vista! In order to try to help make your installation day go a little bit smoother I’ve compiled a list of 7 things to do before inserting the Windows 7 program disc into your computer’s drive:

1. Check for Viruses
2. Backup your System Hard Drive
3. Backup your Data Files
4. Update your System BIOS
5. Find your Hardware Driver Discs
6. Find your Software Installation Discs
7. Consider Dual Booting Windows

1. Check for Viruses: You should be doing this all the time anyway, but if you are planning to upgrade your existing Windows installation to Windows 7 (rather than performing a clean install) you will definitely want to ensure that your system is clean of viruses before proceeding. This is not quite as important for a clean install, but it’s still not a bad idea. If you don’t have a virus scanner check out the free version of AVG Antivirus
2. Backup your System Hard Drive: You will want to be completely prepared to recover your computer just in case the worst happens. It probably won’t, but better safe than sorry. The best way to do this is to make a complete backup of the system drive (ie. the drive that contains your operating system, usually the C: drive) onto a brand new spare hard drive. Hard drives are very cheap these days and it’s always good practice to have a complete backup drive sitting on the shelf anyway, just in case. I generally buy bare drives and install them in USB enclosure to connect them to my computer. I do this rather than buying dedicated External USB Drives so that I can take the disc out of the enclosure and insert it directly into my computer when my installed drive fails (because eventually it will fail). I use Acronis True Image backup software to clone the drive. There are other good software programs out there too, but I’ve successfully used True Image many times.
3. Backup your Data Files: If you have important files stored on your computer, such as legal documents, photographs, music, videos, and financial information, you will want to ensure you have spare copies of those files handy for use in an emergency. USB thumb drives are a good choice here (they are small, fast, cheap, AND easily writable in case you make changes to your files), but burning a CD or DVD would also work in a pinch.
4. Update your System BIOS: Check the website for your computer manufacturer to see if they have any BIOS updates available for your system. Sometimes these updates are required to ensure that your system will even run with newer operating systems, and immediately prior to an upgrade (and immediately after backing up your hard drive) is a great time to do this.
5. Find your Hardware Driver Discs: Windows 7 has been out in the wild in a release candidate version for a long time, so it’s likely that the installer will be able to find the drivers for most of your hardware devices. But sometimes printers, scanners, etc. really need the OEM installer before they work properly. Unless you are uber-organized your discs are probably not all together in one place, so it’s a good idea to find everything and have them ready in one convenient location.
6. Find your Software Installation Discs: Unless you are doing a direct upgrade of Vista to the corresponding version of Windows 7 (ie. Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium) you will actually be doing a clean install of windows and you will need to reinstall all your software, so you’re going to need your installation discs (or setup files if you downloaded them from the web) and license information. Again it’s a good idea to gather all of this stuff into one convenient location in advance. You should also take some time to go through everything you already have installed under Vista to be sure that you aren’t forgetting about some of your rarely used programs (as long as it is still relevant and important).
7. Consider Dual Booting Windows: If you’re really scared about losing everything when you install Windows 7, you might consider “Dual Booting”. Basically that means installing Windows 7 beside your existing OS without killing the existing version. There’s an easy step-by-step guide on how to do this over at Lifehacker, so I’ll leave it to them to help you make this work.

Well that’s it. If you do these things then you should be pretty safe to go ahead and install Windows 7 without worrying about losing all of your important files and data. There’s still likely to be a lot of work to set up the OS the way you like it, and to install all the software you need, but this is a great first step. Good luck!

I generally want my computers to automatically logon to my personal account when I turn them on (or when they restart in the middle of the night following an automatic Windows Vista update) so that I don’t have to waste any time logging in when I sit down to use the computer. This may not be the ideal thing for a computer shared by several users, but for a computer that has a single main user it is often very desirable.

I just got a new desktop computer and I’m in the process of setting it up with all my personal preferences.  This seems to take longer and longer as Windows gets more and more filled with bloat.  It seems to me that setting up automagic logons was a lot easier in Windows XP than it is in Vista, but I can’t actually remember how it was done there either. Maybe it was included as an option in the TweakUI Powertoy. Anyway I always have to hunt around to find the trick for Vista machines, so I thought I would write it down so that we can all find it easily the next time we need it.

Fortunately there are only a couple of easy steps:

1. Click Start and type netplwiz in the search field (or in the Run… dialog if you are using the classic menus)
2. Click Continue if one of those uber-annoying “User Account Control” windows appears
3. Select the user account to which you want to automatically logon
4. Clear the “Users must enter a username and password to use this computer” option box up above the User Accounts window
5. Click OK
6. When prompted, enter the password for the user account you selected in step 3

That’s it.  From now on whenever you start or restart the computer Windows Vista will automatically logon to your preferred account.  I assume that this method will also work for Windows 7, but I haven’t been able to test it yet.  I’ll get back to you sometime on or near October 22nd!!

UPDATE Oct 27, 2009 – This trick is definitely still applicable to Windows 7, and it works perfectly!