Category Archives: windows

Fix for Firefox Graphics Problems in Windows 8

Posted on March 5, 2012 by amd

Mozilla Firefox - disable hardware acceleration in Win 8If you’re using Firefox on Windows 8, particularly on an nVidea graphics card, you may have seen a lot of graphics problems, glitches where images are blurry or even completely unrecognisable.

Here’s a possible fix for that which has worked for me and quite a few folks online: disable Hardware Acceleration in Firefox.

Here’s where to find it:

  • Click the Firefox main menu, choose Options.
  • Choose Advanced.
  • Go to General tab.
  • Untick the box beside “Use hardware acceleration when available”. 
  • Restart the Firefox browser (close all windows including Downloads if it’s open, wait 10 seconds and start Firefox again).

The broken images problem should now be gone – if it’s still there then it’s another problem – please let me know in the comments if you know of any other potential cause and/or solution for that!

Posted in windows | 7 Comments

How to disable Metro UI in Windows 8

Posted on March 3, 2012 by amd

Windows 8 Metro UII’m playing around with Windows 8 on desktop PC – first impressions pretty good, but I’m not convinced of the value of Metro UI on a desktop yet (although it is beautiful). Metro would be great on a touchscreen, but that’s far from the dual monitor Dell PC I’m using here. So I might want to be able to turn off Metro – here’s how:

Quick hack

Rename X:\Windows\System32\shsxs.dll to shsxs.old or similar

or

Turn it off in the registry

  • Run regedit
  • Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
  • Change the RPEnabled to ’0′ instead of ’1′

To re-enable Metro UI, change the value back to ’1′

More Windows 8 thoughts later.

Posted in windows | 1 Comment

Creating Keyboard Shortcuts in MS Word

Posted on March 24, 2011 by amd

Here’s a quick video I did on how to create a keyboard shortcut in Microsoft Word.

Posted in software, windows | Leave a comment

Solution for Media Player Classic: Can’t create shockwave control

Posted on April 28, 2008 by amd

Quick fix: if you recently reinstalled like I just did, you might encounter this error when trying to play SWF or FLV files with Media Player Classic:

“Can’t create shockwave control”

The answer to fix this is fairly simple – thanks to nameless over on the neowin forums:

If you have this problem, you need to install the Flash plugin for Internet Explorer. You need to do that because Media Player Classic uses the Internet Explorer Flash plugin to render SWF files.

Simple enough! I find the quickest way to get it is open youtube.com (or any other site guaranteed to have Flash content) in an IE window and click on the link to install Flash.

Hey, let me know if this helped you out by posting a quick note in the Comments!

Update from Ren in the comments for folks using Win7 x64 MPC:

Under Windows 7, using the x64 version of Media Player Classic, you’ll have trouble playing flash stuff in MPC. This is due to the fact that a 64-bit program can not load a 32-bit active X control.

The only work-around as far as I can see is to use the 32-bit version for your flash until Adobe updates to 64-bit.

You can download the activeX controls at labs.adobe.com

Posted in software, windows | 9 Comments

Useful Software for Windows

Posted on April 14, 2008 by amd

This list was created for my own reference to keep all the links in one handy location. It might be useful for ideas for you too when you’re installing a new Windows PC or laptop. Not all of these are free, but the vast majority are.

Posted in geek, security, software, windows | 5 Comments