PCTips Box

The Safely Remove Hardware mechanism is by no means something new to Windows Vista. In fact the feature has only survived into Vista with little to no enhancements. Essentially, Safely Remove Hardware is an integer part of the Vista model for managing Plug and Play devices, designed to notify the operating system that a certain item will be removed. The feature will make sure that there is no more interaction between Windows Vista and the Plug and Play hardware attached in order to streamline the removal of specific devices without having to shut down the operating system and without leading to loss of data.

“Some Plug and Play devices can be installed or removed while the system is running. For example, USB, IEEE 1394, and PC Card devices can be added to and removed from a fully powered system. When such hardware is added or removed, (more…)

A modern PC with Vista Home Edition takes about one and a half minutes to boot. An older machine with XP is about the same. That’s 30 seconds for the PC itself (the BIOS) to boot up, plus a minute for the Windows operating system to boot. Sometimes, you need to reboot Windows (e.g. when installing new software), but there is no need to restart BIOS, too. However, the default is to reboot both. (That’s called doing a “cold boot,” rather than a “warm boot.”) There’s a trick that works on both XP and Vista to get it to do a warm boot instead, thus saving you 30 seconds per cycle.

The trick is to hold down the SHIFT key when invoking the restart. (more…)

Most notebook batteries are lithium ion. Lithium ion batteries can slowly lose their capacity to hold a charge. But they hold their charge better over some time compared to other rechargeables like nickel cadmium and nickel metal hydride.

Shut Down (or Hibernate) instead of Stand By. There are things you can do to extend the charge of your batteries when you’re using your notebook on battery power. You should shut down completely instead of putting computer on Stand By mode to preserve your battery power. The hibernate feature saves you computer’s state in your hard drive but completely shuts down the computer. (more…)

There are many methods that you can use to shut down your computer. The normal way is click on Start > Turn Off Computer > Turn Off. But here I will share with you how you can shut down your computer in different ways.

1. The fastest way

I always do this when I want to shutdown my computer. Just press the Windows key (on the keyboard) and press U key two times. (more…)

Here’s the updated version of the popular shutdown shortcut for Windows XP. Just right-click onto an empty area of the desktop then select New then Shortcut from the menu that appears. Click the Browse button and navigate your way to: C:\Windows\System32\Shutdown.exe.

Click Next, give the shortcut a name and click Finish. Now right-click the new shortcut, select Properties and in the Target box, add the command line ‘switch’ -l (to log off), -s (to shut down) or -r (to reboot). A basic shutdown shortcut command line should look like this: (more…)