Last week i wrote about switching my main OS to Kubuntu and so far everything has been going fairly well except for a few configurations here and there. I hope to have some cool posts regarding Linux topics in the near future. One of the things I really have enjoyed so far is Open Office. We can install Open Office on a Windows machine as well. If you have never heard of or used Open Office I thought I would take the time to show you around. This office suite is completely free and a great alternative to Microsoft Office. Below are a series of screen shots in order they appear during initial installation. These shots are from my Vista machine. These are fairly straight forward and I have left comments on certain ones. Please feel free to contact me with any additional questions!
Enter in your username and information. Also make sure you select if you want all users on your system to have access to it or not.
Here you can decide which features to include with the installation. Unless you’re going to do development with Open Office you can probably leave everything as is. I also made sure to enable ActiveX Control for the rare situation when I use Internet Explorer.
If you already have a version of Microsoft Office installed you may want to uncheck these choices. If checked Open Office takes the default role of opening the Microsoft files.
Wait while Open Office is installed.
Success! We can now start exploring what Open Office has to offer!
You will also notice the program launch icons on the start menu.
Download Open Office
I’ve got a Wacom drawing tablet hooked up to my computer, and ever since I installed Vista’s Tablet PC utilities, I’ve had this obnoxious onscreen keyboard on the welcome screen that just can’t seem to be turned off through any regular settings. So how do I get rid of it?
If you use Outlook and you’ve noticed it being excessively slow or just having errors, you should probably scan and repair your Personal Folders file for any problems. It’s sorta like checkdisk for your email.
In the pursuit for performance, making sure your drive isn’t fragmented is a regular task. The problem is that Windows XP doesn’t allow certain system files to be defragmented without commercial software. What about free solutions?
If you open up a lot of PuTTY windows just to keep connections open, you might be interested in an updated version that supports minimizing to the system tray. I find this very useful for opening tunnels that I wouldn’t otherwise need to interact with on the desktop.
As regular readers know well, I’m a huge fan of using AutoHotkey to automate my entire computing experience… but in Windows 7 and Vista there’s a serious limitation since you can’t run a script as Administrator by default. This means that your hotkeys can’t interact with windows running in Admin
If you can’t figure out how to turn on the Details or Preview panes in Windows Vista Explorer, you aren’t alone. This question popped up on the forum the other day, so I decided to write up the answer for everybody’s benefit.
I have decided that J River’s Media Jukebox is now my music player of choice. I did an initial review in a previous post. Now let’s cover the various features included in this application. Today I will cover how to rip you CD’s into your favorite format.
I was browsing our forum earlier today when I noticed a question from a reader asking how to select a date range when searching for files in advanced search. This is something that was extremely easy in XP, but seems to be much less intuitive in Vista.
In the Customize View window click on Fields.
In my IT experience I have noticed that sometimes Remote Desktop can run painfully slow. Here are a couple tricks to speed up the process. We will change the display settings first. Sure it won’t look as fancy, but when working on computers remotely, you just need the functionality.
