A coworker brought me a laptop (accompanied by the required food bribery) and asked me to remove a virus that had started popping up.  I booted up the laptop and, not at all surprisingly, it was infected with a Fake Security Scanner of a new and particularly nasty variety. It was called ThinkPoint and it replaces explorer.exe as your Windows shell, so as soon as you login ThinkPoint is all you see and all you [...]

This demonstration video shows you how to uninstall applications on Windows 7.  For this video I intentionally sabotaged my computer with a bunch of applications which I don’t recommend anyone actually download, just to show viewers the various tricks that some programs play to prevent you from removing them. This is the third video in a series developed for my Home PC Maintenance course. Enjoy!

The following video shows you how to check your available hard drive space using Windows 7. It also explains how to use the Disk Cleanup Wizard, Compress, and Index options under the Windows 7 Drive Properties window. This is the second video in a new series I’ve developed for my Home PC Maintenance course.

This video I made tonight will teach you how to defragment your hard drives on Windows 7.  This is the first video in a new series I am creating for an upcoming Basic PC Maintenance Course.

I’ve built hundreds of PC’s in my day. That includes dozens of one-off systems that I’ve configured and assembled for my own use as well as for friends, family, and customers. It also includes batches of new systems that I build during the summer at my full-time job. The following are just a couple of tips that I’ve picked up along the way that make the system-building process as painless as possible.