It's strongly recommended that you create restore point prior to installing any new program on your PC. Note, that system restore points are automatically created when installing drivers or updates.

To Create a System Restore Point in Windows 7:

1. Right click on Computer > choose Properties.

 2. On the left pane choose Advanced System Properties.

 3. Switch to 'System Protection' tab and click 'Create' button:

 4. Name this restore point (you can use the name of the program).

5. It can take up to several minutes to create a restore point.

6. Done. New Restore Point has been created.

To run an application as an Administrator you can right click on its shortcut or main executable file, and then select "Run as Administrator" option. However, doing this can be quiet annoying if you use this application very often. This article describes how to simplify that process.

Let's consider an example, 

choose trusted application, i.e. its executable file:

Right click on it and choose Properties, go to Compatibility tab and check the check-box "Run this program as an Administrator", click O.k. to accept changes.

When pressing <CTRL>+<ALT>+<DEL> you can find out that svchost.exe process is using up maximum CPU resources and only occurs when Automatic Updates is enabled. Microsoft has recognized this problem and has released a patch. But this patch doesn't guarantee that this problem will be solved. 

Open Task Manager and go to "Processes" tab and then press "Mem Usage". If you have this svchost.exe memory leak bug after about 1 minute you will see that the amount of memory usage svchost.exe uses will keep increasing until CPU becomes 99 or 100%.

How to Stop svchost.exe using up 100% system resources (Windows XP only):

1. Download windowsupdateagent30-x86.exe (5.93 mb) and save it onto your PC.

2. Download this file fix_svchost.bat (2.97 kb) (right click and choose save as...) and save it to the same folder.

3. Download this file  WindowsXP-KB927891.exe and save it to the same folder.

4. Reboot PC into Safe Mode.

5. Login as an Administrator. 

6. Open folder with downloaded files and double click on fix_svchost.bat, do not close the window until operation is finished, it will automatically close itself.

7. Then launch the Windows Update Agent, and simply follow the wizard.

8. Install the Windows XP-KB927891 update.

9. Restart the PC.

10. Check the problem.

The more faster the internet speed is, the more comfortable your web-browsing is. But sometimes there can be significant slowdown due to improperly configured browser, even if you have fast internet package. Supposing that Mozilla FireFox is used for browsing, certain changes can be made to improve the performance.

How to Speed Up Mozilla FireFox Browser:

1. Launch Mozilla FF. In the address bar type in: "about:config" without quotation marks and press Enter. Scroll down and look for the following entries.

network.http.pipelining

network.http.proxy.pipelining

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

2. Normally the browser will make one request to a site at a time. When enebling pipelining it will make several at once, which really gives good results.

3. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining"  to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like "40-60"  which indicates the number of requests.

4. The last thing to do is to right-click anywhere and select New > Integer. Name "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set it to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

Telnet is a protocol that allows you to connect to remote computers (called hosts) over TCP/IP network. Telnet client should be installed on the computer to make a connection to a telnet server (i.e. remote host). After establishing the connection telnet client becomes a virtual terminal, allowing to communicate with the remote host. password and login name may be required to login to remote host, or guest account can be enabled optionally. Telnet clients are available for most OS.

Besides, SSH is similar to telnet, but the last one provides better security.

By default, Telnet client is disabled in Windows 7.

How to Enable Telnet Client on Windows 7:

1. Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features.

2. On the left pane with options, choose "Turn Windows Features On or Off".

3. In the opened window in the list of components, find Telnet Client and select the check-box. Press O.k. to confirm changes.

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) allows remote connections to the PC using remote computer's IP-address or name. It has a great variety of settings which can help with configuring RDP for slow connections or to make it more secure. By default, the server listens on TCP port 3389. That's why the basic info to connect to the remote PC is its IP-address(name). To provide stronger security you may want to change the default port, so that attackers will not be able to connect via default port.

To change port number for RDP in Windows XP:

1. Navigate to the following key in the registry from left pane:

1.1. Start > Run > type in: regedit - press Enter.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TerminalServer\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber

2. Double click on PortNumber entry, then click on Decimal, type the new port number and then click Ok. Close Registry Editor.

NOTE: When you try to connect to the remote computer using Remote Desktop Connection, you'll need to specify new port number.

Make sure the firewall is opened for this new port.

Some third-party programs require disk write caching to be enabled or disabled. While having disk write caching enabled on computers gives them extra performance by making disk writes more efficient, it can sometimes interfere with how certain applications work on these machines. This article describes how to enable or disable disk write caching.

Enabling or Disabling Disk Write Caching In Windows XP:

1. Right-click on My Computer > Properties.

2. Switch to Hardware tab > click on Device manager button.

3. Expand Disk Drives node and then right-click the drive on which you want to enable or disable disk write caching, and then click Properties.

4. Go to Policies tab and check or uncheck the check-box with: "Enable write caching on the disk".

Imagine the situation you have subscribed to many services and you receive emails from different companies and you would like to have emails from one company in its separate folder to quickly view new emails or you want to have a separate folder for incoming messages from your friends or you just do not want to receive emails from certain people and would like to delete these emails. Outlook Express provides a great variety of such rules that can be created and customized by the end-user.

To configure rules in Outlook Express perform next steps:

1. Launch Outlook Express > go to Tools > Message rules > Mail.

2. Configure appropriate rules. E.g. if the From line contains people from your organization. Click on Contains people to select or deselect contacts.

3. Specify the folder there to move emails from  these people.

4. Select the folder by clicking on Specified:

5. That's it. Now new rules has been created and new messages from these people will be automatically moved to the specified folder.

Sometimes, when you create a document with numbered pages in MS Word 2007, you do not want the first page to have a number, e.g. a title page.

Note: Inserting cover page causes the second page to be numbered as page 2. 

Remove the page number from the first page

1. Click anywhere in the document.

2. On the Page Layout tab, click the Page Setup Dialog Box Launcher, and then click the Layout tab.

3. Under Headers and footers, select the Different first page check box, and then click O.k.

Note:

If the Different first page check box is already selected, do not clear it. Instead, delete the page number in the First Page Header or First Page Footer area.

Start numbering on the second page from 1

1. Perform steps described in the first section of this article to remove the page number.

2. On the Insert tab, in the Headers & Footers group, click Page Number and then click Format Page Numbers.

3. In the Start at box, type 0.

MS Outlook 2007 allows users to speed up and simplify their working experience in many ways. One of such useful features in MS Outlook is the automatic Address completing for frequently used e-mail addresses. The cache for entered e-mail addresses is stored in the AutoComplete file with the extension .NK2 located in the user's profile, for example, in Windows Vista it would be: \users\<username>\AppData\Microsoft\Outlook\<profilename>.NK2

As the user types an address, the cache items matching the letters typed are displayed in a dropdown box. The user can choose the appropriate address by using arrows keys or by selecting an address with the cursor. The AutoComplete file handles up to 1000 entries and stores more than just addresses.

Not everyon emay need this feature, but those who will need will want to know how to enable it and those who will not , - will need to know how to disable it. AutoComplete is easily toggled on or off through Outlook. Navigate to Tools > Options > E-mail Options > Advanced E-mail Options. To disable AutoComplete, clear the checkbox beside the option to Automatic Name Checking and Suggest names while completing To, Cc and Bcc fields options.