Posts tagged ‘Windows’

Disabling Windows Smart Screen for Downloads

pictureWindows Smart Screen is a security feature of recent releases of Windows. It attempts to alert you to potentially dangerous downloaded software by… well, mostly by creative guessing.

According to Microsoft’s web page that explains Smart Screen, the Smart Screen logic determines if a downloaded application is dangerous by “checking downloaded files against a list of files that are well known and downloaded frequently. If the file isn’t on that list, Microsoft Defender Smart Screen shows a warning, advising caution.”

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Architecture – 32- and 64-Bit Software

pictureThe current editions of Alchemy Mindworks’ software – beginning with version 12 – are available in 32- and 64-bit editions, and as we’ll get to later in this section, if you’ve registered a license for the current release of Graphic Workshop you’re welcome to install either – or both on the same computer.

For most users of our software, the 64-bit editions will prove to be quicker and more capable. Should you find yourself in a hurry, you can stop reading this post now.

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Windows Speedup: Disabling Defender’s Real Time Protection

pictureThe Windows Defender application that installs with Windows 10 is an estimable security application, with a rigorously-maintained database of threats. That it costs nothing to use has a lot to be said for it as well. Like most security software, however, it likes to wander into the insanely-paranoid section of the theater from time to time.

Left to its own devices, Windows Defender will avail your computer of a laudable degree of protection from malware and other intrusions by cybercretins. It can also substantially reduce the usefulness of the system it’s running on.

One of the more questionable features of Windows Defender is its real time protection. Real time protection scans every file that arrives on your computer – in real time, as its name implies – to defend you against invading e-mail attachments, venomous downloads and malicious web browser plugins, among many other things.

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Windows Adjustments: Moving a Windows Hard Drive to a New Computer

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Neither words, elaborate hand gestures nor emotive cave paintings can adequately describe the existential horror of having to reinstall Windows and all the applications that run under it on a new computer. Shopping for and subsequently paying for a new system is as nothing compared to actually populating the beast.

If you have an existing computer that’s currently running Windows 7 or better and you’ve decided to spring for a newer machine to get hardware that’s quicker, roomier or less funky, chances are that your Windows installation is working fine. While the procedure for doing so isn’t widely used, it’s shockingly easy to uproot the hard drive from an old machine, bolt it into a new computer and have Windows carry on running all your stuff, never having really appreciated that it has changed digs.

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Windows Adjustments: The Incredible Expanding Hard Drive

Upgrade your hard drive to a larger device without re-installing Windows or any of your applications – we too were shocked when this worked.

pictureWith the benefit of flawless hindsight, some of the computers at the offices of Alchemy Mindworks might have been configured with slightly larger hard drives when they were originally purchased. What seemed like enough storage to encompass the sum of human knowledge with room left over for a modest library of MP3s a few years ago has grown increasingly claustrophobic with time.

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Windows Adjustments: Back Up your Windows Installation

The hard drive in your computer is easily its most valuable component – although its worth probably can’t be measured entirely by the damage it did to your credit card. Installing Windows, and subsequently installing all the applications that will run under Windows, can take days.

While you can back up important files on your hard drive, there’s no way to back up an entire Windows hard drive in a form that would allow you to subsequently restore it and get back on line immediately, should your current hard drive get nuked by a virus, or wiped accidentally, or just die.

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Windows Adjustments: Thin Out Your System Tray

Your system tray – the rightmost area of your Windows task bar, usually inhabited by small icons and the Windows clock – will probably start looking like an aerial photograph of unsold cars if you have a lot of stuff happening on your computer. As the real estate occupied by the system tray reduces the available breathing room for the rest of the task bar, it’s worth adjusting your system tray’s behavior to minimize its footprint.

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Windows Adjustments: Applications Groups

Left to its own devices, Windows will present you with two relatively cumbersome ways to launch applications – you can select them from the Start menu or you can run the from icons on your desktop. The first typically entails a lot of clicking, ‘specially if you have a lot of toys installed on your system – and the second will mean minimizing anything you presently have running to drill down to your desktop.

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Windows Adjustments: Preventing Automatic Restart after Windows Updates

Microsoft maintains a regular program of security updates and bug fixes for Windows. If you have Automatic Updates enabled – as well you should – they’ll download and install automatically as they’re released.

Once they’re installed, Windows will automatically reboot your computer to complete the installation. If you happen to be in front of it when it tries to do so, it will allow you to defer the restart, but it will nag you incessantly thereafter until you allow it to restart your system.

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Windows Adjustments: Changing a USB Device’s Drive Letter

Having long ago lost count of the number of USB storage devices that litter our offices, we’ve learned how to manage the beasts. The list of these things list includes not only USB flash drives and external hard drives, but toys like iPods, which are also effectively USB storage.

One of the perennial issues surrounding these devices is the assignment of drive letters to them. Windows does this automatically, of course, which is why you’ll probably need to know to manually override its behavior in time.

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