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[WORKAROUND] HP doesn’t provide printer drivers for download anymore?! How to skip HP Smart and Easy Start

HP used to provide proper printer drivers for printers. Most printers had two drivers available for download: a “basic” driver that only contained what you actually need, and a “full” driver that also included a bunch of extra software you probably didn’t need at all. Since 2019, however, new printers seem to only have one…
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April 8, 2021 0

Why a 14 TB external drive appears to be 12.7 TB in size – the short explanation!

The marketing TB of a drive is based on multiples of 1000, so 14 TB is 14 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 = 14,000,000,000,000 bytes. Computers use the binary number system, so the computer’s view is based on 2^10 = 1024 instead, so 14 TiB (“tebibytes” or binary terabytes) = 1024 x…
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November 16, 2020 0

[FIX] Thunderbird: “There is no email program associated to perform the requested action” error

Short version: make sure Thunderbird is set as the default mail app, then download and run the REG file below to fix MAPI. Mozilla Thunderbird is the best email client ever. There isn’t much room to argue against that. Anyone in IT has suffered through the misery that is Microsoft Outlook and knows better. Unfortunately,…
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March 12, 2020 9

Windows 7 is “no longer supported.” Should you upgrade? Should you buy new?

(Scroll to the end for our local Windows 10 upgrade offer.) Windows 7 support ends January 14, 2020, and Microsoft is letting everyone know, and lots of people think their computers will magically catch on fire and never work again in 2020. (Okay, I’m kidding about the fire part.) If you’re reading this, you probably…
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December 31, 2019 2

Delete a file named NUL on Windows

So…here we are. You were probably using stuff ported from a UNIX-like system and managed to create a file called NUL on a Windows system. A file name that’s special on Windows and that can’t be deleted. Well…this is awkward. Fortunately, the solution is a command prompt command away. You’ll need to know the full…
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August 6, 2019 1

Windows 10 1903 (May 2019 update) freezing, crashing, and blue screens? Update your Realtek ethernet driver!

I don’t remember where I found it, but there was a person in a forum who said that when he updated his Realtek ethernet driver from the one Windows picked to the latest version, his freshly updated WIndows 10 1903 stopped being unstable. I tried it myself, updating from the 2016 driver to the latest…
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July 2, 2019 0

WORKING DOWNLOAD LINK for TRIM Enabler 2.2 for Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard

Note that no downloads of TRIM Enabler are hosted here. You can get it from the Wayback Machine instead: Download TRIM Enabler 2.2 from The Internet Archive Apple added TRIM support to Mac OS X in Snow Leopard update 10.6.7, but it only works on Apple SSDs. Third party SSDs never have TRIM enabled. There…
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April 23, 2019 4

Force-disable Windows 10 automatic updates (with a caveat)

I left the following comment on Reddit and I thought it might be useful to anyone looking to turn off Windows 10’s abhorrent forced update behavior: You can force-disable Windows 10 updates by going to regedit, navigating to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\services\wuauserv, exporting that entire key to a reg file, deleting it, and rebooting. You can also skip…
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January 4, 2019 0

A damaged/bad CD, DVD, or Blu-ray disc in your computer can cause it to crash or lock up

There was a machine in the office with a large Windows software RAID-0 array that would drop out of the system on rare occasions and immediately pick back up. Upon reviewing the event logs, there were lots of errors related to “atapi” which is usually the CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or BD-ROM drive having some kind of…
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December 31, 2018 0

Advice if your USB 3.0 external hard drive is slow or has performance issues

This is some general advice that I gave in response to a request for help with a USB 3.0 hard drive that was only working at 20 MB/sec when the drive is easily capable of 80 MB/sec or more. Reformat the drive with 64K clusters (if you’re storing mainly large files, i.e. over 8MB on…
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December 29, 2018 0