PC Tips & Tricks

Portable Document Format is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993. Now PDF format became universally accepted format for document exchange.

While for reading PDFs Adobe’s Reader is the standard (also free) application on Windows systems, when it you want to create PDFs you have to choose between the expensive Adobe Acrobat and the few applications full of built in advertising.
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15 applications I always had on my Windows computer.

1. Open Office -  is the leading open-source office software suite  for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more.
   
2. IrfanView – is a very fast, small, compact and innovative freeware (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista.
3. GIMP – is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

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In the days of 16-bit Windows, all settings were stored in initialization files. The two main files for storing settings were the SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI files. As each application was installed, it stored its settings in these two files.

These applications could store only a limited set of entries because of the INI files were restricted to 64K. To solve this, application developers started to use their own INI files. This seemed to be a good idea, but as the number of applications grew, so did the number of INI files. And as each INI file grew, the system would often slow down.

The registry was born in the same time with Windows NT in 1993 and it was the answer to Windows INI files. The registry is a hierarchal, relational database that holds system information, application settings, operating system configuration data, and more.
The information stored includes everything from the display settings to the hardware configuration. To speed access time, the registry is stored in binary format and is composed of multiple files.
Under Windows 2000/XP/2003, user-related settings are stored in a file called ntuser.dat. This file is stored in the user’s profile directory located in the %USERPROFILE% directory. System settings are stored in the SYSTEM32\CONFIG directory and consist of the following five files:
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In many situations you need to process a particular command against an entire set of files. With forfiles you can, for instance, delete old log files or temporary files, among other things. On Windows 2003 and Vista it is installed by default, if you are using Windows XP Pro you will find it in Windows Resource Kit Tools.
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Have you ever wanted to know how long your Windows XP computer has been running since the last reboot?
Back in the Windows 98s time it was quite simple. The System Information provided this information. This is not the case of Windows XP. Well, not in the GUI version of System Information.
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