Computers on Terry Nguyen

Resetting Windows 7's Volume Mixer

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If an application has appears to have sound activity in your volume mixer but isn’t actually heard on the device it’s outputting to, maybe the mixer needs a good nudge. Here’s one thing you can try to get that sound to actually make it all the way to your ears.

What might’ve happened is that though the Volume Mixer might not reflect this, it is muting an application, which means it’ll never make it to your ears. If this is true, then toggling it in the mixer won’t make a bit of difference because it’s essentially stuck this way.

WhatPulse - Track Your Usage!

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

WhatPulse is a nifty little application that sits in your system tray or notification tray that keeps track of your mouse and keyboard. Statistics such as mouse movement distance, key press frequency, and total clicks and keys are recorded and publicly displayed on your WhatPulse profile. I should stress that this is in no way a keylogger and simply records statistics about your keyboard and mouse usage, nothing more.

Pros

WhatPulse is cross-platform and is available on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

HWMonitor

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

HWMonitor is a great way to view an array of values from sensors from your computer components. Available as a standalone and portable application as well as an installable program, HWMonitor is lightweight and fairly user-friendly.

Pros

Very little setup is required to get this thing up and going; even less with the portable executable!

From the makers of CPU-ID, the best possible attempt is made to identify and provide names such as “AMD Radeon HD 5700” which is better than “GFX”. Paying customers can designate custom names.

Skype on Dexpot

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Skype is rather fickle when it comes to running alongside an installation of Dexpot. When you have more than one virtual desktop, it tends to refuse to launch on more than one virtual desktop. Though this isn’t exactly ideal, one way to workaround that issue is to force Dexpot to replicate it throughout all or certain virtual desktops.

Dexpot users who enable the Desktop Pager plugin will be able to right click on Skype in the pager and tell it to copy Skype to all or certain virtual desktops. Other users will be able to right click on Skype’s titlebar (i.e. the bar at the top of any window) and perform the same set of actions to copy Skype to individual or all virtual desktops. This also solves the problem regarding Skype and Dexpot when Skype stops functioning properly when opened in more than one virtual desktop.

Teracopy

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

For a while, I’ve been using CodeSector’s Teracopy to handle day to day file operations in place of Windows. It’s widely acclaimed to speed up file operations by optimizing buffer caches or something like that, but I’m fairly certain that mileage will very from person to person. Nonetheless, I find Teracopy to be very useful and recommend it to power users. It can also be installed for less than computer-inclined users who want something powerful yet easily usable, provided they don’t start messing with some of the deeper functions.