Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

After a new hard drive installation or maybe just to keep things organized the way you like, you may want to change the drive letter of a hard drive partition, CD or DVD drive in Windows Vista. The Computer Management tool makes this a snap.

Note: You cannot modify the drive letter of your main partition on your PC. In a normal Windows Vista installation, this is the “C Drive”. All other drive letters, including CD and DVD drive letters, can be modified though.

1. Click on Start and then Control Panel.

Tip: In a hurry? Type computer management in the search box after clicking Start. Choose Computer Management from the list of results and then skip to Step 4.

2. Click on the System and Maintenance link.

Note: If you’re viewing the Classic View of Control Panel, you won’t see this link. Simply double-click on the Administrative Tools icon and proceed to Step 4.

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Tags: hardware, vista, windows

Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

I have often ran across computers that I needed to gain access to for data recovery, but I didnt have the administrator password to access the hard drive. Since in many situations, there is just one administrator account I can’t log into another administrator account and change the password so I have to rely on other methods. I could put the hard drive into another computer as a slave and gain access (sometimes) or I could try installing a second copy of the operating system in parallel and gain access but there must be a better way.

That way is to try to reset the administrator password to something you do know and allow you to access to the user profile and the data. In most cases,

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Tags: computer, hardware, vista, windows, xp

Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

Updating your drivers and software sometimes can significantly improve the speed of your PC and software, as well as fixing old bugs or adding new functionality. Unfortunately, many manufacturers don’t build into their applications an auto-update process, so the only way to do this is manually.

I get around this by keeping a bookmarks folder on my PC where I store links to the sites for all my software and hardware. Then every month or so, I spend 30 mins upgrading all my software and drivers. This is a good habit to get into to keep your machine running smoothly and to stop problems happening further on down the line.

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Tags: computer, drivers, hardware, windows

Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

Toshiba said Wednesday that shipments of its HD-A20 HD DVD player had begun. The player is the first of the high-definition players, either Blu-ray or HD DVD, to offer 1080p resolution at a sub-$500 price point. The player will include an HDMI interface which Toshiba says could upconvert standard DVDs to near-HD quality, as well as standard interactivity and networking capabilities.

Over 900,000 HD DVD discs have been sold to date, Toshiba says, and 70 new titles are scheduled to be released between now and July.

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Tags: buy, computer, hardware

Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

So I installed Windows Vista. Not a big deal, right? After all, I’ve been doing it for almost 3 years. I started with Longhorn 4074 within days after it was available. I have always tried to be among the first to install new builds as they came out, test them, take screenies, etc. The idea was to test them, of course. Meaning not using it the way a “normal” person would, but putting it through the ringer.

I went through this routine right up until RC1. Then…issues. I had been hoping all along that each new build would show improved performance. This was not happening for me. I went out and bought a Radeon X800 XT specifically to take advantage of Aero, which was iffy on previous builds with my Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. Now, the X800 XT was state-of-the-art when I got it, yet I ended up with a performance rating of 1.0. I was frustrated to no end.

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Tags: hardware, vista, windows

Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

RATHER THAN using the beta ForceWares, which are now up in the 100s, GeForce 8800 users running Windows XP have got a new version of the official release drivers to play with, dubbed version 97.94. There aren’t too many big differences here, and if you’re running all your games happily, you’re not going to find much of a reason to upgrade.

There’s a new performance profile for the Titan Quest demo, there’s a fix for 1080i MPEG2 playback and Company of Heroes now works properly in SLI when AA is set to 4x or 8x. However,

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Tags: hardware, windows, xp

Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

Intel is planning to announce a new set of processors for the next generation of Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) on the 18th of April. Can a new CPU and some new design approaches unfold the sales disappointment that has been the UMPC/Origami initiative?

According to a leaked PowerPoint presentation available from HKEPC, the new UMPC reference design is code-named “McCaslin” and will feature a new CPU dubbed “Stealey.” The CPU is based on a Dothan design using a 90nm fabrication process running at 600 or 800MHz with a 400MHz front-side bus and 512KB of onboard level 2 cache.

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Tags: buy, hardware, mobile

Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

The best gift PC is a computer that’s as close to new as possible, in terms of both hardware and software. It represents the most work for you, but the reward is a computer that will be as trouble-free as possible, and no one can pull your personal data off the hard drive, because you’ll be replacing it.

Windows works best when it is freshly installed from scratch on a clean hard drive, so if you’re looking to make the computer as trouble-free as possible, reformatting the hard drive and installing Windows from the Windows installation discs is one way to go. But prices of new hard drives have come way down—you can get a 40GB drive for under $60 and a 200GB drive for less than $100—so consider replacing the drive.

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Tags: buy, computer, hardware

Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

Microsoft has made changes to its licensing model for Windows Vista to meet the needs of enterprise customers in the finance and government sectors using bleeding-edge technologies.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant will announce April 2 a subscription license called Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops, which allows customers to use Windows in virtual machines centralized on server hardware.

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Tags: buy, hardware, software, vista, windows

Originally published at PC Tips Box. Please leave any comments there.

iPod users will be relieved to know that Microsoft has fixed a glitch in Windows Vista that had the potential to mess up their player’s data. It concerns the Vista ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ function, used to eject the player from the system and although the patch, which was released a few days ago, though the advice from Apple is to continue using the iTunes eject function. CNET News also reports a number of other updates to do with hooking devices up to Vista PCs, including one that could result in a loss of images when transferring image files from a Canon EOS-1D

Tags: hardware, iphone, ipod, vista, windows