Newsletter Archives

  • How to take advantage of the Photos app in Windows

    WINDOWS

    Lance Whitney

    By Lance Whitney

    The Photos app in Windows 10 and 11 will help you view and organize all the photos and videos scattered across your PC and other devices.

    After years of shooting photos and videos, you may have thousands of them stored on your phone and your computer. And now you want to be able to access them all, preferably in one single spot.

    Designed for Windows 10 and 11, the built-in Photos app is a free and convenient way to manage and view all your photos and videos, no matter where they’re located.

    Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (20.12.0, 2023-03-20).

  • How to choose and use the best PowerToys for Windows 10/11

    WINDOWS

    Lance Whitney

    By Lance Whitney

    Microsoft packs a lot of cool tools into its free PowerToys offering. Here are some of the best.

    Microsoft’s latest incarnation of PowerToys has been around for a few years. Geared for Windows 10 and 11, PowerToys aims to add more features and flexibility to Windows.

    But now there are more than 15 individual tools in PowerToys. How do you know which ones are worth trying? Let’s check out what I think are the best of the bunch.

    Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (20.05.0, 2023-01-30).

  • Printers can drive you insane

    After months of print spooler patches hardening the print spooler so that attackers can’t use printers to gain a toe-hold into the network and then launch ransomware, printer vendors are having to go back and redo printer drivers/or you are having to install more modern drivers to deal with these issues.

    Show me a Patch Tuesday and probably SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE has hit a printing issue.

    I’ve had to reinstall/touch every printer in the office or home during the course of a year.  Yesterday I was fighting with an HP printer getting it to work reliably doing remote printing. But at first I couldn’t even get the Color Laserjet to recognize that it WAS a color printer in the first place.

    I showcase in this video the spot I found to get the device to “update now” and recognize it was a color printer.

    Now I’m trying “basic” printer drivers. I have to wait until tomorrow when the person is there to test if remote printing will now behave.