100,000 views on YouTube

It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally got over 100,000 views on my YouTube channel. You can find it at: http://www.youtube.com/procomputersupport

The most popular one, and the most disliked is the Repairing Broken HDD video – they’re all silly videos but people take them far too seriously!

Please share the videos if you find them amusing!

Synergy+ Mouse/Keyboard Sharing Software

I just thought I’d share a piece of software I use daily now, which I’d be lost without.

At home, I have my email/internet/messing around PC on the left (PC1) and my music/production/radio PC on the right (PC2) – as it’s two seperate keyboards I used to have 2x mice and 2x keyboards taking up deskspace. This wasn’t ideal so I wanted a solution where I could use the one keyboard and mouse on both machines – but I didn’t want a KVM.

A bit of searching let me to Synergy+ a free, open source programme that ‘shares’ your mouse and keyboard from one PC and the others can pick up on it.

You can then setup the application with hotkeys. So for example if you’re on PC1 and want your mouse and keyboard to work on PC2 you can press 2, to go back to PC1 you’d press 1. So it switches immediately. You can also set it so it works like an extended desktop. So moving your mouse to the far right of PC1 immediately moves it to the far left of PC2 with keyboard inputs moving with whatever screen the mouse is on. You should use obscure keys you never use, as you can’t type them once the application is running.

It still has some progress to be made, they openly admit the sharing methods are less then secure but if you’re on a firewalled home LAN you’re OK. It also works on Mac/Linux etc… so you can move between Windows/Mac if needbe!

Let me know if you use it!

Changing the Registered User and Company Name in Windows XP / Vista

This is something I’m always doing to try and keep standards – I like to keep the name and company name the same within a corporate environment. Some people like to put the name of the user, some the name of the I.T man, but this can all be changed!

I’m always asked this by friends and colleagues, it’s annoying also as HP/DELL often are delivered with nothing in there – it’s not required, but it can help with application installs for auto typing the company name/user.

Here’s how you do it;
Click Start, goto Run, and type in regedit. Hit enter. You’ll get the registry editor screen open.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, MICROSOFT, WINDOWS NT, CURRENT VERSION. In there you’ll see two editable sections. One called RegisteredOwner, and one called RegisteredOrganization.

If you double click these, an edit window will appear. Simply put in the value box what you want it to say for both things, and click OK. You’re done! Simple wasn’t it?

The above obviously needs you to have the correct rights to access and edit the registry, if you’ve done things right, Administrators should be able to do this, the end user shouldn’t!

Next time, I’ll show you how companies put their logo and support information in the properties of My Computer. It’s very easy, and if your the IT guy, you can earn lots of whoa and kudos by doing small modifications like that!