I share a love-hate relationship with Windows’ User Account Control (aka UAC). According to Microsoft, UAC is supposed to add an extra layer of security for system files, and therefore minimizing the damage malware can inflict on infected hosts. From a security standpoint, this is indeed very good, but unfortunately it can sometimes interfere with the way certain programs run.

Not too long ago, I decided to re-enable UAC on all my pc’s (I initially had it disabled because of the constant and annoying prompts!!) and came across a bug. Long story short, I had Anvir Task Manager running on one of my older laptops, but after enabling UAC, Anvir’s temperature monitor tray icon stopped working properly. It just would not show the temperature when Anvir was set to run on startup (on a manual start, everything works but I would have to confirm a UAC prompt). I eventually found that the reason this was happening was because Anvir needed to run with admin privileges in order to work properly. My guess is that Anvir’s method of checking the motherboard’s temperature requires elevated permissions to work. So we need a way of getting the program to run on startup, but with elevated privileges. Fortunately, there is a clever workaround to bypass UAC using Windows’ own Task Scheduler.

I cannot emphasize enough the power of search engines when it comes to troubleshooting. I have been having some issues with Windows Media Player 12 for a while now. Song albums just refuse to display when a song is playing, and visualizations do not work anymore (they are enabled, but all that shows is a black screen).

I found some suggestions online to reinstall Windows Media Player altogether, but that is burdensome. Fortunately, Google led me to another quick and easy fix, which I will share here for anyone else experiencing similar problems. Apparently, just resetting Windows Media Player to default settings will fix a lot of problems. Here’s how:

If like me, you recently updated your copy of Chrome/Iron to version 15, you may have noticed a slight delay in the initial loading of the first page when you open the browser. Fortunately, this only happens at the very first page when you start the browser afresh, but it is still very annoying. If you look at the browser status bar down below during this two second delay, you will see a strange “Resolving proxy…” message. After a short encounter with Google, I came across a simple solution.

Feeling evil lately? Have a roommate that likes to hog the bandwidth on your network? Or even repeat intruders on your unsecured wifi because you are too lazy to set security? All is well, all is well. While browsing through the GetJar app store a couple days ago, I came across a very sinister app. Please, it is best you stop reading now if you do not have the stomach for evil-capable apps.

Buried under the heaps and stacks of shortcut icons lie the often neglected wallpaper. You keep telling yourself you will clean out the desktop one day, but let’s face it, that is never going to happen. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something in the taskbar similar to the “show desktop” feature that will instead hide icons? AutoHotKey makes this possible.

Now I realize you can right click the desktop, point to View > uncheck Show Desktop Icons to accomplish the same task, but that takes too long! Plus, you will get a brief overview of how to work with AutoHotKey scripts in the process. By the end of this tutorial, we will have created a program (which you can place in the taskbar) that will hide desktop icons in just one click.