Tech Tips
On this page I will provide some Technical Tips I've made use of. Its
purpose is to help others who might have had the same problem, as
well as remind me of what I've done, in case I need to do it again.
Some of these things I've researched on the internet and found solutions
in some forum. Usually the ideas in forums don't apply to me. Some were
resolved by what friends told me, and some I resolved on my own.
So, I guess I have to dig up some of the things I've done.
Media Card Reader Not Recognized
I have a Dell PC using Windows XP2. It has an internal Dell 13 in 1 Media
Card Reader. I've been using it for a couple of years to read an SD Card
from my digital camera. Then, suddenly, I'd put the card in, the LED on
the card would flash as it is read, then go solid, and nothing would
happen. A Windows Explorer window for the device did not open. It does
not show in an Explorer window that I'd open.
The problem apparently was that a drive letter had been associated with
the card. That drive letter either became associated with another device
or the association was lost. You'd expect Windows to dynamically assign a
drive letter to the device when the SD card is inserted. For whatever
reason, this did not happen.
The solution is to assign a drive letter to the device.
First, I inserted the SD card and went to Disk Management, in Computer
Management. One of the disks it shows is a removable disk without a drive
letter. Right click it, choose Change Drive Letter, and pick an available
letter. The SD card now appears in a Windows Explorer window, and your back
in business.
Computer Management is one of the tools listed under Administrative Tools in
the Control panel.
Hidden Tooltips
The tooltips are the words that pop up for a few seconds when you hover your
mouse over the icons in the System Tray or the QuickLaunch toolbar.
What happens is that these drop behind the tray area so that you cannot read
them. This has been happening since at least Windows 95. Microsoft hasn't
bothered correcting the problem because they say just restart the system.
One way in which it happens is when you right click on a file in the spread
of programs that show up when you click on the Start button and then All
Programs, and then click on OPEN.
There are a few ways to solve this, one is to run a program, like
ToolTipFixer that runs
all the time. Since this rarely happens I preferred using a nircmd command
from NirSoft.
The command is:
nircmd win settopmost class "tooltips_class32" 1
You can put the command into a text file that you name with an extension of
'bat' instead of 'txt'. Then just double click the file or create a
shortcut to it and put the shortcut in your quicklaunch or program list.
I read that the class location changed in Vista, so it may not work there.