While your computer may work perfectly, when various applications stop working on a regular basis, this means the reliability index is affected. The problem is that, sooner or later, you may end up losing some work because an application that you are using twice a month crashed exactly before you managed to save your documents.

Today, I'll show you a quick method to look back and see all the software and hardware issues encountered by your Vista computer...

As a bonus, I'll also show you how to check the current system activity graphs, so let's get things started, shall we?

- Press the Start Orb, type "relia" in the search box and click the Reliability and Performance Monitor to open it. If you're really in a hurry, you can also press Enter as soon as you finish typing and see the highlighted item.


- Check the Resource Overview in the Reliability and Performance Monitor window. Expand an item to see details about programs using it.


- Expand the Monitoring Tools, if it's not open already, and select Reliability Monitor.

- Left click a day containing errors and scroll down to find details about the problems encountered.


That's it, a pretty easy way to find out what happened in the past with your computer without having to check cryptic logs that usually require a computer guru to get all the information out of them...

"Rebranding" Internet Explorer isn't something really useful, but if you can put your name on it... why not? The only problem is that you won't be able to avoid having "Windows Internet Explorer provided by", so the final result will be a title bar with the name of the current page, these words, and your custom string at the end, as you can see in the screenshot below.


<-234x60 Half Banner - left->To accomplish today's task, we'll use the Group Policy Editor. Since opening it isn't always possible, I'll tell you about an alternate method too. Anyway, you don't have to worry about which one to use, simply follow all the steps in this tutorial, nothing bad can happen if you do everything right, I tested it!

- Press the Windows key+R, type "gpedit.msc" in the Run window and press Enter.


- Open the Run window again, but this time type "mmc /a".


- In the Console window, open the File menu and choose Add/Remove Snap-In.


- Select Group Policy Object, Local Computer, and then Finish, as you can see in the screenshot below.


- Now, select Local Computer Policy in the left pane and go to User Configuration>Windows Settings>Internet Explorer Maintenance(to apply changes for all users of the computer, open the Computer Configuration branch).


- Left click on Browser User Interface, then right click on Browser Title and choose Properties.


- Select Customize Title Bars, enter your text and press OK.


- Open Internet Explorer and enjoy your custom title bar!

For most of us, Saturday is a day to enjoy doing anything else than working, but it seems this Saturday is also a good day for software releases. I am not talking about small things here, because we don't have another tiny text editor or media player being released... today, OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 RC1 became available to the public!


Unfortunately, no new features have been added to this latest release, but this Release Candidate version comes with a lot of minor fixes, compared to the previous "unstable" release.

Available for Linux, Solaris and Windows, OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 RC1 can be downloaded from this page, and if you didn't purchase Microsoft Office yet, it could be a pretty good replacement for it.

At last, if you think that an open source office suite like this one may have problems regarding the customer support part, you should think again, because commercial support for enterprises and individuals is available from Sun Microsystems and a large list of consultants, that can be found here!

As I was saying some time ago, Adobe started to prepare updates for its applications to ensure full compatiblity with Apple's Leopard. Fortunately for the Mac users that upgraded to Leopard and suffered from small incompatibility issues, Adobe released yesterday an update to Photoshop and a new Lightroom version, too!


The Photoshop 10.0.1 update, which can be downloaded from this page, comes with a few fixes and improvements, and most important for Mac OS users is that images saved as DICOM are no longer corrupted on PowerPC computers when opened in Photoshop CS3.

Lightroom 1.3 can be downloaded from here, and has improved Leopard support, as well as being able to work with new cameras, such as Canon 1Ds Mark III, Nikon D3, Nikon D300 or Olympus E-3. The import and export dialogs have been enhanced, and a Lightroom Preview Export SDK is now available for developers interested in creating export plugins, while various performance issues and small bugs have been fixed.

I don't know about you, but I consider that icons like Control Panel, Computer, Network or Recycle Bin are extremely well known, and the text below them is useless. In fact, my desktop would look better without that text, but... how to remove it?


This is an older trick, and fortunately it works in Vista too, so here it is...

- Right click the icon you want and choose Rename.

- Hold Alt pressed, and type "255" using the numeric keypad. This is the ASCII code for the space, if you didn't know it already.

- Press Enter when done, and enjoy your result - an icon without a name. Great!

Unfortunately, if you want to keep 20-30 icons on your desktop and do this with all of them, you must repeat the steps described above for each icon...