Get All the Details on the Hardware Inside Your PC
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Many PC World tips require some detail about my PC's innards. How do I find out about my processor, hard drive, graphics card, and so on?
Oscar Meza, Junction City, Oregon
To tune up your PC, you need to know what hardware is inside the box. To find out, right-click My Computer and select Properties. Listed under the General tab is your processor's make and speed, plus the amount of RAM in your system.
But the Device Manager will give you even more info. To get to it from here in Windows 2000 and XP, click Hardware and then Device Manager. In Windows 98 and Me, click the Device Manager tab. On it you'll find information covering pretty much all the devices--inside and out--that are attached to your PC and require a driver, including your display, DVD and CD drives, and network adapter.
To determine your hard drive's capacity, right-click the drive's icon in My Computer and select Properties. To find even more information, run the System Information program: Select Start, Run, type msinfo32, and press Enter.
You'll get a simple yet thorough report with the free Belarc Advisor program. SiSoftware Sandra Standard provides even more detail (the utility is free only for private and educational use; see FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1: Get detailed hardware reports from the SiSoftware Sandra Standard utility.
). Both utilities are available for download from PCWorld.com.
Print Wide Web Pages
Some Web pages are so wide that when you print them, the right side is missing. Is there a solution?
Ken Brusoe, Haines City, Florida
The simplest way is to print the page in landscape mode: In Internet Explorer, select File, Page Setup, choose Landscape, and click OK. Now you can print the page.
If you don't like the horizontal printout, convert the Web page to Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format. Tell your file-conversion software that you want a larger, tabloid-size page, and then select the option to fit everything onto a single page.
You'll need an Acrobat conversion program such as Pdf995 (free for the version with advertising; $10 for the version without ads). Pdf995 installs itself as a printer driver, and when you "print" to it, you get a.pdf file.
Once you've installed Pdf995, go to the wide Web page and select File, Print. For your printer, select PDF995. If you use Internet Explorer 5.x, click the Properties button and then the Paper tab. With Internet Explorer 6, click Preferences, Layout, Advanced. In either version, select the Tabloid paper size. "Print" the page, giving the new.pdf a name at the prompt. Load the.pdf file into Acrobat Reader, select File, Print, make sure that the Shrink oversized pages to paper size option is checked, and print your page.
Slim Down Your Fonts
I have far more fonts in my computer than I need, and they're slowing down my boot process. How can I safely remove them?
Jim Nibi, Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida
The trick is to move--not remove--the fonts, so you can easily get them back.
First, create a folder on your hard drive called Excess Fonts, and open that folder in Windows Explorer. Select Start, Run, type fonts, and press Enter to bring up your Fonts folder in another Explorer window. Select fonts to remove (double-click a font to see how it looks), but keep Arial, Courier, Courier New, Modern, MS Sans Serif and MS Serif (these two may appear as "MS Reference"), Symbol, Tahoma, Times New Roman, and Wingdings.
When you move a font, bring along its bold and italic variations. Drag unwanted fonts to the Excess Fonts folder. If you ever need one of them, open both folders again and drag the font back to Fonts.
Schedule Tasks Hourly
Want to schedule a task to happen every hour? Or every 4 hours? Windows' Task Scheduler doesn't schedule for intervals of less than one daya?|unless you know the secret. First, create the task as you normally would: Select Start, Programs (All Programs in Windows XP), Accessories, System Tools, Scheduled Tasks, and then double-click Add Scheduled Task to start the wizard. Set your task to run once a day. When the wizard is complete, double-click the task and click Schedule, Advanced. Check Repeat task and define the rules.