Playing Frets on Fire with the official Red Octane SG or Gibson Guitar Controller shouldn’t be difficult to setup, but it’s a little more complicated than Plug-N-Play. Frets on Fire doesn’t seem to retain joystick settings when mapping the buttons from a Guitar Controller into the game. It may work for a little while, but I’m sure many have noticed that the controller setup is bound to fail. Mainly the Strum Bar fails to function during the game (which really sucks when you’re in the middle of a song, hell, or just trying to navigate the menus). This guide will show you how to properly setup your Guitar Hero controller to work flawlessly with Frets on Fire everytime!
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After many happy attempts to play nice with Unbuntu I finally have thrown in the towel, but when you do that Unbuntu still keeps a tight grip on your PC. I, like so many others during installation, added Unbuntu to my bootloader as recommended. However, this posed a problem when I tried to uninstall it.

So, after a minute of Googling I downloaded the EmergencyBootCD (http://ebcd.pcministry.com), which removed the Unbuntu from my bootloader with ease.

1) Once you download this, make the ISO file and burn to a CD.

2) After the CD is made; just insert CD, reboot, change boot sequence, and fire the PC back up.

3) When the program loads choose Number One and go to MBR and that is it.

4) Shutdown and remove CD and the boot loader for Unbuntu has been removed.

Simple? Yes. Easy? Yes. The way Unbuntu should have been but was not.

Replace the Windows Taskbar with the Mac OS X Dock

If you are a Windows user who always wanted to get rid of the Taskbar for a more sleek approach - look no further. RK Launcher for Windows is a tiny application that mimics the functionality of the Dock in OS X. It even captures many of the special effects such as the magnification of the dock icons when the mouse hovers over them, drag-and-drop adding and removing (complete with the “POOF” effect), the genie effect for minimizing windows, etc. The developer hasn’t worked on it for a bit (since 2005), but the beta works great for now!

Download RK Launcher

Whether you’re building a DOS machine for nostalgic gaming, a replacement company computer (yes, businesses STILL use DOS), or as just a general learning experience you may have issues with font display on newer video cards. You’ll notice in an instant if you have this problem, because almost every menu in the DOS application and general alert boxes are filled with crazy ascii characters that definitely shouldn’t be there (see pic above). But, trying to find a fix for a MS-DOS related issue on the internet is well… almost impossible… until now! This brief guide will show the issue which causes scrambled fonts to appear within the DOS app, and three solutions that will have you well on your way to the beautiful 8-bit display you expect!

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Having problems with breaking up with windows but still want to have an affair with Linux? Well not to sound like the love doctor but, just make a dual boot system . It is a lot easier and no divorce papers.

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If you like the look of Windows XP Media Center Edition you’ll love this. With a theme download (rumored to be from Microsoft’s website) you can now easily install the Royale theme used on Windows XP MCE on your Windows XP install. Finally, you can rid yourself of the generic and somewhat childish colour scheme of the default Windows XP theme.

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I have shown you how to shut down xp faster so logically I guess my next article is how to boot up xp faster. Everyone wants a computer that boots really fast and the only way to do that is to stop all those pesky programs that automatically get started at start up. This guide will walk you through using the System Configuration Utility to have complete control of Windows XP Startup Items.

Checking Startup Items

Click Start > All Programs and look for Startup

These are all the program that are slated to startup when XP does. This is one of the big problems in the faster boot up game.The more there, the longer your machine will take to startup. To remove any unnecessary Startup Item from the Startup List just Right-Click on the item to delete and Click Delete.

System Configuration Utility Changes

You would like to think this article is done but it is not, that was only half of the battle, the next thing to do is to go System Configuration Utility and change your startup services.

To do this just go to Start> Run and type in “msconfig“, (without the “”).

Once in the System Configuration Utility, Click on the Startup Tab

Under the Startup Tab is a list of all your programs that startup when the computer does, (these are different then the ones in the startup on the all programs tab). You can disable a program from starting at boot by unchecking it in the Startup list. It is safe to disable all of these except one, your anti-virus, but in doing so certain programs like AIM, Google Talk, and other appications won’t load on startup. Usually what I do is pull out the command section (look at above picture) so I can see which programs have automatic startup.

If you are having problems and can’t figure out what a startup is, go to sysinfo.org. Once there you will find a huge list of startup applications names and what they do.Well that is it, very simple, takes 10-15 tops and will hopefully allow you to gain a few seconds or minutes on your boot up.

By default Microsoft reserves 20% of your bandwidth for their own purposes (updates, error reporting, etc.). However, you can easily disable this feature and reclaim 20% of your bandwidth that otherwise sits idle.

Note: This method only works on Windows XP Professional.

1) Click START> Run

2) Type gpedit.msc in the Run dialog box. This will open up the Group Policy Editor.

3) Next go to Local Computer Policy> Computer Configuration> Administrative Templates> Network> QOS Packet Scheduler

4) Double Click on Limit Reservable Bandwidth

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5) On the Settings tab click ENABLE Reservable Bandwidth

6) Set the Bandwidth Limit percentage to ZERO.

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Now you will get that extra 20% of bandwidth that Microsoft has taken away from you!

Most of us remember the “old days” of computer gaming when shotty pixelated graphics were thought to be high-end.

Games like Leisure Suit Larry, Dune, Kings Quest, Populus, Wolfenstein 3-D, and even Duke Nukem 3-D are just a few in an endless list of games that are now branded as Abandonware. Surprisingly enough, those games and many others are readily available on the internet.

This guide will show you how to find and play all your favourite classic games without breaking out the old x486.

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Everyone has locked themselves out of their own system at least once and thought that formatting their hard drive was the only answer. Not true! Now you will never have to lose your data over your forgetfulness again! There are two methods to bypass Windows XP security, both of which are basic at best, but they work beautifully.

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