When you are performing maintenance on a Windows-based PC, you always want to have a set of tools that will help you acheive the goal that you have in mind; however, sometimes the case may be that prior to diagnosing the Windows PC you are about to work on, you do not know what tools you will need to fix the obstacle course in front of you. With this in mind, I would like to bring your attention to a software CD that has always helped me in times of trial, and it has acted as a Swiss army knife-like tool for the computing world. This CD that I am referring to is called Hiren’s Boot CD.

This quality CD (available from Hiren & Pankaj‘s website) offers many tools for any troubleshooting scenario that you can think of. For this edition of WindowsDailyNews, I would like to bring your attention to some of the most commonly used tools that I employ when I need to utilize Hiren’s Boot CD, and I have provided a list of these tools below so that you can get a snapshot of how useful this CD is.

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Have you ever upgraded your operating system or computer before and had to perform the cumbersome task of re-entering ALL of the passwords to your favorite websites? If so, and if you are a Mozilla Firefox user, you do not have to go through this dawnting task anymore!

To avoid having to re-enter all of your passwords after your upgrade, I would like to bring your attention to a Mozilla Firefox addon called Password Exporter. This handy addon easily installs into your Firefox addon list by clicking on the green “Add to Firefox” link located on its listing page via Mozilla.org.

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In some situations, there may be an instance where you will need to network various Windows-based machines together to gain network/internet access. Windows XP provides an easy way to perform this by using a method called Internet Connection Sharing. If you are unsure of how to set up Internet Connection Sharing, please follow the steps in the tutorial that I have provided below.

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For reasons that I can’t figure out, my Windows 7 laptop thinks that everything’s fine with the sound system, but I can’t actually hear anything when I try to play music or watch videos on YouTube. Is there some easy way to diagnose these sort of sound or audio problems on Win7?

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This blog is a great place to find content-rich news pertaining to all distributions of the Microsoft Windows operating system; however, if there is something that you cannot find here on the WindowsDailyNews Blog, you may want to try browsing our quality WindowsDailyNews Directory.

This link directory contains unique user-submitted websites that are organized by Windows-related categories of which I have provided some examples of below:

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If you use various workstations at one time from your Windows PC and multitask between the two, this blog post is for you. When working with multiple workstations, you are forced to work with multiple keyboards and mice to interact with these workstations, which clutter your desk and make things difficult and confusing. One solution to this is to use a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) unit, which can be quite cumbersome, because you always have to manually select the other workstation that you want to use. With this in mind and to make life simpler, I would like to bring the application of Synergy to your attention.

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Companies and people who want their offices to resemble something out of a not-too-crazy science fiction movie are in luck; last week, Microsoft made the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 Touch Pack available to everyone who can utilize it.

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I just got an Apple iPod Touch, which is super cool, but I have no idea how to get it to work with my Dell PC. I’m running Windows Vista and use Windows Media Player 10 (WMP10) for the music on my computer, but WMP doesn’t seem to see my iPod. How do I proceed and get it to work??

Dave’s Answer:

There’s good news and bad news. What do you want to hear first?

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We all know that Windows controls (at least) 90 percent of the PC market, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.  Internet Explorer is steadily losing users, however, and if you’re one of the folks who have switched to Firefox or Chrome, it may interest you to know that there’s a possibility Internet Explorer 8 won’t be inseparable from Windows 7.

A recent test version of Windows 7 (build 7048) is similar to many others insofar as it gives users the opportunity to turn features on and off.  Chris Holmes and Bryant Zadegan noticed that this build lists IE8 among the many other options, though, and they got a screenshot as proof.

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Check out this great list of Microsoft Windows 7 Beta Secrets by Tim Sneath.  Here’s a few of them, so be sure to check out the full list here for the full 30 Windows 7 Secrets!

• Windows Management. By now, you’ve probably seen that Windows 7 does a lot to make window management easier: you can “dock” a window to the left or right half of the screen by simply dragging it to the edge; similarly, you can drag the window to the top of the screen to maximize it, and double-click the window top / bottom border to maximize it vertically with the same horizontal width. What you might not know is that all these actions are also available with keyboard shortcuts:
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