The 10th Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Welcome to the tenth monthly Carnival of Computer Help and Advice. Another collection of blog articles to help you avoid problems and get the most out of your PCs.

We start this month's carnival with Michael guide to Whats inside a computer? from Too Easy Tech.

Next up is, Money 2000 to Money Plus: Will It Convert? posted at About.com Financial Software. The author of the article, Shelley Elmblad, says, "This post answers a question about running older versions of Microsoft Money on Windows Vista, and tells you how to get older MS Money data to convert for use with Microsoft Money Plus."

Four more posts about software: Jules of PCauthorities.com explains How to Uninstall IE8 Beta 2; the writers at ErrorSmart present instructions for Fixing Rundll32.exe; Satbir Singh lists 10 Essential Portable Applications for your USB Drive at Technotraits.com; bobby instructs us hwo to Login with multiple Ids at the same time in yahoo messenger with a Registry hack at Wonderful tech. stuff.

This carnival would not be complete without a post from Andrew Edgington. This month he presents 20 Photoshop on-line Video Tutorials at Learn Photoshop Smart, and his Quick Fix Tips at Learn Adobe Elements.

Thanks to everyone who contributed this month. As ever limits in space mean that not all submissions appear in the final carnival.

If you have an IT themed blog and would like to host the next carnival leave a comment on this post or use the contact form over at our Blog Carnival page where you can also submit your blog posts for inclusion. If don't wish to have the responsibility for selecting articles or writing the carnival post, don't worry I can do that for you.

More in the November edition.

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How to run a program every time Windows starts

In a previous post I explained how to stop programs running when Windows starts up, but in this post I will explain how to make one run every time you boot up. There are a variety of ways of telling Windows to run a program when it starts, but using the 'Startup' folder on the Start menu is probably the simplest. For the purposes of this tutorial we will set Windows to run Firefox automatically.

Click on the Start menu and browse to the appropriate sub-menu. Right-click on the icon for the program you want to start automatically, and click 'Copy'.

Now find the 'Startup' folder on the Start menu, right-click on it and click 'Open'.

This will open a new window showing some of the programs that run whenever you start Windows.

Right-click on some empty space in that window and click paste.

If you cannot find the icon for the program you want in the Start menu, but you have it on your desktop then you can copy that one into the 'Startup' folder. You can repeat this process for all the programs you wish to start automatically; however, be warned that the more programs you have running the slower Windows will work.

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Jargon Busting: Anatomy of a window (Part 1)

All the various controls on a Windows program have names that are not always intuitive. In this post I will identify the most common controls and list the various names that they are known by. I will not bother with buttons or menus as everyone should know what they are. All the controls on this post are interactive, rather than just being images.

Text box, Text field, Text Entry, Input Box A control into which you can type text. It can be a single line as above, or multiple lines as below.	This element is also called a text-area
Radio button, Option button This control enables you to select one of a number of choices.	Male Female
Check box, Tick box These either appear singly offering an on/off or yes/no choice, or they offer a chance to select a multitude of options.	What do you own? Desktop PC: Laptop PDA
List box This control enables you to select one or more items from a list. To select more than one item hold down the Ctrl key while clicking.	PopRockR&BDanceC&W
Drop-down list This element allows you to select an item from a list	AustraliaCanadaNew ZealandPhilippinesUnited KingdomUnited StatesOther

In the next post in this series I will look at other program controls, such as sliders, spinners, trees and grids.

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