Most of the time there is no problem, but every once in a while the internet explorer is the cause of problems. In a lot of cases the solution is a deinstallation of the explorer and a brand new install.

Whether the opportunity to deinstall the Internet Explorer is available depends on the way it is installed on the system. There are a couple of situations where there is no possibility to perform a normal uninstall (the program appears in the list of available programs, but there is no "Delete" option or the delete option is "grayed out").

when it is not possible to deinstall the internet explorer in a normal way, follow the following procedure:
1. Push the startbutton select "Run".
2. Start de commandprompt by using the command CMD and push enter.
3. Execute the following command:  %windir%\ie8\spuninst\spuninst.exe
4. Restart your computer after the deinstallation has completed and reinstall the internet explorer 

Microsoft has written an article about this issue, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957700/nl

A Strange problem which occurs occasionally. If you have a USB stick into a computer converts it recognizes the drive, install the appropriate driver, but you do not see it as a separate drive letter in Windows Explorer.

There may be many different causes and solutions.


When the F: drive is being mapped to a networkshare, Windows XP is not able to see this and no driveletter will be assigned to the USB device!


0.  Connect the USB device to your workstation.
1.  Go to the configurationscreen (Start -> Configurationscreen)
2.  Select Systemmanagement.
3.  Select Computermanagement in the right part of the screen.
4.  Select Disk Management in the left part of the screen.
5.  Select the USB device in the right part of the screen and click on the right mousebutton.
6.  Select Change Drive Letter and select the driveletter you want to assign to this device.

The driveletter will be visible in the Windows Explorer when the steps above are followed.

Microsoft advises to map networkmappings from Z:, Y: etc. 

Microsoft also recommends mappings to network drives starts from the bottom number (Z:, Y:, etc). This reduces the chance that the above problem will occur considerably smaller.

Hmm .. the Microsoft solutions is more some kind of cheap workaround, anyway, always good to know that there are alternatives!

When your Windows XP system uses the FAT32 filestructure u can come to the problem that your beautiful harddisk of 240 Gb is shown in the Windows Explorer as a 30 Gb harddisk.

The solution for this problemn is a conversion of the partition to the NTFS filestructure. To do this you go to the commandprompt (Start->Run->cmd) and execute the following command: 

convert <disk>: /fs:ntfs

To complete the conversion Windows needs a exclusive access to the partition, when that is not possible, Windows suggests a restart of your system, during the start of the system the conversion will be completed.

Sometimes a computer does the things you want him to do, but sometimes you must give him a hand. The last part of this sentence is needed for the use of the autoplay function which takes care for automatically playing CD's and DVD's when they are loaded in the player.

By default Windows XP plays CD's and DVD's automatically when you load them. Sometimes this is what you want, but you can also turn this behaviour off.

Follow the next three steps to turn the autoplay function off:

• 1. Click Start, Run and enter GPEDIT.MSC
• 2. Go to Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, System
• 3. Locate the entry for Turn autoplay off and modify it as you desire.

No, this is not a panacea, but can quite wel be used for turning off the autoplay option. When you want to use this tip to turn autoplay back on again, you might have luck. There are several options to turn autoplay off and the group policy editor is one of them, every option to turn something off has an own option to turn it on again.

Last remark for this tip, it only works on the professional version of Windows XP. This is the version whitch includes the Group Policy Editor that is being used.

In a normal situation Microsoft Windows selects by the extension of a document which appliction it must start to open that document (.doc related to Microsoft Word, .pdf with Acrobat Reader and so on).

In some cases this goes wrong, has Windows lost his way and we have to help manually.

To look at the default programs, you select "Start" and chooses "this computer". Next you select "options" in the top of the screen and select "map options", the next screenshot will appear:

In this window you can select witch programm has to be used to open a certain kind of document. As an example, to open a .PDF document with the Adobe Acrobat Reader, you go to the upper part of the window and select the PDF extension by using the blue beam. After that, in the lower part of the window you select "change" and select the Acrobat Reader application as the default application to open this type of documents.

Of course, this works not only on the .PDF extension, it is possible with every extension that is known in Windows XP. And even if it is not known in Windows XP, you can add an extension yourself.

Last week I was at a customer who had a notebook that refused to make a connection to the internet. In the device manager were a lot of exclamation points next to the network adapters. This pointed me to a problem with tha AVG Miniport Driver, which was strange because AVG was no more installed on that system.

After a thoroughgoing investigation I turned the firewall on and off again. After those simple clicks the problems were solved, the exclamation points were gone and the notebook had a internet connection again.