A piggy bank of commands, fixes, succinct reviews, some mini articles and technical opinions from a (mostly) Perl developer.

Your PC does not need dynamic wallpaper or a health check

Do not install any of the following types of programs, they are almost guaranteed to be spyware, slow down your computer, and be difficult to remove:
  • Dynamic wallpaper/screensaver
  • PC health check
  • Speed up your PC
  • Clean your PC
  • Any new special anti-virus program (you should only have one trusted anti-virus program)
  • Defrag your computer
Instead, use Ad-aware or Spybot Search & Destroy to keep your Windows computer clean.

Windows "add or remove programs" list is empty

First of all, just wait for a few minutes. The list may appear after some time.

If still no luck:
  • Highlight and copy the entire bolded text below: 
    • cmd /c REGEDIT /E "%userprofile%\desktop\uninstall.txt "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\ 
  • Click on Start > Run and paste in the text you have just copied. Hit Enter. 
  • A notepad document should appear on your desktop called uninstall or uninstall.txt 
  • Open it to view the contents
    • Look for the "UninstallString" values and copy those into the Start > Run box to uninstall programs


Thanks to tomshardware.co.uk

How to manage problematic application windows in Ubuntu

In Ubuntu:

To find out what application a window belongs to: Type xwininfo in the console, then click on the window.

To kill a window, type xkill in the console, then click on a window to kill it.