HTC Desire secret menu

The HTC Desire has a secret menu, which can be accessed by entering a special code as if you were dialling a phone number. The menu shows a wealth of interesting information including IMEI, phone number, usage statistics, wifi information, accurate battery voltage and signal strength (the latter being useful to see if you are suffering the ‘smartphone grip [...]

Add Google.co.uk as a search provider in Internet Explorer (IE8)

Microsoft seem to have been making it harder to personalise the search engines used by the IE search box. There is a process for adding any search engine but it doesn’t seem to be as easy to find as it once was.

To add a new search provider, simply click on the link below and [...]

Spotify stopped working? – how to fix the problem

Due to a foul-up by securty firm Symantec, users of Norton anti-virus products found that Spotify had mysteriously stopped working today. The reason was that the security product had falsely identified the program – Spotify.exe – as a Trojan Horse and quarantined it.

It is possible to restore the program to its rightful place but [...]

How to fix the Windows XP speech recognition SAPISVR crash problem

Got the message “SAPISVR 5 has encountered a problem and needs to close” and found that neither Windows speech recognition nor your Office programs will work? The problem is caused by your speech recognition user profile having become corrupt. You need to switch to the default profile or another users’ profile to restore system stability. [...]

How to fix an unstable Thomson DTi6300 Top Up TV recorder

The Thomson DTi6300 PVR can become slow and unresponsive if the available free disk space falls below 15%. This easy to fix by deleting a few programmes.

Sometimes however these boxes can get their disks in a twist, which can result in flaky operation even when there is sufficient free space. In this case, the answer is [...]

How to install RealPlayer in Ubuntu

Real Player is a high quality media player, which is freely available for Linux operating systems. It isn’t included in Linux packages because it is not a fully open source program. There are .rpm and .deb packages available for RedHat and Debian variants but nothing that will obviously work for Ubuntu. Fortunately it is fairly [...]

Fixing the Windows ‘low or out of virtual memory’ errors

Windows uses hard disk storage when the memory needed by the runnning programs is bigger than the amount of RAM memory your PC has. This ‘virtual’ memory is called a page file and is located in C:/pagefile.sys.

Sometimes the error arises because one or more of the applications has a ‘memory leak’ bug. When this [...]

Which barbecues are best – charcoal or gas?

Updated 25 May 2009

If you are considering buying a barbecue you will have noticed that they burn either solid fuel – charcoal – or gas. So what are the differences and why would you buy one in preference to the other?

 

That wonderful barbecue flavour Some people [...]

How can I find my mobile phone IMEI number?

You can easily find your IMEI on most phones by simply entering *#06# on the keypad. Some phones call it a serial number rather than the IMEI, which can be a little confusing. If *#06# doesn’t work with your phone there are a couple of other ways of finding the IMEI:

Look under the battery – [...]

How to fix the Thomson Top Up TV receiver ‘orange light stuck on’ fault

There have recently been a rash of problems with Thomson DTi6300 hard disk Top Up TV boxes. The fault typically manifests itself as a box that won’t come out of standby, usually with an orange front-panel light stuck on.

Thomson Top Up TV PVR

The first thing to try is to turn the box off at [...]