With the growing use of home media servers and home theater PCs (HTPCs), many of us now turn to larger capacity hard drives.  The traditional trend is to use a server with hardware RAID to take many smaller drives and turn them in to one larger drive for media, but many software based RAID options now exist to help keep the hardware cost down and simplify making large arrays that are protected from hardware failure.  Keep in mind that RAID is never a substitute for backup, however.  In this article we take a look at the software solution called FlexRAID, which can let your computer and take hard drives and act as a NAS (network attached storage).

If you have ever run into a hard drive you wanted to re-format or use and it was labelled as a "GPT Protective Partition", here are the steps you can take, from within Windows to get the ready for action again.

As we know and have mentioned on our Podcast several times, Surface RT is highly restricted to only one single x86 legacy program and that is the Office software that comes on the tablet.  All other x86 legacy applications can't run on the device, until now.  Thanks to mamaich on the XDA developer forum, the ARM tablet can run classic windows games in fact, at least some.

One issue that is run into with Windows 8 is that you can't have Hyper-V enabled and use Vmware Workstation at the same time.  That is, you can use them both at once.  But you can get them to work by creating an extra boot option and rebooting into the proper mode.

If you have encountered this annoying prompt when double-clicking on attachments in Outlook, fear not, there is a way to avoid it each time.  This fix applies to Outlook 2007 and above (including 2013).

The Issue

As with any increase in security, Microsoft has become tighter with security in Outlook in particular.  Microsoft has set it to prompt you in case the file you are clicking on is a malicious attachment.  The problem is, you can't uncheck the box so that you can just directly open the attachment.  If you are running a decent antivirus program such as Nod32 or free ones like AVG or Microsoft's Security Essentials, then these attachments will be checked automatically by default.

The Solution

Again, as a word of caution, only perform this action if you already have an anti-virus program installed on your computer that checks attachments for viruses and malicious code.  And of course never open attachments from anyone you don't know.

The simplest solution to fixing this is to hold down the shift key while right clicking on your Outlook shortcut.  Choose "Run as Administrator."  Now go back to the email with the attachment in question and uncheck the box "always ask before opening this type of file" and click open. 

After this, close Outlook and reopen Outlook as you normally would (no need to run as Administrator after the change is made, only when selecting a new file type to change).  Now each time you double-click on that particular type of document whether its a .doc, .html etc, it will automatically open.  Remember you will need repeat the Administrator procedure with each file type that you want to auto open on double click.

There is a bug in Skyrim that makes it impossible to defeat Alduin when you encounter him.  This bug has existed for a while, but in case you are unaware of how to get around it, here are a few tips to help fix this glitch.

Many may have already figured out the secret to backing up or saving your Start Screen with Windows 8.  You spend loads of time getting it just right, but want to make sure that if all is lost you can restore it.  That is done by backing up the appsfolder.itemdata-ms file in your appdata\local\microsoft\windows folder and restoring as need be.  But what if you want to customize it so that every user on the machine sees the same Start Screen.  There is a way...

I have a TrackIR device which I use primarily with Flight Simulator X, and ran into an issue out of the blue.  Nothing was changed on my system and it was running fine previously, using version 5.1 of the software.  Suddenly when TrackIR would load it would simply say "error" in a dialogue box and then close.  To get past this error I discovered that the checkbox under OpenGL Settings called "Triple Buffering" was causing the issue.  Simply un-checking the box has made the error go away. 

Thus far, even at this writing, version 5.2 of their software has not fixed this glitch.  This was with my ATI 5850 card combined with Windows 8 x64 RTM (and the latest Windows updates).