Tech Tip of the Day: How to change the boot order on an Intel Motherboard

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Tech Tip of the Day: How to disable the Adobe splash screen

Say "Good-bye" to the Adobe Reader X "Welcome Screen"

Adobe Reader X starts by popping up a "Welcome Screen" making it easier for you to pick a recent document.

One problem - if you have applications that open or print your PDF file, the "Welcome" screen can block that action.

There's no option or preference choice in Adobe Reader X to turn this off, but there is a very easy fix:

1. Create a new text file on your desktop. To do this, right click on the desktop and select New » Text Document.
   
   
   
   
2. Rename the file to: NoWelcome.reg
   
   (Make sure that you can see file extensions and change the name from New Text
   Document.txt to NoWelcome.reg - this should prompt Windows to ask if you are sure that you want to change the file type.)
   
   
   
   
3. Copy the text contained inside the box below and paste it into your new file. Save and close the file.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\10.0\FeatureLockDown\cWelcomeScreen] "bShowWelcomeScreen"=dword:00000000

4. Double-click on that file, agree with all of the prompts and warnings, and the "Welcome" screen will be gone.

 

For more assistance contact Technical Support here.

Tech Tip of the Day: How to achieve a faster DNS response

Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) also provides a DNS (Domain Name Service) server to translate the address you type into the numerical address the internet needs to bring you the web page you're after. For most people the time this takes is insignificant, but if you want to tweak your system for every bit of speed you can get, this article is for you.

There are many DNS servers that are available free for you to use but you need a way to choose. Enter namebench! 

namebench is a free utility that will test your current DNS server and many others to find you the fastest one. It's available at http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ and runs on Mac OS X and Windows. Choose the appropriate download for your operating system and in just a few seconds (it's tiny) you'll have a copy. When you run it, it will extract and open its interface.

If the interface looks confusing don't be worried. The defaults will be fine. Just click on "Start Benchmark" at the bottom right.

After a few minutes of testing the results will appear in your web browser.

The top part is what you're really interested in because it tells you how much you can speed things up and which DNS servers to try.

The graphs below can give you some idea of how many milliseconds improvement you can expect. Yes, I did say MILLISECONDS.

For more assistance contact Technical Support here.