Last week I had 10 BSOD’s crashing the hell out of my windows XP machine at work, I knew what the problem was related to though as I had created a new TrueCrypt container which was larger than the one I had been using without problem for two years now.

As my dropbox storage availability was going up, the container holding the data was staying at 4GB so I had to do something as having to move files each day due to the virtual drive filling up was becoming tedious..

I had benchmarked the fastest algorithm as AES which was not the previous one I had been using (twofish) so decided to switch to that so program file access would drag a little less…

So I have a FAT AES 6GB partition and two times a day the machine BSOD’s after years of stability. If you are having blue screens then the starting point is to download the free utility BlueScreenView to check out what those memory dumps contain which pointed out that fastfat.sys was the problematic driver.

Upgrading TrueCrypt from version 6.3 to 7 and changing the algorithm back to twofish did not help as 10 mins later it happened again.

So two days ago I decided to create a new AES NTFS 6GB partition to remove the FAT driver from the equation and two days on not a single bluescreen… fingers crossed it continues to be stable.

Another freeware program from the makers of BlueScreenView that I used years ago and think is great is ShellExView which you can use to trim the crap out of your right click menus so you can be more efficient with less clutter.

What a mad weekend so far, from a lovely friday off, out together in central London where me and natasa to getting home to find the boiler misbehaving again, it seems to have fallen out with the thermostat, took ages to get it heating the house again, and -5 outside was no joke.

Then this morning we speed off to IKEA in wembley, quickest journey there ever and the place was almost empty not the packed stress it usually is, however.. we get out to almost not find the car it was so snowed in then I think how the f*ck we are gonna get home the same day.. totally ungritted roads were hell to drive, the news said the whole of brent cross shopping centre was shut down for the day due to the dangerous conditions, we saw 4x4s doing 360s on roundabouts and HGVs that just couldn’t make it up slight inclines on the north circular, driving  along in a soup of black ice at dead slow all the way hoping to get home without a bang, then couldn’t get the car on the drive without clearing the 6 inches of snow out the way first, certainly one of my toughest driving experiences ever along with the singletrack offroad in March thanks to tomtom, that was strictly for horses and motorbikes, fingers crossed the boiler does it’s magic and the snow disappears soon. It’s just madness…

Strong passwords are a bitch to come up with, but become a lot easier with this simple rule below.

Need to turn a password you can remember in your head into one that looks like you could never remember it – or the person looking over your shoulder?

Keep your usual password if you need to; just move your fingers over one  space on the keyboard to the left or right.

If you want a secure password without having to remember anything complex, try shifting your fingers one set of keys to the right. It will make your password look like gibberish, will often add in punctuation marks, and is quick and simple.

• password => [sddeptf
• letmein => ;ry,rom
• money => .pmru
• love => ;pbr

It’s not as good as going for a complex strong password but it’s probably stronger than what you have now.

Do you use a program that requires you to push the same seemingly pointless “are you sure you want to do this?” type buttons?, wouldn’t it be nice if they were pressed automatically so you could save your fingers and do something else?

Some computer programs pester you with their endless dialog boxes repeating the same questions. Would you like to do X? Are you sure you mean to do Y? If you know what you want and are tired of telling your PC the same things over and over, use PTFB (short for “Push the Freakin’ Button”), a button-pressing utility I have been using since 2005 and has saved me tens of thousands of pointless clicks.

When a dialog box asks the PC equivalent of “are we there yet?”, in a few seconds you can tell PTFB which button it should press, and the program will take care of that specific confirmation button forever afterwards. You can set the program to press the same button in similar dialogs as well as it’s quite flexible if you need it to be.

You can download the free version here, or buy the pro version so the guy can make some money for his great software – the free version has been all I need for this sort of stuff for the past 4 years though.

Give it a try, keep away the RSI. No those are no my fingers in the image, make sure they are not yours either.