I have been fairly impressed with Windows 7 and my new Dell laptop. One of the items that had been getting on my nerves was the fact that I would randomly zoom in or zoom out of various screens I was on specifically when using a web browser. This is done by pinching two fingers together on the Dell touchpad and while I was not doing this on purpose the way I use the touchpad must simulate this pinch an awful lot. Follow the directions below to disable the pinch zoom for your Dell touchpad on a computer running Windows 7 or Windows Vista.

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I have been messing around with Microsoft Outlook 2007 today in an attempt to not only make it start quicker but also to make it run more efficiently. One area I have been concentrating on is the Trust Center where you can manage the Outlook Add-ins. The more Add-ins you can disable the better as each one th, at is disabled is one less task that Outlook has to load on start up and keep track of while running. Below I explain what the Microsoft VBA for Outlook Addin is and how to disable this and other Outlook add-ins. Make sure you understand what each add-in is before disabling it because disabling add-ins could remove Outlook functionality that you use on a regular basis. A good example of this would be if you remove the iTunes Outlook Addin you will lose the ability to sync calendars between Outlook and your iPhone so if you don’t sync the calendars between the two then it can safely be removed for a small performance gain.

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I have been forgetting to turn off the remember password offer by Firefox for a long time. Every single time I login to a site Firefox will drop down a box below the tabs asking “Do you want Firefox to remember your password?”. This can be a convenient feature however  it is a better policy to always type in your password for many reasons. What if someone had access to your computer without your permission and all of your passwords were stored within Firefox? It would only take them a little amount of time before they had access to any site that you had previously logged into. To turn off the offer of remembering passwords in Firefox follow the below instructions.

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When updating CentOS or RedHat via yum its possible to receive an error similar to the below. This error will cause an issue where yum will not work even though as described below the issue is typically isolated to one yum repository.

Error:Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: dag. Please verify its path and try again

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A default installation of Internet Explorer 8 has some security settings that can be annoying at times though technically they are the correct way to have things configured. One that will pop up a lot if the default settings is left untouched the the display of “mixed content” or display a HTTPS URL that has HTTP content mixed into it. Technically when visiting a secure webpage being delivered over SSL there should not be any HTTP items on the page as it leaves the door open for a security breach. The problem is there are a ton of web sites out there that display mixed content.

**NOTE: This setting is the same for the Windows XP 32-Bit and Windows 7 64-Bit versions of Internet Explorer 8.

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