Technology Insights

How to Boot the Recovery Partition on a Acer Aspire when Alt – F10 Does Not Work

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I had a Acer aspire one in the shop today and it had a variety of critical Windows issues. While doing some tests one of the things I did was rebuild the windows boot loader using the /FIXBOOT & /FIXMBR commands from a recovery disk. What I did not realize is it seems Acer has a custom boot loader which allows for the keys Alt & F10 to be pressed on boot in order to reinstall from the recovery partition so when I reinstalled the boot loader I overwrote the Acer one. This prevented the Alt – F10 combination from being used to access the recovery partition. Now, normally if you can boot into Windows there is a icon in the start menu to execute the recovery program but in my case Windows was so messed up due to a bad chkdsk I was not able to do that.

Technology Insights

Right Click Without A Mouse In Windows 7 Or Windows XP

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Last weekend I found myself working on a laptop that had numerous problems including it could not boot. After fixing the Master Boot Record(MBR) the computer was able to boot but the mouse was not working. It is fairly easy to navigate around a Windows XP computer without a mouse however right clicking is something that can be missed. Use the information below to right click on a computer that doesn’t have a mouse installed.

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How to Get Back A Missing Address Bar in the Safari Web Browser

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Recently I was installing some applications on a friends iMac computer and noticed his address bar was missing from the Safari web browser. I had never seen this before as I rarely use Safari though I imagine it was easy to resolve.

To add the address bar back into the browser you can either restore the toolbar defaults or just add in the address bar itself. To restore the default toolbar settings follow the steps below.