Ever wondered whether all those system tray programs lower your FPS? 

When I was younger, my low-budget PC struggled to run most games, so I made it a habit to shut down any unused background programs, virus scanners, and services before every gaming session.

Nowadays, I'm older, have a real job, and am fortunate enough to be able to spend more money on my beloved hobby. With a high-end CPU and two high-end GPUs in SLI, I have the luxury of being able to just boot up a game, put all settings to max, turn on 3Dvision, and enjoy what is usually a smooth, sumptuous gaming experience. But I started wondering: was I hurting my performance by forsaking this old habit? Could I still get a noticeable boost by shutting off a few programs before I launch a game? 

Conventional wisdom says that 'No, those days are over': today's CPUs are much better at multi-tasking, so leaving background programs running shouldn't impact gaming in any serious way. Still, I decided to find out for myself, if only for peace of mind.

The Razer Sabertooth game controller is based on the Xbox 360 gamepad, and is supposed to work out of the box as if it were a standard Xbox 360 gamepad. It doesn't always do this though. If Device Manager fails to recognise your Razer Sabertooth, follow the below steps. I'm using Windows 7 64bit. I'm not sure if this works on Windows 8 or other versions.

I recently had an odd problem. I have Adobe Creative Suite 5 installed, as well as Photoshop CS6. Since Adobe Bridge comes installed with Photoshop, it also means that I now have two versions of Bridge installed: CS5 (CS5.1 actually) and CS6.

My problem was that whenever I tried to run Bridge CS6, Bridge CS5 would open instead - even when I went to the Adobe Bridge CS6 source folder and double clicked bridge.exe.

It turns out that there's an easy fix. The problem is that Bridge 5 is still loading itself into your memory when you start your PC. So, with its 'foot in the door' in your RAM, it automatically launches itself whenever you try to launch Bridge - even if you try to launch a different version.

To solve the problem:

• press the windows key
  
• type msconfig and press enter
  
• select the startup tab
  
• scroll down until you find Adobe Bridge CS5 (or CS5.1 or whatever), then uncheck it
  
• Click ok, and restart
  

That should solve it, as Bridge 5 should no longer load itself up on startup. If the problem persists however, try the following:

• Open Bridge 5
  
• select edit/preferences (or press Ctrl-K)
  
• from the list on the left, select "Startup Scripts"
  
• choose disable all and click ok
  
• restart the computer
  

Once in a while, I load up my Windows 7 PC and, for some inexplicable reason, everything on the screen appears a bit too dim and grey (except for the mouse cursor, which remains bright white). The above image shows the problem, albeit somewhat exaggerated. It only happens rarely though, and restarting the PC usually makes it go away - though having to restart is frustrating.

Googling reveals that a lot of people get this problem, though few seem to know what the source is or how to fix it, and it took me a long time to find the solution. Though I finally did (at least, it works for me):

UPDATE: Windows 10 fixes now also provided

If you draw or paint with a wacom tablet on Windows 7, you may have suffered through one of Microsoft's more puzzling punishments: those horrible little circles that hound your cursor and hamper your ability to draw smoothly. From what I gather, they're actually designed for touch-screen monitors, so it's frustrating that Microsoft forces them onto wacom users where they don't belong.

I found it surprisingly hard to find the solution to this issue online. Part of the problem is that there are two separate circles, each with a separate solution. Another part is that one of the solutions I frequently came across doesn't work on Windows 7 Home Premium Edition. The below solutions do.