Web & Technology Articles

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How to Find & Remove User Installed Fonts on Windows

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A bloated operating system is a slow operating system, and one of the most overlooked culprits of digital clutter is your font library.

Every installed font consumes system resources, bloats your registry, and can actively slow down font-heavy applications like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, or your favorite IDE.

If you are trying to maintain a lean, high-performance PC, keeping a tight rein on miscellaneous font installations is a must.

Today, many apps and installers skip the traditional system-wide directory entirely, opting to quietly drop fonts strictly into your local user profile instead. If you are trying to track down recent additions to purge the clutter, the classic Control Panel won’t show you the full picture.

If your goal is a clean, optimized machine, this article covers how to uncover these hidden, user-specific fonts and sort them by installation date so you can easily sweep away what you don’t need.

 

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Avada Column Overlap Fails to Overlay

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This article serves as a reminder-to-self regarding a recent display issue I had on one of my WordPress sites with the Avada child theme.

Within the Avada theme for WordPress you can set the padding to be a negative number so that two columns or containers overlap. This generates a nice effect.

However, after updating Avada to 7.15.3 I discovered a new option under the Performance menu (see screenshot) called: Optimize Offscreen Rendering

Turning the Optimize Offscreen Rendering on prevented the overlay from appearing despite my having adjusted the Z Index options.

No doubt they’ll have it fixed in an upcoming release, for now I’ll just leave it turned off.

 

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Fixing Runaway WordPress Action Scheduler: Stop Gigabytes of Log Bloat

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If your WordPress site suddenly starts dragging, your database balloons in size, or your host sends you a warning about excessive queries, there’s a good chance the culprit is hiding in plain sight: Action Scheduler.

This background task runner powers WooCommerce, subscription plugins, backups, and countless other tools. When it behaves, it’s invisible. When it breaks, it can hammer your database every few seconds and generate gigabytes of log entries before you even know what happened.

That’s exactly what happened to one of my sites — and here’s how I fixed it.

 

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Where Did My Hard Drive Space Go? Hunting Down Hidden Bloat

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It is one of the most frustrating puzzles in modern desktop computing: you calculate the exact size of your personal documents, photos, and project directories, only to discover that your physical storage drive is reporting hundreds of gigabytes of mysterious, unaccounted-for data.

You have already emptied the Recycle Bin, cleared out the standard temporary files, and uninstalled resource-heavy applications—yet your storage pool remains stubbornly maxed out.

Where in the world is this ghost data hiding?

When your personal files take up a modest 150 GB, but your Operating System claims 461 GB is occupied, you are dealing with a 311 GB “phantom gap.”

On a single-user Windows machine, this discrepancy isn’t random layout fragmentation. It is almost always driven by hidden OS features, background update caches, bloated system state images, or background software logs that Windows intentionally isolates from standard user view.

Let’s pull back the curtain and look at the prime locations where Windows hides its massive storage reservoirs, along with safe, step-by-step instructions on how to reclaim your drive space.

 

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Replace WordPress login logo, link, and title

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In some cases you may want a slightly more personal login page. Here is a snippet you can use to change the default WordPress login logo, link, and title.

 

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How to Disable Microsoft Phone Link from Running in Background

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I’ve never used or want to use the Microsoft Phone Link app. Despite this fact, the application still runs in the background taking up between 40 to 50MB of RAM.

To remove Phone Link, which does not offer a standard uninstall option in Windows Settings, you must use PowerShell with administrative privileges.

In this article I provide you with that PowerShell snippet.

 

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WordPress Fatal Error Gravity Forms with User Registration Add-On

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There was a minor update ( I am talking 2.10.0 to 2.10.1 ) for Gravity Forms which included a ‘security enhancement‘ which I implemented.

Upon doing so my WordPress based membership site, which was using the Gravity Forms User Registration Add-On completely crashed with a Fatal Error and Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue notice.

No big deal I thought, I would just restore the backup from the day prior. Same result, so I continued restoring older daily backups without success. Now what!?

This article covers how I was able to resolve that Fatal Error but is intended for my personal use only in order to help me jog my memory should this issue occur in the future. So I won’t be going into great detail.

 

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Remove Duplicate OneDrive from Windows Explorer

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After unsubscribing from my over priced Microsoft 365 account and downgrading to the free version I ended up with two OneDrive Personal icon links within Windows Explorer.

The most direct fix for duplicate OneDrive links within Windows Explorer is to edit the Windows Registry to remove the residual entry after unlinking or relinking accounts.

This article will guide you through the process I used to resolve duplicate OneDrive Personal folder icons from appearing within Windows Explorer on my PC.

 

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PaperPort Thumbnail Failing to Display

Fix PaperPort 14 Thumbnails Not Loading

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Despite my recommendation to clients to use the built-in Scan to PC feature (available on most modern all-in-one printers) with document management through Windows File Explorer, some insist on using PaperPort 14.

PaperPort suffers from a number of issues, one of which is the failure to display scanned document thumbnails on Windows 11. Instead of document thumbnail previews, users only see generic icons with PaperPort performance lagging heavily.

This article outlines the steps I took to resolve this thumbnail issue. That said, I continue to advise against utilizing PaperPort for document management—solely because it is redundant. Learn my simple and effective alternative solution to PaperPort.

 

PaperPort Thumbnail Failing to Display

 

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Microsoft 365 Auto-Expanding Archive Setup: PowerShell Tutorial

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Managing mailbox growth is a constant challenge for Microsoft 365 administrators. Even with archive mailboxes enabled, heavy‑use accounts can quickly approach storage limits. Auto‑expanding archiving solves this by providing additional storage on demand, allowing Microsoft 365 to automatically allocate more space as the archive grows.

Auto‑expanding archiving is one of the most powerful tools available for long‑term mailbox management in Microsoft 365. With just a few PowerShell commands, you can ensure your users never hit unexpected archive limits again. This not only improves performance and compliance but also reduces the administrative overhead of manually managing mailbox storage.

If you’re ready to enable this feature for a user, PowerShell is the most reliable way to get it done. Below is a clean, step‑by‑step walkthrough to help you implement auto‑expanding archives safely and efficiently.

 

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