The H-Factor

Reducing Entropy

Recent Posts

Adding Hanger Types to HydraLIST

If you want to use a new type of hanger, or are a fab shop that gets a job from a contractor that uses a hanger type that you do not have, it is easy to add that new hanger type to your own machine. A hanger is an assembly, and an assembly is just…

Welcome

Recently our previous blog service (Typepad) ended their business – so, we have a new home. It will take a bit to get images back and displaying properly, but we are working on it! Final pageview count of original Typepad blog: 387,232

Using a Non-Standard Pipe Type in HydraCALC

A customer called today asking how to enter a 1″ black plastic underground pipe for the calc. This particular situation sounded unique enough that I did not tell him to add that pipe type to our database, as I would have if he expected to see this pipe type used repeatedly. I told him to…

September 2026
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Category: Microsoft Stuff

  • So, Windows 11… The good news (for us at least) is that all our current versions of Hydratec software work well on it. I ran the update on my machine, and my already installed software worked just great. I have also run some of our install without a problem. What’s the bad news? Nothing is…

  • Quick Assist is built into Windows 10 and allows for remote control connections to other computers. No downloads or other software needed! Type in Quick Assist at the Windows Search bar. You are given two simple options when it launches If you want to take control or see another person’s computer, choose the Give assistance…

  • This idea is from long time customer and frequent good advice giver, Larry Howell at L & K Fire Protection in Marion, Illinois “I wanted to share windows file explorer libraries with the blog users, as I just discovered their usefulness. When choosing a place to save calculations and stock listing files, the default does…

  • I had a customer contact me today because he was unable to use any of the internet spawning commands in HydraCAD including Send an Email to Hydratec, Hydratec Website and Hydratec Support Blog (this blog). The cause of his problem was that a browser was not associated with HTML files. Instead, some other program was.…

  • Most people seem to know that holding down the ALT key while tapping the TAB key switches Windows applications, not as many appear to know that holding down the CTRL key while tapping the TAB key cycles through open Documents or Drawings _within_ the current window. In other words, if you are in AutoCAD, and…

  • Occasionally, we are faced with situations where we try to install a program and Windows says it is already there, but we think it isn't, and we can't find it in Programs and Feature in Control Panel. Or, we are trying to uninstall a program, and Windows errors out saying it is not there(!) The…

  • Many years ago, customers asked us to give them an 'atta boy' for getting no errors when running Checkups. That evolved from just the Congratulations dialog box to the dialog plus the Congratulations spoken message. The voice being used depends on the version of Windows you have. On Windows XP, the voice is officially known…

  • From a longtime customer – Joe O.: Here is one I just noticed in Vista and I was not sure if you knew about it…   With Vista, if you highlight multiple files to change the name, the name will change but each file will retain their respective extensions.  This is very handy if you…

  • My coworker Paul noticed yesterday that his files were not getting sorted in Explorer like he was used to seeing them. Those that started with numbers were no longer in numerical order, at least not the way he wanted them. He dug around and found a Knowledge Base article on the Microsoft website. Sort Order…

  • Many (most?) of you may have run into the problem where you use Windows Explorer to search a file for text the YOU KNOW IS IN THERE BUT $%^@# WINDOWS CAN’T FIND IT – grrrrrrr Here is how you get it to do that, straight from Microsoft (method 2): 1. Click Start, and then click…