News, Hints & Tips, Reviews, etc of all things computers
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Written by Von
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Wednesday, 25 July 2007 |
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Defragmenting your hard drive can speed up the reading and writing of data on your hard disk. Defragging your hard drives frequently can keep the disks working at their best, but this can be a chore to remember.
For those with Windows Vista, there is a utility to enable automatic defragging. However, most people are still wise enough to delay updating until the bugs with drivers and system are ironed out. XP users can still automate the defrag process: you can let Windows' Scheduled Tasks take care of defragmenting your hard drive for you.
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Written by Von
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Monday, 04 June 2007 |
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One part of backing up that some people may overlook is their program settings. You can easily backup your Firefox and Thunderbird settings by backing up certain files. It is also very easy to copy Firefox and Thunderbird settings over to a new computer. Read on for the details. |
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Written by Von
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Monday, 04 June 2007 |
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If your hard drive failed now what would you do? That's right, use the backup hard drive and copy all your data back to a new disk. Backing up your music, pictures, videos, documents, and settings needn't be difficult, or even expensive in software costs. SyncToy can handle everyday backups of your data. It's a powertoy from Microsoft for XP, with a small download at 971KB (about 1.3MB when installed). What's more, its easy to set up, follow this guide to set-up automatic backups of your all important data. |
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Written by Von
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Tuesday, 11 March 2008 |
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Facebook is littered with pointless applications, which make it impossible to see the valuble content on people's profiles (Wall, Pictures, etc.). Using Greasemonkey and 'UnFuck Facebook' in Firefox hides all the meaningless content, and clears up the layout.
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Written by Von
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Monday, 16 July 2007 |
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Devices such as mobile phones, the PSP, or 5th Generation iPod have video playback. However, you need to have your videos in .mp4 or .3gp format to view them. Most people will store their videos in .wmv or .avi (XviD or DivX) format, so they will need to be converted in order to view them on the device. There are lots of software solutions around to do this but I have found that 3GP Converter is adequate, with no install and very little configuration or set up.
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Written by Von
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Wednesday, 06 June 2007 |
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Microsoft Windows comes with a lot of services you probably won't need. Running today's high end games is demanding enough without the games having to compete with Windows components. You can shut down some services permanently but there may be some that are required some of the time.
For example, do you really need that nice Luna theme hogging resources when you're playing a game? If the game is offline only, do you need all your networking services up and running? I will explain how to automate the starting and stopping of services. |
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Written by Von
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Friday, 01 June 2007 |
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I like to use open source programs on Windows as well as Ubuntu, I have replaced almost all my closed source programs. Here is a list of the open source software I use and some details/comparisons with their closed source counterparts: |
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Written by Von
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Saturday, 02 June 2007 |
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If you leave Thunderbird on all day then this 'hack' is for you. The same tweak for Firefox has been widely publicised all over the place. That tweak moves some of Firefox's data to the page file when it is minimized, which reduces the RAM usage. This can be very effective if your system is low on memory. However, it has been noticed that restoring/maximizing Firefox can be slower as it has to fetch the data from the hard disc again. We can also use this tweak in Thunderbird. |
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Written by Von
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Thursday, 14 June 2007 |
 This must be one of the best ways to recycle glass bottles. Janos Marton installed a fully functional PC into a 1.5L whisky bottle. It even runs Windows XP. The full article can be found here. Click more for a bigger picture of the insides of the bottle. |
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