Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

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CCleaner AKA Crap Cleaner

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

One of the biggest slow downs for computers is the crap that you accumulate while just browsing the web.

CCleaner combines a system cleaner that removes unused and temporary files from your system and also a fully featured registry cleaner.

I have been using CCleaner for 6 years or more and it’s the second thing I install after a new install of windows. The first being Firefox. Not only does CCleaner, clean up your temporary internet files, cookies, history, recently typed URLs, Index.dat files, last download location there is more but I am feeling a bit lazy…


CCleaner also comes with a registry scanner that will fix and or remove files that are no longer being used as well as removing left over application paths from removed programs.

It also comes with a program uninstaller, while I recommend using revo’s uninstaller this program is better than the standard windows uninstaller

CCleaner is a user friendly application that allows you to make a back up before you remove any files in case you are unsure about a certain file. This way if something does go wrong you can easily return your computer back to the state it was in before running the Cleaner. I have never had to do this however it is nice that it is there.

Download CCleaner from here

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Building a Media Center for under $ 400.00

Monday, May 25th, 2009

If you have a place to hide your computer out of site, this project will work for you. If you don’t , the project will still work however you will have to spend a little more money than $400 dollars. As the cost of the case runs up the build.

I started out with a basic case from New Egg HEC 6C28BB8S Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case for $39.00.

Next up is the power supply, since I do not plan to go nuts with the system, I can afford to go with a small unit, thus saving on the cost. The unit I will go with is the hec HP585D RETAIL 585W ATX12V Power Supply cost is only $29.00

For the motherboard I went with the ASUS M3A76-CM AM2+/AM2 AMD 760G uATX AMD Motherboard, as I have used ASUS in the past, and have never had any problems both with the boards as well as the customer service. Motherboard is only $64.99, I could have gone with a cheaper one or spent a lot more money on a better one, but considering what this board has, and what I intend to do with it, this mades a good fit.It has built in ATI 3000 video card, supports up to 8 gigs of ram DDR2 1066 and has 8 audio channels. To understand why that’s important read ANandTech’s Understanding 8-channel LPCM over HDMI: Why it Matters and Who Supports it

For the processor I picked the AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 Brisbane 2.6GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core for $52.99. Nothing to high tech, but it will have plenty of power to perform as a media center.

Ram is next up on my list and with the prices dropping it made it a very easy to get 4 gigs of DDR2 1066 Corsair for $87.00, if need be I can upgrade latter.

Hard drives are another thing that has really dropped in price, I went with the Samsung spinpoint F1 1TB 7200 RPM SATA cost was only $94.00

Since the CPU needs a cooling fan I went with the basic Cooler Master for $8.99

For the DVD-R I went with the Samsung for $23.99

All of the above items are priced from New Egg, since I believe if you can get it all shipped by the same store at the same time it saves you money, even if you can find some parts a little cheaper at another store. I do not work for New Egg but I have found they do have some of the best prices around..

For the keyboard I went with the BTC wireless keyboard that has a dual mode joystick mouse built in. You can find them at Amazon for $29.99 however I did find a refurbished one at Geeks.com for $14.99 and since New Egg did not carry them, I was going to have to pay for shipping so I shopped around for the best price :)

For the monitor cable, since most new TV’s have a plug for a monitor cable and you want to be able to place the Case out of the way and hopefully out of site, I will use a 10′extension cable attached to a normal 6′ monitor cable. Price at Geeks.com is $10.99.

Keep in mind since this unit is going to be stored out of sight I also order a 16′ USB extension cable for $7.99.

The last item before we talk about software is the wire for your sound, the cheapest way to do this is going directly from the computer to the back of the TV.Cost for the cable is $3.99.

Total cost for hardware = $413.00 very close to my goal of $400.00 Not bad at all. Keep in mind I did not order a TV turner for the card since my goal is to watch TV shows and not record them. Since by making this, I will be able to pick when I watch something. Prime example is the show 24, love the show, but I am not always near a TV when it’s on. Instead of having to record it, I can wait till the next day and it will be on line, and free for me to legally watch it.

Now the only down side with this is my local news and sports. While some sport shows are shown on line, Football is not, or if it is I have not been able to find the games live. Good news is that with the HD channels, I can still catch the local news and sports just by adding a HD antenna.

For Software, I am using an extra copy of Windows Vista since Netflicks and Microsoft just singed a deal allowing you to have on demand with Vista Media Player, not sure why they did not do so for XP. For those who are comfortable using Linux , you know that you have a great OS that has many types of Media players for you to pick from.

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How to burn dvd movies

Monday, May 4th, 2009

How to burn dvd movies – learn how to burn original dvd movies to a blank writeable dvd

Author: Elizabeth Hind

I have a vast collection of dvd movies and wanted to know how to burn dvd movies. Everytime I put one of my original dvds into the computers dvd drive and try to copy it onto my hard drive it kept coming up with an encryption error.

I decided to go online and find a solution to the problem. I need to find out how to burn dvd movies that I owned because my kids kept scratching the originals or damaging them and made them unwatchable.

There is nothing worse than sitting down to watch your favorite movie and all you see is a jumping disc with little bits of sound that sounds as if you are listening to someone on a mobile with a bad reception.

I eventually found some software called Eazy Backup Wizard. It said that it would be able to decrypt any DVD and copy the movie onto my hard drive and then it would burn the movie to a blank rewriteable disc. I got this software at a special offer price of $29. It usually retails for $59

I downloaded the software and installed it on my pc. It fired up and asked me to put the disc in the drive. As soon as the disc loaded the software listed all the files on the disc. 1 more click and it was copying the files to my pc.

1 more click and it was now burning the movie to a blank disc. The software worked perfectly. It was $29 well spent as my kids have ruined 4 of my favorite movies and now I won’t have to shell out for dvds that I already had. At least now I know how to burn dvd movies.

About the Author:

If you want to know how to burn dvd movies then buy this software it will do it all for you. Follow the link below and you can buy the software yourself for the special price of $29 How to Burn Dvd Movies

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – how to burn dvd movies – learn how to burn original dvd movies to a blank writeable dvd

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Tim Fehlman list of 24 Open source Media Centers

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

I have not posted much on software, since I seem to be caught up with politics for some odd reason. I have been watching Daily Cup of Tech’s 24/24 post on open source media Centers. Below you can see some of the detail Tim Fehlman went into on these programs. If your into open source (free) programs and are looking for a good media play check out Tim Fehlman list of 24.

Daily Cup of Tech
Plex Media Center for OS X

Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing user interface that provides instant access to your media. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats as well as online streaming audio and video. The real power of Plex is found in its library features: Organize your media into versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins.

Remedie

Remedie is a perl based media center application with pluggable architecture. You can subscribe to videocast feeds, watch local folder with media files and keep track of your favorite video sites like YouTube, Nico Nico Douga or Hulu. See Supported Sites for details. It runs as a web server so you can use your favorite browser (Firefox, Safari) to browse your video collection, playback videos using your favorite player. If you’re familiar with Plagger, Remedie is a fork of Plagger, optimized for media downloading and viewing, and comes with an HTTP web server with JSON APIs and web-based frontend built with jQuery and CSS.

These are just 2 of the 24 that I grabbed at random.

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Tutzor Photoshop Tutorials

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

I enjoy playing around with photoshop, I am always looking for new sites that offer tutorials that are easy enough for me to follow along. Tutzor is one site that I just found and must say so far I am loving it. They have tutorials for just about all types of projects.
Some of the projects are a little advanced but if you follow along just about anyone can do it. Really nice thing about these tutorials is that you can ask questions and get answers pretty quick.

If your looking to learn some new things with photoshop head over to Tutzor

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6 tips to protect yourself from virus and spyware

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

1. Be wary of unexpected IM messages and emails urging you to open or run an attachment or download
2. Run up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spyware software with behavioural protection, Keep it running in the background at all times.
3. Ensure you run Smart Updates and Microsoft updates regularly.
4. If you are asked to update to a new version of a flash player or any other program go to producers’ website and download the update directly from it.
5. Organisations usually contact you by phone or mail, so when you get an email call them back instead of clicking on any links or attachments.
6. Never let your guard down, it’s better to be too cautious then sorry.

Those tips are from PC Tools. I recommend that you all sign up for their newsletter or another security software company’s newsletter. The good ones come out once a month and have the latest threats as well as some tips to avoid them. You can sign up for PC Tools Newsletter by visiting their site PC Tools

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Around the web

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Import Microsoft Access Data Into Excel
Microsoft Access is a great place to store and organize data into tables, and creating queries to generate specific reports. Excel simplifies the process of presenting the data into single worksheets. Here we will show the steps to import an Access table into Excel.
Open up a new or existing Excel worksheet that you want to add the data to and click Data \ Get External Data \ From Access.
Full Article

Microsoft releases security bulletins once a month that outline new security updates and patches for Microsoft products. The security updates for April 2009 list a total of eight vulnerabilities for various Microsoft applications including Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Six of the eight patches affect various Microsoft operating systems. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 face three critical, two important and one moderate security vulnerability while Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 bring it to two critical, one important and one moderate vulnerability. Below is a list of links that point to all eight Microsoft Security Bulletins. These bulletins contain extensive information about the vulnerabilities including the systems affected.

Read full update at Ghacks

The eBay auction platform is still the most popular online auction system despite its decline from a friendly neighborhood auction site to a site driven by commercial auctions. If users think online auctions they tend to think eBay.

Auctions can be monitored on the eBay website easily with the disadvantage that changes are only reported to the user per email sporadically or after logging into the ebay site. Software programs that monitor eBay auctions offer the advantage that the information are available in realtime on the computer desktop without having to access the eBay website.Another Good article from Ghacks

Rearrange Shuffle Opened Applications In Windows Taskbar By default windows does not allow to opened applications and windows listed in taskbar to rearrange and shuffle to change the position. But there is a free application named taskbar shuffle which lets you reorder the taskbar items. Taskix is another free application which solves the same purpose of moving taskbar opened items, allows you to reorder the taskbar tabs and change their positions in taskbar.More info at Technix Update

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Everything local search engine

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Everything is a local search engine. It helps you locate files and directories based on their filenames. You can’t use Everything to search based on file contents, but it more than makes up for this shortcoming with the speed it demonstrates. The secret is that it automatically indexes all the files and directories on your system, so that when it’s time to search for something, you’ve already got a database of the contents of your hard drive, so you’re just looking things up, rather than having to run through your entire directory structure at search time. It supports wildcards and regular expressions, so you can make your search queries very specific when you enter them.

Everything is a Windows application. It runs under Windows 2000 and later, and will only index local NTFS volumes—no FAT volumes, no network drives.
I have been using Everything for awhile now, and love it. I have 4 hard drives on my main computer and it makes finding files a breeze.
You can download Everything
If your looking for other great free software check out Free Download a Day

WordPress Tags: engine,files,contents,system,database,directory,expressions,index,computer

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Autoruns

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

One of the hardest things a new computer user or a person who has limited knowledge of computers is knowing what is running at start up. Autoruns is a pretty simple program that shows you what’s there. Keep in mind that a lot of programs like to add themselves to auto start up at your system boot.

From the developers site; Autoruns shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows Me and XP. Autoruns’ Hide Signed Microsoft Entries option helps you to zoom in on third-party auto-starting images that have been added to your system and it has support for looking at the auto-starting images configured for other accounts configured on a system. Also included in the download package is a command-line equivalent that can output in CSV format, Autorunsc.

You can download it here Autoruns

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PortableApps Suite

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

From download site PortableApps Suite™ is a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, sudoku game, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably. Just drop it on your portable device and you´re ready to go. All versions of the PortableApps Suite include the integrated PortableApps Menu and the PortableApps Backup utility along with a set of custom icons, an autoplay configuration, folders and a quick start shortcut. Features: * Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition (web browser) * Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition (email) * Mozilla Sunbird, Portable Edition (calendar/tasks) * ClamWin Portable (antivirus) * Pidgin Portable (instant messaging) * Sumatra PDF Portable (PDF reader * KeePass Password Safe Portable (password manager) * Sudoku Portable (game) * Mines-Perfect Portable (game) * CoolPlayer+ Portable (audio player) * OpenOffice.org Portable* (office suite) o Writer (word processor) o Calc (spreadsheet) o Impress (presentations) o Base (database utility) o Draw (drawing) All runs comfortably from a 512MB drive.

I love this suite since it gives you everything you need and you can carry it on a USB drive. Portable Apps download

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