Posted by Brian Cui on May 19, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Seems like everyone is uncovering a new cloud storage service these days, as both Google and Amazon now have their own 5GB of free online storage, accessible from anywhere and a variety of devices. Microsoft’s SkyDrive has been around for much longer, previously offering 25GB of free storage, and now 7GB for new users (existing users can get a free upgrade). The new SkyDrive for Windows desktop application is an alternative to Windows Live Mesh, letting you sync a folder directly to your SkyDrive instead of just having a separate synced storage area. Check after the break to see if you should give it a try on your own.
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Posted by Brian Cui on May 12, 2012 at 6:46 pm
Despite the large move of media from physical platforms to purely digital, we still encounter the CD or DVD format often. Burning your own audio CDs or home DVDs for backing up files or playback on a DVD player is easier than ever, with dozens of free tools available online. The problem with burning onto blank discs is the lack of a proper label: a string of words using a permanent marker isn’t nearly as attractive as a full-color label. HP’s Lightscribe technology offers a solution: inscribe a greyscale label directly onto the disc itself without needing any extra hardware – just a Lightscribe compatible DVD drive.
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Posted by Brian Cui on April 29, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Officialy a Windows exclusive, Nvidia Optimus technology switches between integrated graphics and a dedicated graphics card automatically for increased performance when you need it at the cost of battery life. Nvidia has stated that they currently do not have plans to implement Optimus for Linux, and so installing any Linux distribution on an Optimus enabled laptop results in using just the integrated graphics. The open-source Bumblebee project aims to provide support for Nvidia Optimus on Linux that works on any Optimus enabled laptop, with packages for ArchLinux, Ubuntu, and Mandriva available for download and installation.
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Posted by Brian Cui on April 22, 2012 at 3:45 pm
There’s an endless amount of media files and types, and no operating system or portable media player can playback every codec in the world. You’re bound to encounter a filetype or codec you haven’t seen before when downloading videos, movies, or music, and chances are you won’t be able to play it back either without installing something else. To combat this problem, you can either install a compatible media player, or obtain the required codec. Which of the options are better, and should you just opt for a codec pack instead? Read along as we explain the main differences and discuss which solution should work the best for you when you come across an unknown file format.
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Posted by Brian Cui on April 14, 2012 at 10:37 am
It’s expected of netbooks to sacrifice the DVD drive expected on larger laptops for the sake of portability. Using physical DVDs or CDs is then impossible without an external reader, and those can be expensive and bulky, not really worth it if all your other computers have DVD drives already. Disc image mounting lets you ‘emulate’ having a DVD drive, so you can install software typically only available on a disc without using the disc itself. WinCDEmu is an incredibly simple free way to mount disc image files and create ISO images of discs, integrating seamlessly into Windows almost like the utility is part of the OS itself.
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Posted by Brian Cui on March 31, 2012 at 1:57 pm
Heralded as one of the best free archiving utilities, 7-Zip does just about anything you’d expect from an archive manager. Too bad the icons it comes with aren’t too appealing – the icons for archives themselves look like they were pulled straight out of Windows 98, and the file manager looks bland and doesn’t fit in well with the more modern interfaces that come with today’s operating systems. 7-Zip Theme Manager allows you to replace them with dozens of stylish icons for you to pick from built in, each with a different style, including icons for the file manager itself.
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Posted by Brian Cui on March 10, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Again and again, we’ve recommended clearing out your startup applications for Windows as means of improving boot times. Even after much optimization of startup items, you’re actually still missing out on a few things: context menus, copy hooks, and other things integrated into Explorer, for example, will be applied at startup yet they will not be displayed in a nice list in some Windows configuration panel. Autoruns for Windows provides extra insight on the stuff that runs when you boot up, perfect if you’re looking to shave off a few extra milliseconds here or there for stuff you never use.
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