Posted by Brian Cui on March 18, 2012 at 11:00 pm
It’s that time again, when we have a new wallpaper pack available for download! This time, instead of a set of seemingly random assorted pictures thrown into a pack, there’s a theme! This pack revolves around elements of nature, such as plants and animals, in contrast to that of more abstract and solid modern technology. As always, the wallpapers will work for any operating system and have all been sized to 1024×600 (standard netbook resolution). The download can be found after the break!
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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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Posted by Brian Cui on March 4, 2012 at 10:53 pm
When building or purchasing a computer, you usually don’t pay attention to what the keyboard is like nearly as much as the internal specs. That’s because any physical keyboard can work just fine once you get used to it, even tiny netbook keyboards can become easy to type on over time. So it’s no surprise that theLITE-ON Wired Standard Keyboard is one of the most purchased keyboards on Newegg today, as it’s one of the cheapest keyboards available. Seeing all the 5-egg reviews, I chose to buy one for my desktop to get a feel for it myself.
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Posted by Brian Cui on February 26, 2012 at 1:26 pm
A lot of software these days have portable versions available that don’t require installation and can run standalone. You can put your favorite, customized browser on a flash drive so you can use it anywhere on any computer with the same OS. Since they are completely separate from the operating system, if something goes wrong, your system won’t be affected and you can just re-download the application. They come with some distinct disadvantages, unfortunately – automatic updating is rare, and configuration files can sometimes spew all over the place which can make them hard to uninstall. So is it a better idea to install all your software, or use the portable versions?
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Posted by Brian Cui on February 18, 2012 at 11:14 am
With webapps beginning to replace desktop applications as internet access becomes increasingly available, three of the most popular browsers used today have added new application shortcut features, allowing you to pin a website to the taskbar or start menu while modifying UI elements of the browser so it looks and feels like a desktop application that’s just rendered via the browser. IE and Chrome have a pin to taskbar feature built in, and Firefox requires the use of a plugin or application called Prism. All of the browsers do this in a different way – which one does it the best?
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Posted by Brian Cui on February 11, 2012 at 7:38 pm
By dividing up your hard drive into multiple partitions, you can effectively create multiple ‘virtual’ drives to store your files in. With the introduction of Libraries in Windows 7, the location of your personal files no longer has to sit in Windows’ predefined folders for convenience – now it’s possible to separate system files and personal data onto two separate partitions while being able to access them easily so you don’t get them mixed up. Windows doesn’t have a partition manager built in (or I don’t know of one), so thankfully there’s Paragon Partition Manager 11 Free: a tool that can edit, create, and delete partitions on your hard drive.
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Posted by Brian Cui on January 29, 2012 at 11:15 am
Renaming individual files is pretty simple – right click, select “Rename”, and type in what you want the new name to be – and even modify the file extension if you wish. Dealing with a list of multiple files will take much longer – Windows doesn’t allow you to rename multiple files at once, just one at a time. Bulk Rename Utility is a free tool that allows you to rename a long list of files at once – and modify them by adding or removing strings at virtually any location in the file name, such as applying a numbering system to the prefix of all names.
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