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Tweak Tuesdays: Shutdown Windows XP Quicker
2008-03-18 12:00:00
So here are two quick ways to speed up your Windows XP shutdown and if need be restart time. The first one is do away with that awful Exiting Windows .wav file that plays. It slows down the process considerably and I don't know about you but I am tired of hearing it.   All you need to do to silence this slow down is to click your start button then go to:  settings -> control panel -> Sound,
More About: Windows Xp , Tweak , Shutdown

Mobile Monday: Google Calendar Sync
2008-03-17 12:00:00
Have you seen the above new red letters on you Google Calendar page? Well I have to admit that this was something that has been out for a couple of weeks and I completely missed it. I usually access my Google Calendar from Gmail via Greasemonkey script so I do not always see the new stuff that they post there. None the less as soon as I saw it I had to load it. And I am extremely happy, I can
More About: Mobile , Monday

Firefox Friday: Broadband Speed Test and Diagnostics
2008-03-14 12:00:00
If you are like a lot of folks on the net, you want to know your Internet speed. Well that is where this great Firefox Extension comes in. Broadband Speed Test and Diagnostics is a nice and hand built in Internet speed test and diagnostic. All you do is load it like any other extension and access it via the tools drop down. There you have four choices. You can check your download speed,  your
More About: Friday

Thursday Firefox Special tip: Backing up About:Config settings
2008-03-13 12:00:00
Are you like me and have made several changes to your Firefox registry file or "About:Config " file? Well just like any other changes that take time to do you want to back them up so that you will not have to go thru the trouble of redoing all that work. It is pretty easy and painless thing to do all you need to do is know where to go to get to the file that you need which is call "prefs.js" and
More About: Special , Thursday , Backing

Vista Web Minute: Tips to Improve Windows Vista Performance
2008-03-10 12:00:00
Registry errors often cause several computer-related errors, which may prove fatal to your computer. The registry-related errors occur when it starts expanding due to the accumulation of several unwanted, invalid, outdated, and incorrect entries within it. These entries find a place in the system’s registry and leads to uncontrolled registry growth. This unwanted growth is likely to cause poor
More About: Windows , Performance , Windows Vista , Tips , Vista

Firefox Friday: Mozilla Weave Extension
2008-03-07 13:00:00
Pic: FolkenStardust's As more folks are taking there computer everything with them these days it only makes sense to have a online source to consolidate your information. I have for the past yearbeen using Google's Browser Sync. for Firefox , which has worked out okay but left more to be desired. I did not like the fact that half the time when I would restart my Firefox that I wouldbe prompted to
More About: Mozilla , Friday , Extension , Weave

Web Wednesday: Radio-Locator
2008-03-05 13:00:00
Who needs to find a radio station these days with them being streamed online or via satellite you ask? Well some of us folks do not yet have satellite radio or HD radios and this handy little site will locate any radio station in a given area by several different ways. It is amazing how many things can be singled out and found online like this. Next week I will look at a site that can show you
More About: Radio , Wednesday

Web Minute: Handy Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts
2008-03-04 17:00:00
I guess I am a real dummy because of all the different operating systems and applications that I have used over the years with keyboard shortcuts it never dawned on me that Firefox had some really useful ones. The one that I have gripped about internally to myself over and over again is to be able to move from tab to tab in Firefox from the key board. Well I just happened to stumble across an
More About: Shortcuts , Keyboard , Handy , Minute

Tweak Tuesdays: Speedup Firefox Page Loads
2008-03-04 13:00:00
In previous posting's I have mentioned several ways that you can tweak Firefox to speed it up. Now there are all kinds of different off the shelf so to speak applications that will make these tweaks for you without you having to even tinker with the inner workings of Firefox. Those are good and I have seen significant browsing speed from my previous tweaks but the one that I want to tell you
More About: Page , Speedup , Tweak

Mobile Monday: Stompbox make your vehicle a mobile access point
2008-03-03 13:00:00
On this weeks Mobile Monday I saw the perfect item referenced on a Systm episode, If you have never watched Systm then I encourage you to take a look. One of the best things is that they now feature Patrick Norton from the old Tech TV. So how do you make your vehicle a mobile Internet access point? Well there are now a few custom made ways to do this that can be bought ready made for your
More About: Vehicle , Access , Make , Point

Web Minute: Gmail Advance Filter for SPAM
2008-02-29 20:08:00
Upon reading Amit's Digital Inspiration recent blog post about Gmail Plus I was struck with what he talks about being a useful Gmail trick of adding a "+LABEL" after your beginning email when you sign up for something online in order to track and handle SPAM. For example I could use this email address to signup for Digital Inspirations news letter and then setup a filter to look for that
More About: Spam , Filter , Minute

Web Minute: Make Gmail work like Outlook
2008-02-29 05:55:00
Are you like me you in that you really miss some of the natural ability of MS Outlook to keep you organized throughout your day but you are on the go or you don't have a MS Exchange server at your small business or at home? You can make yourself a nice portable office suite for email and productivity. I have used the following: Portable Firefox 3 beta 3 from Portableapps.com Gmail and Google
More About: Work , Make , Minute

Tweak Tuesdays: Multiple hardware profiles to test services settings from l
2008-02-26 18:21:00
If you do not know what Windows Services are please be careful in trying anything described below. It has long been the opinion of most savvy Windows XP users that when Windows starts up there are a lot of services running in the background that are just not necessary. The trick is in knowing which ones you can completely disable or simply change from their "Automatic" setting to "Manual". I am
More About: Hardware , Profiles , Test , Tweak

Web Minute: Adobe Flash Player Version Detector
2008-02-25 22:00:00
Ever wanted to know exactly which version of Adobe Flash Player you have installed on your PC? Well since I use a variety of different versions of browsers recently I found myself wanting to find an answer to this question. Simply click on the picture above orHERE and you will quickly know.
More About: Flash Player , Adobe Flash

Download of the Day: Taskbar Shuffle
2008-02-25 15:00:00
Today's download of the day is one that I have been looking for a long time. I like to keep my icons on the taskbar in a certain order especially when I am at work. I know this sounds silly but it keeps my workflow smoother if I have them setup from left to right in the order that I would open them first thing in the morning and do my daily work. I do from time to time have windows close
More About: Download , Shuffle

Mobile Monday's: Windows Skydrive 5Gigs and still climbing
2008-02-25 13:00:00
Today's quick article is on Microsoft's Skydrive. As part of our on-going Mobile Monday's posts this is another great online application that Microsoft has made available to users for free. By signing up to this service you can share Documents, Music, Pictures & Videos with friends and loved ones. One current drawback is the 50Mb size limit to each file. Sure you can have up to 5 Gigs worth of
More About: Windows , Climbing

Microsoft Weekend Minute: Vista SP1 compatibility problems
2008-02-23 13:00:00
Windows Vista SP1 is almost out but there will be some problems. Some security programs such as Zone Alarm Suite 7.1, Trend Micro Internet Security 2008 and BitDefender 1.0 will be blocked from even starting up once you install Windows Vista SP1. There is also at this point a problem with Windows Vista machines going into an endless cycle of boots and reboots. The fix is to remove a previous
More About: Microsoft , Weekend , Problems , Minute

Freeware Friday: DriverMax a great tool for OS reinstalls
2008-02-22 19:40:00
Any time that I have to do a re-install of Windows XP one of the major slowdowns that I face is making sure that I am able to locate all the drivers that I need to make everything work correctly. For instance for one of my motherboards require at least 4 separate drivers to be installed in order for the Ethernet, north bridge and sound card to name a few to be able to work. Well with today's
More About: Great , Tool , Freeware , Friday

Web Wednesday: Draft.Blogger.com
2008-02-20 21:17:00
  This Web Wednesday I am going to write about an option that I was not even aware existed until yesterday. Even though I have registered my domain name "Tech-Weekly" and run a simple tech web page currently I still rely on Google's Blogger to host my site. And one of the biggest gripes that I have had for awhile is that you cannot do any type of future posting via Blogger. I had to resort to
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Tweak Tuesdays: Add My Computer as a Toolbar
2008-02-19 13:00:00
Ever have your desktop full of open windows and not want to mess with going to the "Start" button to open you "My Computer " to access something or eve want to mess with going to your desktop to get to the "My Computer" button. Say you have several hard drives or partitions and you need to quickly open something on one of them or like in my case I like to have a quick way to jump to the files on
More About: Toolbar , Tweak

Mobile Monday's: Foldershare a great application for the mobile warrior
2008-02-18 22:31:00
Welcome to Mobile Monday's here at Tech-Weekly. As more and more folks are starting to do the bulk of there computing either via laptop, handheld or by taking what they need with them loaded on their thumb drives. You are see less and less set one computer to a person. The application that I am going to talk about today is Foldershare. Up until last week I had not ever heard of this application
More About: Great , Application , Warrior

Why you should backup your registry
2008-02-08 02:02:00
Why You Should Backup Your Registry The registry is an important component of your Windows operating system, and may get corrupted due to unwanted storage of inaccurate or malicious registry keys. If you want to prevent this damage to your system, you must safeguard the registry by using a reliable registry cleaning tool. As automatic registry backup is not possible in Windows Vista, you may have to opt for a manual backup of your system’s registry. Let’s analyze the options, which would allow you to backup the Windows registry in Windows Vista: Registry Editor Tool You can use the Registry Editor tool to perform manual edits to your Windows registry. The tool enables you to make a backup of a part as well as the entire registry. You need to perform the following steps to back up the Windows Vista registry using a Registry Editor tool: Select the Run command from the Start menu and type regedit, and then press Enter. Click the File menu and select Export to display the File na...

Download of the Day: Open recently closed applications with GoneIn60s
2008-02-06 20:07:00
I know that I have this happen alot. I will out of habit start clicking "X's" to close programs because my desktop and taskbar are getting to full. Or I am trying to re-center my thoughts and get rid of some clutter on my screen. And all of the sudden I have closed a program that I wanted to keep open either because I was still working on it or had not saved etc... With today's find for Download of the day you can save yourself and your work. With GoneIn60s even when you click to close an application it delays its shutdown. It will hide the application from view as though it has closed but for up to 60 seconds you can right click on the lightening icon in the system tray, select the closed application and it will spring right back open. This program is a must have if you are like me and have fingers that are faster than you sometimes think.
More About: Applications , Open , Recently , Closed

It's Cables That Keep the Internet Connected
2008-02-04 11:08:00
  What do you see in the picture above? Look's like a bunch of seaweed and flotsam you say? Well believe it or not this is a picture of a cable landing site. A submarine communications cable specifically. Well I must admit prior to this week I had never heard of such a thing really. Of course I guess at one time or another I had heard of a trans-atlantic cable such as ones used for phone communications and such but I guess a bit naively I had thought in this day and age of the global Internet that such cables were a back-up and not something used heavily each day. Boy was I wrong. In the past weekly several of these many submarine cables have been torn or disabled at sea effectively hindering a lot of Asia and the Middle East's ability to communicate both by phone and via the Internet. If you click the picture to the left you will see that the world is literally interconnected with these cables. Some of them spanning many 10's of thousands of miles. While like the rest of ...
More About: Cables , The Internet , Connected

Get Windows XP SP3 now
2008-01-31 22:26:00
Officially Microsoft should be releasing the Windows XP SP3 soon. However, if you would rather not wait and get a taste of it early you can do the following: Here is how you can download SP3 straight from Microsoft. Follow the instructions carefully and you’ll be running Windows XP SP3 in no time.     Download this file ( WindowsXPSP3Hack.cmd ). Once you have downloaded the file, login as administrator and run the file by double clicking it. Wait for the Confirmation Message on screen. The Above file adds a few entries to the Windows Registry that makes Microsoft think that you are a part of the Private beta program. Check for new updates on Windows Update. You should now see Windows XP SP3 listed in the available updates. Download and install it. Reboot whenever necessary. A word of caution that this is for the Release Candidate version of the Service Pack so all the bugs are not even close to being worked out of it yet. When I installed it I ran into problems at...
More About: Windows Xp

Block Windows XP SP3 or Windows Vista SP1 from installing
2008-01-23 01:00:00
That's right Windows XP SP3 is just around the corner following hot on its heals is Windows Vista SP1. But what if you are happy with you current window setup and do not want these SP's to install how do you stop them? One way would be to download the command line program from Microsoft and muddle your way thru getting it to stop these updates. Another way would be to make the registry changes yourself: Update the registry manually. To do this you simply need to go to this key: HKLMSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftWindowsWindo wsUpdate Create a new DWORD value named DoNotAllowSP and set it to 1 (To disable the SP install), or 0 (To allow the SP install) Or you could download from one of my favorite sites www.intelliadmin.com their free GUI Tool shown below.  
More About: Windows Xp , Block

Firefox: Get rid of unwanted menu titles
2008-01-22 23:00:00
Want to cleanup your Firefox browser a little? Maybe get rid of some of the menu headers that you don't user or possibly all of them? Well it is quick and easy to do. To get rid of say "Tools" and the "Help" menu items you would need to find the file userChrome.css. It will be located in Firefox's folder under the data and then the profile folder. All you need to do is right click on it and chose "EDIT" and add the following to the bottom of the file and save it. /* Remove the Help and Tools menus */ menu[label="Tools"], menu[label="Help"] { display: none !important; } You could add all of the menu items if you wanted to or only the "Help" item. Its up to you.
More About: Menu , Titles

MS Office 2007: How to determine what version you have
2008-01-22 20:34:00
If you are like me you want to be able to click and tell which version your Office suite is at a glance. With previous versions of MS Office all you had to do was click on the "Help" button and chose "About" and it would tell you what version of Office you were currently using. Now with Office 2007 it is not nearly that easy. This might seem like a simple thing but after recently install Office 2007 SP1. I was not sure whether the update had installed and wanted to confirm it.   Here is how you can check this for Office 2007. First click on the "Office" icon in the top left corner where you will see a drop down like the one below. In this instance I have Excel open so I want to choose the "Excel Options" button and left click it. From there you will want to chose the "Resources" button and to the right you will have information on what version the application is.
More About: Version , Ms Office

Ready or not here comes IE7
2008-01-22 13:00:00
Well if you are not currently using IE7 and still happy with Internet Explorer 6 take note. The IE7 upgrade scheduled to roll out via WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on Feb. 12 was announced last October, when Microsoft said it would no longer require users to prove they owned a legitimate copy of Windows XP before they were allowed to download the newer browser. Microsoft explained that the move was prompted by security concerns.. If you are a home computer user and have your Windows setup to auto-update you will need to either edit your registry so that it does not implement the auto-update of IE7. You can do that by doing the following: Create a registry key that will block the install. It is located under this key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftIntern et ExplorerSetup7.0 The key name is: DoNotAllowIE70 Setting this to 1 blocks the install, setting to 0 allows the install. Also Microsoft has a IE 7 blocking tool. It can be downloaded from here at Microsoft's web...
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Editorial: Bionic Eye or Ultimate Gaming Accessory
2008-01-22 01:00:00
Most of us may be familiar with the Bionic man or the new Bionic woman. Who had parts of their bodies replaced with enhanced electronic and mechanical parts after severe injuries. Well the folks at Washington University have gotten one step closer to making one of those replacements a reality. On January 17th they announced a prototype device that contains an electric circuit as well as a red light-emitting diode for display, though it does not yet light up. They are currently struggling with materials that can be used for this that will be safe to use in the body, similar to that which are used for current contact lenses. "Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," says Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. The researchers plan to eventually power the lenses using a combination of radio frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens according to Parviz. The large por...
More About: Gaming , Editorial , Accessory , Ultimate