You just signed up for this cool forum where everyone is having a great signature and you desperately need one as well. My advice would be to visit the coolsig website and take a look at their signature archive. Categories include People and Society, Oddballs, Humor and Geeky Signatures.
Every passing day makes it more likely that the registry file contains obsolete entries that might make your system unstable. They could also slow down your system. It is a good idea to check obsolete entries in your registry from time to time and remove them to keep the unnecessary entries to a minimum.
I thought this was kind of a joke when I read this story a few minutes ago. We read about Will who is recieving a newsletter from paypal although he never dealt with them whatsoever. He looks for a way to unsubscribe and finds no other than to log into his account (which he does not have of course.)
The question that always comes up when I´am talking about the benefits of download managers is why would someone need to use them at all. This can´t be answered in a hurry but my initial response is always the same. First, download managers are great time safers if you download many files from a server that allows only a few connections from the same IP. It´s tiresome to wait until one download is finished to start the next.
This extension is a great time safer. Whenever I wanted to upload an image to add into my article I had to fire up an external ftp client and use it to upload the image to my ftp space. This extension adds a full features ftp client to firefox, this means you can add an unlimited number of ftp hosts, transfer / delete / rename files, set passive mode and much more.
Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?
This message pop ups at the end and immediatly gets the focus, even if you are in a game or watching a fullscreen movie. You have the option to restart now or later. The first would result in an immediate reboot while the second would nag you again in 10 minutes. This will be annoying if you can´t reboot your computer at that time.
I´am not using bittorrent that often anymore but it is still a great way of transfering large files. You see less complaints of people about low download speeds but certainly there are some that are having troubles downloading at a great speed. This can be of course torrent related, if you don´t have many seeders or only seeders with low upload speeds you will experience a slow download.
What´s running 2.2. gives you an insight look into what is running on your system. It is completly free to use for non commercial usage and includes information about processes, services, modules, connections, drivers, startup and system. You can control everything with what´s running, e.g. start and stop services and processes.
This guide might be useful for you if you have some avi / divx / xvid movie files and want to watch them on the big television screen. I don´t like watching long movies on the computer, can´t exactly describe why but it feels out of place somehow. A nice way to watch those movies on the television screen is to convert the formats to DVD.
I once had the problem that I changed some settings in windows which disabled my automatic login into windows xp. I was prompted to enter my login details and could not remember them at all. The following method could be working in this and similar cases. You could try using the default Administrator login and leave the password blank. This should work for every computer where the admin password has not been changed.
Many of you might know the discountinued freeware microsoft bootvis, for those who do not. Bootvis analyses the boot process and measures the startup time from cold boot, hibernate and standby. After analysing the startup process it will optimise it so that boot times of one or more minutes are a thing of the past. It´s a great tool if you have a computer that is slowly booting into windows xp.
The free transparent customizable calendar called Rainlendar is a great addition to every windows system. Rainlendar is a lightweight open source application which supports lots of languages (must be 30+). It displays three independent transparent windows on your desktop, the calendar showing the actual month, a todo list and an events list. You can add or edit entries by doubleclicking the window.
It is a good idea to make sure that no one is able to find and use private files on your computer against you. I can think of several reasons why it is wise to secure private files. If you are sharing a computer you have multiple users working with it, would not it be embarrassing if your mother (wife, sister, girlfriend..) found your hidden adult picture stash ? A thief would be more than happy to use all the personal information (login details to sites like paypal or ebay for example) to make some extra bucks.
Great list of the top 100 network security tools voted by 3243 users of the nmap-hackers mailing list. Every tool mentioned has a description, a homepage link to the developers, icons that tell you if it works on your system and if it costs money. All utilities belong to a category, you have the option to display every category. (like vulnerability scanners)
Media Coder is a free audio and video transcoder that is able to convert among many audio and video compression formats supporting on the fly batch encoding. The freeware comes with build in codec, filter and media player support making it an ideal converter for files that you can´t play on your system because of missing codecs. It supports a wide range of audio and video formats. Among them are:
What´s an oxymoron again ? Who or what is quixotic ? You might find the Dictionary Tooltip Extension for Firefox useful if you happen to stumble upon words that you have never heard before (or know but have no definition at hand).
Fabchannel is offering a big online archive of concerts that took place either in Paradiso or Melkwegs. Both of which seem to be dutch clubs / concert halls. The archive consists of more than 50 concerts covering genres like Hip Hop, Rock, Metal and Pop. You are able to watch concerts of bands like Simple Minds, The Gathering and Wir sind Helden for instance.
The Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet is a great way to learn more about the firefox browser. New users will find this one page firefox reference useful because it lists all those little tips and workarounds that speed up your firefox workflow.
I love remakes, especially when they are fan made and not a companys effort to make easy money with a well known franchise. I never played the original Kings Quest series (was more into Leisure Suit Larry at that time) but enjoyed the remakes that have been released so far. If you did not know, there are also remakes of Kings Quest 1 and Kings Quest 2 availabe at the website of ADG Interactive. (free of course)
Adobe Reader is really slow when it starts. Did you ever try to view a pdf document that was available on the web ? The reader tends to load very slowly although the document itself might be only a few hundred kilobytes. This is bothering me and I suppose it´s bothing a lot of people who are using the Adobe Reader to view pdf files.
Xpy is a great little freeware application that lets you change windows xp settings with ease. The normal way of changing items would be to use a registry editor, search for the relevant key and change the value of that key. Xpy aids you by offering options to change many settings with a simple click of the mouse button.
There have been lots of articles lately that explain how to secure a wireless network. Most of this articles contain at least one measure that is not enhancing security at all. This does not neccessarily mean that it is lowering the security on the other hand though. Let us take a look at the six dumbest ways to secure a Wirelss Lan.
The Music Industry (from now on only called MI) is putting a lot of pressure on the consumers. They release copy protected media but fail to realise that this is a punishment for the people who buy music. Even if you don´t download music from the internet you most likely know sources where to get that music for free, without DRM and in high quality. The commercial pirates as well don´t care about copy protection.
Everyone knows how to send and recieve emails but only a few understand the concept behind the process. Emails are normally not send directly from your machine to the recipient. Mailservers that are setup by your ISP for instance process incoming emails and send them on their way. This information is stored in the headers of the email. Understanding email headers helps you identify spam directed at you.
Yesterday we witnessed the release of Nexuiz, an incredible freeware online shooter. Today it´s a free survival game that looks and plays a lot like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Penumbra sets you on a quest to find out more about your father who bequeathed you a mysterious book. Graphics and gameplay is great for a freeware game, make sure you grab your copy from the developers homepage.
Nexuiz is a free online shooter developed by Alientrap. A new version of the shooter has been released today and is available as a download (around 200 megabytes) from the developers homepage. The game Nexuiz is a classic Deathmatch Shooter like Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament. Chose to play different maps, select different weapons to frag your opponents. Graphics are great for a free game.
It is sometimes a good idea to keep a local copy of a website on your hard drive. A reason could be that you fear the website will be taken offline in the near future and you want to save valuable information. Another one could be that you want to save it on a computer that does not have internet access all the time.
Microsoft released a pdf file called MSRT - Progress Made Lessons Learned yesterday which provides an analysis of the data that the program reported when scanning computers. The tool itself was executed more than 2.7 billion times on at least 270 million unique computers since January 13th, 2005. The tool has removed more than 16 million instances of malicious software which means that on average every 311th computer was infected.
Microsoft released a beta version of their upcoming Microsoft Vista operating systems a few days ago. I don´t think it´s wise to install a beta version of a microsoft os as your main operating system:dual booting is the solution. You want to experience Vista and still be able to return to XP or whatever other operating system you are using ? Fine, follow this easy to understand guide to dual booting.
Safe XP which is developed by Theorica Software is a freeware application for Microsofts Windows XP operating system. It requires no installation at all and is ready to run once you unpacked it into a directory of your choice. The software makes it easy to change some security related settings of the following elements: Services, TCP & Ip and Netbios, Internet Explorer 6, Media Player, MS Office XP & 2003, Start Menu, Windows Messenger and Network.
Extended Statusbar is another useful firefox extension which adds functionality to firefox. It displays additional information about the website that is currently loaded. Those information include the overall load time of the website, the amount of bytes that have been downloaded, the speed that you downloaded those bytes, the number of loaded images and finally the percentage that the site is loaded.
It is a well know fact that files that are deleted by normal means can be recovered with ease using so called file recovery utilities. This might not be a problem for most users but it surely is not nice if you sell a used computer and someone discovers private pictures, account data and the like on the formatted hard drive.
Microsoft introduced Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) just a month ago to Windows XP users. Once installed it checks if the running Windows XP version is genuine. If it´s not the it´s showing annonying popup messages. It´s Microsofts decision that only popups are showing, they could easily change this to force a purchase for example at a later point.
Firefox can save your login details to websites, online banking or forums with ease. The next time you enter the same website it will autofill the details and you simply have to confirm the details to sign in. This is convenient of course and great for the lazy ones. The paranoid ones will most likely be unconvienced by this because it´s easy to display the password in plain text.
The football worldcup is starting today and it surely is going to be the biggest sports event of this year. We all know that some companies are going to stream the worldcup live on the internet for their countrymen. If you are not that tech savy and still want to view the cup online your best bet is to download a software called pplive. I suggest the stable version but experienced users could use the beta version as well.
If you are crazy enough to try a beta version of Microsofts upcoming operating system you might want to head straight over to microsofts vista website and download a version for either 32-bit or 64-bit. You will need a Microsoft Live account to download windows vista. You can also order a dvd that will be send right to your home.
I sometimes stick lots of post-its on my monitor that remind me of upcoming important tasks. This is looking rather messy and I was looking for an alternative. A note is that alternative. The freeware lets you add post-it like notes right to your desktop. You are free to chose a color for the note, setup an alarm with sound or change the font of the note. You are able to change almost everything The notes can be uploaded to a database to use them from more than one computer. (for example home and office pc)
Visual Task Tips is another little freeware application for windows xp which displays a preview image if you move your mouse over a folder in the taskbar. Simply download the 90K file from the developers homepage. After installation you have the option to run it and add it to your windows startup files. To disable it again you start it again and it asks you if you want to disable it.
Nettools is a small freeware utility that plays a sound whenever a website that you specified changes its contents. All observered websites are also cached on your local hard drive. The tool has two other features: A web search option and a dictionary lookup. Great tool, really tiny (180k). Grab it while it´s hot.
SQL injection is a security vulnerability that occurs in the database layer of an application. Its source is the incorrect escaping of dynamically-generated string literals embedded in SQL statements. It is in fact an instance of a more general class of vulnerabilities that can occur whenever one programming or scripting language is embedded inside another.
