Need a stopwatch because you want to know how long it takes to write an article, signup at an online service, write an email or load a certain website with your favorite web browser? The stopwatch should also be free, portable and absolutely lightweight? Then Only Stop Watch might be the application that you have been looking for. The 13 Kilobyte program can be run from any location after it is unpacked, ideal for mobile usage especially since it does not use lots of storage space.

The program will display the stopwatch window after startup. First start might be a bit confusing as the program starts to count right away. The F5 key on the keyboard will stop the count. Another press on the same button will start a new countdown while F6 will continue where the last count was stopped.

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Tags: portable software, stop watch, stopwatch, stopwatch program, windows software
Categories: Windows, software

Flickr is probably the most popular photo hosting website on the Internet in these days. It is therefor no surprise that many users like to view and download photos that are hosted on Flickr and even less surprisingly that many application developers have created browser add-ons, standalone applications, userscripts and other kinds of applications to view and download Flickr photos comfortably.

ZFlick is just one of those applications. It has been designed for Adobe Air and can be executed from the local computer system after startup. The interface displays just a search form at the beginning which can be used to initiate a search for photos at Flickr.

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Tags: adobe air, flickr, flickr photos, photos, zflick
Categories: Mac, Windows, software

If you have installed Windows 7 on a computer system that was running a different operating system before chance is that you now see that other operating system in the boot menu during startup. There is not really a need for this unless you decided to go with a dual-boot system for some time. Users who completely switched to Windows 7 might want to remove the old operating system from appearing in the Windows 7 boot menu to speed up boot time and avoid possible mistakes like booting into the wrong operating system.

Windows 7 users who want to remove, edit or add entries to the Windows 7 boot menu have two basic options. The first is available in form of the Msconfig utility that ships with every version of Windows 7. Msconfig might help but it can happen that it is not displaying the other operating systems as was the case with our Windows 7 Pro test system which we upgraded from Windows XP Pro.

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Tags: boot manager, boot menu, easy bcd, windows 7 boot, windows 7 boot menu, windows boot manager, windows software
Categories: Windows, software

It can happen that you notice a pixel or a number of pixels on your LCD monitor that appear to be stuck or dead. It is sometimes hard to notice depending on the location of the stuck pixels but an indicator is that the computer monitor does not change the color anymore in this location. An easy way to locate dead or stuck pixels is to use a software program that can fill the computer screen with one solid color which makes it that easier to locate stuck pixels.

UDPixel is such a software. The free software program can not only aid the user in locating stuck pixels but does come with the means to fix dead or stuck pixels as well. There is no guarantee for success but it cannot hurt either to give this program a try.

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Tags: dead pixels, fix dead pixels, fix stuck pixels, portable software, stuck pixels, udpixels, windows software
Categories: Windows, software

Safe Search is a filter in the Google search engine. By default moderate filtering is applied to all search results which can be changed by the search engine user to strict filtering or no filtering. Especially families with kids but also organizations and businesses use these filters to prevent that inappropriate search results appear in Google search. There was not a way until now however to lock the safe search level which meant that anyone with the know how could change the search filtering level without anyone knowing. The latter is of course only true if no explicit image or text appears on the user’s computer monitor which would be a dead giveaway for the manipulation.

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Tags: Google, google safe search, google search, safe search
Categories: Google, Search Engines

Microsoft this time seems to be dead serious to compete at all levels with the seemingly almighty guys at Google and especially their search engine. Several key services over at Bing were updated today including the already reviewed Bing Maps service. But Bing Maps was but one service that got updated. Microsoft has also updated Bing Search and Bing Videos to make the services more appealing and useful to web users.

Bing Videos for one got a new interface making use of a sidebar navigation for a better and faster browsing experience. Other improvements to the interface include the option to dim the surroundings when a video is played to be able to better focus on the video. New content providers have been and will be added to Bing Videos making the service a very comprehensive source for videos and tv shows from all over the web.

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Tags: bing, bing events, bing health, bing search, bing travel, bing videos, search engine
Categories: Microsoft, Search Engines

Bing Maps has been updated today with several new features and a new look and feel. Most notably in this regard are a new button bar with each button loading a specific feature of Bing Maps. Microsoft has also added some new colors to Bing Maps but those are only the obvious changes to the interface. Among the new features are the option to embed Bing maps into websites allowing website owners or those with posting rights (for example on forums) to post maps that can be customized by location, size and map style.

The performance of Bing Maps was improved in several ways. Microsoft is now serving maps from seven different locations in the world making it faster for the user to access the information requested. The default Bing Maps homepage has seen a size reduction as well from nearly 700 Kilobytes to less than 500 Kilobytes which should be noticeably by and beneficial to low bandwidth connections.

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Tags: bing, bing maps, maps, microsoft, search engine
Categories: Microsoft, Online Services, Search Engines, The Web