The latest Microsoft Press book “Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out” will be available to buy within two weeks and it’s been written by one of the regular editor/contributors here at you’re favourite tech website, gHacks.net. You can still download a free sample chapter from the book HERE, in which you can find out about the core [...]

My new book Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out from Microsoft Press goes on sale by the beginning of November and, yes, it’s been written by one of the staff writers here at gHacks.net! You can pre-order it here and from Amazon and it will be available from online retailers and all good bookshops.  Now as an exclusive I’m [...]

Imagine my surprise when Jojo mentioned that Comodo DNS was blocking ghacks.net, allegedly because it was a hacking / warez site that may offer illegal sharing of copyrighted software and media. Bogus claims obviously, which can hurt a website financially and irritate new and regular visitors. I tried to get hold of Comodo to resolve [...]

gHacks editor Mike Halsey will be appearing on BBC Radio Sheffield tomorrow (Thursday 26th Aug 2010) at 11:30am in the UK (06:30 est, 03:30 pst, 12:30 Europe, 20:30 Aus) talking about his work in ICT and how it led to writing two books about Windows 7 including his forthcoming Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out which [...]

Nothing’s more refreshing than receiving a notification of a WordPress update the minuted before going to bed. WordPress updates are serious, most of the time. Not updating the blog immediately could leave it open for exploits, and malicious users could do many bad things with that new found power. WordPress 3.01 has been released a [...]

gHacks editor Mike Halsey will be appearing on BBC2′s premier political programme Newsnight on BBC2 tomorrow night, Monday 26th July 2010.  The programme will be shown in the UK.

Facebook, love it or hate it. I never really used the social networking site much, not my thing to share quizzes, games and all the other things users share on the site. It has its uses to keep in touch with some friends but then again, there are other means to do that. Still, I [...]

After I set up RGBA support in Ubuntu (see my article “Enable RGBA support in Ubuntu“), I sat about to find applications that could replace non-GTK+ applications currently in use. Replacing the web browser proved to be a challenge. And although it’s not able to stand alone as a full blown replacement for my favorite, [...]

Regular readers might have already spotted a new feature that I have just enabled. The comment form now lists a Twitter ID field next to the standard username, website and email fields that existed before. Ghacks commenters who add their Twitter username to the Twitter ID field in the comment form will have their comment [...]

You know what it’s like when you’re sitting on really great news for several months but you can’t tell anyone?   This is even worse writing for gHacks every day knowing I’m sitting on a great nugget  :} Well after a long period of frustration I can now officially announce that I’ve been signed by Microsoft Press to write [...]

gHacks is today happy to announce the addition of Mike Halsey to the editorial staff.  Mike is the author of  The Windows 7 Power Users Guide,  which he describes as… “A book for people who use Windows 7 at home or at work and know it can do more for them, but who don’t know [...]

In order to improve connection times for users from all over the world, Ghacks enabled a content delivery network (CDN) yesterday. A CDN basically stores files and information on mirror servers all around the world in order to serve data to users from locations closest to them. This speeds up the connection process noticeably. In [...]

Google recently announced that site speed has been added to the signals that they use in their ranking algorithms. Site speed is currently only factored in on google.com if the search is performed in the English language. The new signal has been added to the algorithm a few weeks ago (some webmasters say as early [...]

Jojo just mailed me an interesting article about a blog that discovered that its trackbacks, the links pointing to their articles from other blogs, increased practically overnight to three or four times the standard amount. We to have seen an increase in trackbacks coming from totally unrelated Internet sites which is one of the main [...]

The Ghacks forum has been online for some weeks now and it is growing and evolving nicely. We have some regulars there who contribute a lot to the forum and the user count, threads and posts is continuously on the rise. We are closing in on the 250 members count with almost 350 threads and [...]

WordPress plugins are in many regards just like Firefox add-ons. You got a few popular ones that most webmasters have installed and then a lot of differences when it comes to the rest. If you have ever looked at one of those “top x” posts about WordPress plugins chance is that you already know the [...]

Most of you probably know that we know have a Ghacks forum that provides everyone with the means for in depth discussions about the articles here at Ghacks but also totally unrelated topics. We do post for instance interesting information that we come upon on the forum that did not make it into an article [...]

I just got an email from long time reader Ben who told me that my feed would not update automatically anymore. After checking the feed it turned out that he was right. The Feedburner feed stopped on February 10 and did not update afterwards while the normal feed displays the latest articles just fine. I [...]

You might already know that we have added a forum to ghacks that can be used by anyone to discuss articles posted here in the blog but also other technology related issues. We already got some nice threads going and would like to invite each and everyone of you to take a look at the [...]

We have established the new Ghacks forum just a few days ago and are still in the progress of getting accustomed to the very powerful Vbulletin forum software. Basic options are already provided and we are currently looking at extensions and plugins for the forum to make it more appealing and to add more features [...]

I always pondered with the thought of adding a forum to Ghacks. A forum would be beneficial in many ways including allowing users to post and discuss topics that are not related to the articles posted at the Ghacks blog. It might also be a good way to create a stronger bond in the community [...]

Those users who have already participated in last year’s Christmas Giveaway know that we will give away some of our fine t-shirts on one day of the giveaway. That day is today. Today is actually the only day that we are not handing out software licenses to you. Hope you still participate in this giveaway [...]

I’m proud to announce that we will run another Christmas giveaway this year which will be even bigger than the last one. Not only because of the additional licenses and new software that we were able to get for you but also because of the participation of a partner site of Ghacks in the giveaway. [...]

Last year’s Christmas Giveaway was a very successful endeavor. We were able to hand out hundreds of commercial software programs to ghacks readers. Here is a short description of what happened last year for new Ghacks readers. We decided last year that it would be nice to use the marketing power of Ghacks to convince [...]

I was approached by one of the companies that I work with (IDG) to publish a survey on my website. This survey is being used to create a Media Kit for Ghacks that will be used as a data source in advertising deals. This should mean a higher ad revenue for the site as the [...]

It is not often that I go on holidays. This can be mainly attributed to the fact that my work and spare time balance was leaning towards lots of work and not so much spare time. This is going to change and it is starting tomorrow with a seven day trip to Jerusalem. I just [...]

I will be moving Ghacks to the new web server today which means that you might experience all kinds of problems with the site including disconnects, display errors, script errors or lack of updates because you are still being redirected to the old web server after the change to the DNS. The new managed server [...]

Ghacks has been running on the same server for more than a year now. The server it is running on is provided by German company Hetzner who offer a fantastic deal for the money (€49 for a 4 Gigabyte server with everything that is needed to run websites that have a lot of traffic). A [...]

You might know that Ghacks is not the only website that I run. I have for example a very successful Windows 7 website that I operate with Everton from Connected Internet. The project is that successful that we have decided to create another website as a joint venture. Otaku Gadgets, a gadgets and hardware site, [...]

Appnews is a new software update notification service that provides software updates via rss, twitter or email. It is the brainchild of long time Ghacks reader Rarst and combines notifications about software updates with links to reviews of those software programs on the websites Freeware Genius, Ghacks and Rarst. Every new entry consists of the [...]

You might have already noticed that the WordPress theme has been changed here at Ghacks to a more minimalistic theme. I think the new theme combines an excellent design with good readability. The theme will be tested in the coming days to see if problems of any kind are experienced while displaying the new WordPress [...]

I think it is interesting to provide some general statistical information about the site and its visitors every now and then. Some users might just skip reading the post while others will probably find it an interesting read. The post takes the data from traffic analysis software scripts like Google Analytics and Awstats. Lets begin [...]

Two days ago I asked if I should move some of the more advanced content to another blog. The result currently stands at 47% no voters to 41% yes voters with 12% saying they do not care. This reflects why the decision is that hard to make and why it takes so long to come [...]

Ghacks has seen some changes in the last two months with the addition of Jack and his Linux articles and Daniel’s web development series. A question that came up was if those two (or one of them) should be moved to a separate blog. I still have not come to a decision and I thought [...]

The end of the year is near and it is time to thank each and everyone of you for their visit here at Ghacks. The last year was eventful and the first year where I lived solely from the earnings of this website. It was not an easy decision but it turned out to be [...]

We have given away free licenses to popular commercial software programs in the last 24 days. It was not really clear how you would react to those articles and if a lot of you would participate. That cleared up pretty soon on the first day after the comment count reached the hundreds. From then on [...]

A little known fact is the possibility to subscribe to an RSS feed of WordPress categories, authors or tags instead of the full site feed. This can be really useful if you love to subscribe to one specific author, category or tag of the blog. One prime example could be to subscribe to a Firefox [...]

For those of you considering a migration from Windows to Linux I have a very simple piece of advice that will make the migration much easier. That advice: Choose the right distribution. Let me begin at the begining, or at least the best starting point. The Linux operating system is built with a number pieces. [...]

Hello gHacks faithful. My name is Jack Wallen and I am here to give you the gift of Linux. Appropos seeing as how it’s the holiday season. Let me explain…I have been brought on board gHacks to write about Linux. Why? Because Linux is the future of computing…or at least that is what my soapbox [...]

Do you have geek written over all of your face? Have you turned your back on Windows years ago? Is Kernel your second name? Do you like to write about Linux? Tell others what they can do with it? If that’s what you like and who you are you might be interested in joining the [...]

We start the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway with a bang. Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 is the flagship product of Kaspersky and it is up for grabs for five lucky commenters. All you need to do to enter the giveaway is to leave a comment. Please spread the word so that your friends, family and colleagues can [...]

The Ghacks Christmas Giveaway is starting tomorrow with a bang. I though that it would be nice to keep you in the dark about the software packages that will be reviewed and offered on each day but I make an exception this time so that you know what you can expect in the coming weeks. [...]

I actually had the idea last year but did not pursuit it enough to make it happen in 2007. This year however is different. I’m very proud to announce the first annual Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. We will provide visitors with the opportunity to win excellent software programs (and probably other things as well) from December [...]

Everton from Connected Internet and I are running a Windows 7 joint venture located at Windows 7 News dot com which is providing everyone with news about the upcoming Microsoft operating system. The announcement that Microsoft would keep the name was really exciting and motivated us to bring the news site to the next level. [...]

The third birthday of Ghacks was ten days ago. I received lots of interesting comments in the birthday thread and would like to list them here for discussion. I would also take the opportunity to announce that the ten winners of the Ghacks T-Shirt have been picked and that they should have received an email [...]

Ghacks was founded three years ago on a rainy October evening. Back then I had no plans to become a full time blogger and earn my money from blogging but every now and then life turns out to be sweet and give you chances if you only look out for them. It took more than [...]

This post is dedicated to webmasters who read Ghacks especially those who run their own blogs and tend to use Ghacks articles as a source at times but basically to anyone who maintains a blog on the Internet and cites his sources. Most webmasters have the decency to cite their source when they write about [...]

Regular visitors might have spotted the new Webcasts menu entry in the header area of Ghacks already. I signed an agreement with a company that is providing free webcasts to interested visitors of Ghacks. Webcasts are presentations that are held in either Windows Media Player or Real Player about specific technology related topics. The webcasts [...]

I sometimes like to explore Google Analytics. It can be quite fascinating what information can be gathered from that program alone. It might be nice to share some of the information with you. I’m not talking about content information but visitor information, information about you. Some information could give clues on where the Ghacks visitors [...]

Okay I spend most of the weekend trying to find out why my RSS news feed was not displaying for many of my readers and why I would get all kinds of errors like 404 not found in the beginning and then a dubious homepage when opening the RSS News Feed url in the browser. [...]