The following article explains how to add pictures to MySpace. The process itself is not overly complicated and everyone should be able to follow the steps. Please leave a comment if you have any questions about the process. There are basically two possibilities to add pictures to MySpace. The first is to upload pictures from [...]

The Back to Basics series looks at common tasks and problems that Windows users might encounter on a daily basis and explains solutions and ways to do those “things”. To kickoff this new article series I’m going to look at ways to backup the Windows Registry. The Windows Registry is the core of the Windows [...]

The Internet is full of optimization tips for reducing the boot time and making the computer boot faster. Many of the tips described have virtually no effect or even ill-effects. The Boot Computer Faster article tries to bring the relevant elements to the table that have an effect on the computer startup speed. Many users [...]

Many users shy away from updating the computer bios of their motherboard probably because of the fear of damaging the motherboard irreparably. Methods have evolved in the last years and it is easier and safer to update the bios than it was five years ago. The following article explains an easy and straightforward way of [...]

Not many users know that Windows Explorer is offering several options on how the folders and files are displayed. One useful Windows Explorer tip that I came across a while ago is to arrange the files and folders in groups in Windows Explorer. This basically means that every file will be sorted in a group [...]

The Apple blog published a nice article explaining how to create free ringtones using only the Apple iTunes software. The only restriction of that method is that the song needs to reside on the hard drive of the user so that a ringtone can be created from it. The method is pretty straightforward but requires [...]

It’s been a good week with some great tips and tech articles around the place. Here where my favourites: Take Back Control Over Your Right Click Menus An article over on Make Use Of which I particularly  liked as I’ve been looking around for a application to do this for a while. Philipp Lenssen’s Top [...]

It seems that Lifehacker is having Ghacks week which I personally do not mind but the amount of articles that they referred to is stunning. I found reference to another blog that had a tutorial on how to change the default save format in Word 2007 from Docx to Doc. I had some problems in [...]

A Flickr user can decided to protect the photos that he uploads to Flickr which has the effect that the a user who is trying to download a protected photo will end up with a gif called spaceball.gif instead of the real image. I’ve already shown how it is possible to avoid saving spaceball.gif images [...]

Experienced users love choice. I’m talking about the choice to turn on or off certain features that come with a product. It does not really matter if we are talking about software or hardware, choice can become important almost everywhere. Most companies do not seem to think that giving the user choice is a wise [...]

System Partitioning is a little scary, especially if your as stupid as me and don’t back your files up before you start. I have been using Ubuntu installed through Wubi, a very convenient and efficient way for anyone to try out Linux beyond a Live CD or Virtual machine. While Wubi is great It does [...]

In 2001 reports about Zip Bombs or Zip of Death attacks made the round on the Internet and I thought it would be nice to write about one shiny harmless example of that technique. On first glance the file 42.zip is a normal compressed file with the size of 42 Kilobytes. Many users who run [...]

Windows Vista users may be surprised to know that they actually have two different versions of the places bar in Windows Explorer. The places bar provides access to several links on the system, for example to the desktop and the My Documents folder. Windows Vista users can either see the old five locations on the [...]

“This is a guest post by Ben Carigtan, a technology enthusiast and staff writer at Online-Tech-Tips.” Is your outlook mailbox a mess? Do you miss reading important emails because of the tons of emails you receive on your inbox? Do you want to organize it in such a way that you move a group of [...]

Each user account in Windows is connected to a user profile that defines several important parameters like the types of applications that are available for that user, information about files and shortcuts on the desktop, visual settings like screen size, network and printer connections, wallpapers and data like the Internet cache. From an administrator’s point [...]

For those people who use Windows Media Center, it can be a pain to have to navigate around the program using the mouse, especially if you’re watching a movie and you need to access a particular feature. What many users don’t know or realize is that Windows Media Center has a whole lot of keyboard [...]

New folders are always opened in a new window on my system because I think it’s a comfortable way to work with folders and windows. I never liked the default way of opening a new folder in the same window. This spawns a lot of windows when I navigate to a folder like the Firefox [...]

I spent a little time today on a WordPress theme for one of my clients. He asked me to copy his webpage design and turn it into a WordPress blog. This took me about a fifth of the time it takes to design a blog on my own, and the coding was much smoother and [...]

Ever wondered how energy friendly the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii were ? Or how a LCD monitor would fare against a good old CRT monitor ? Australian consumer group Choice created a chart displaying the power usage of common household technology products and it’s important that people understand the implications. The test [...]

If you are running the Symantec products Norton Internet Security 2008, Norton SystemWorks 2008, Norton 360 or Norton AntiVirus 2008 on a machine with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and want to upgrade to Service Pack 3 you should disable the SymProtect feature before doing so or your operating system could go kaboom. More precisely [...]

Users can move the special folders from their default location to another folder or drive in Windows XP and Windows Vista. Special folders are for example the pictures and music folders in My documents. Their directory can be changed using the Location tab in the Property menu. It is recommended to add the full path [...]

Just a few minutes ago I completed the article that explained how to read 20 digital magazines for free by changing the browser’s User Agent to the one of the Apple iPhone. I decided to look for additional free iPhone offers and discovered that Texterity Magazines are also providing 50 magazines to iPhone users free [...]

Apple Iphone owners get more. They get free Wireless access at AT&T Hotspots, which no longer is that easy to defeat and now they also get to view free digital magazines of 20 or so popular magazines without costs, courtesy of Zinio. Guess how they are providing those free digital magazines and figuring out that [...]

Desktop users will probably question why someone would need a shortcut to turn off the monitor when the button to switch it off is just a few inches away. It does not really make much sense to turn off the monitor with a shortcut if you can reach the power button of the monitor from [...]

When I’m helping friends and family members who are not that tech savvy with their computers I always notice that they do not use keyboard shortcuts. Instead of doing the plain old CTRL C, CTRL V to copy and paste selected text they use the mouse to do that. Thinking about this for a while [...]

There is still some confusion about the use of screensavers and I would like to explain it to those who do not know if it makes more sense to use a screensaver or to turn off the monitor. Screensavers were invented in a time to prevent phosphor burn-ins from images that were displayed for a [...]

Here is another problem that arises after installing Windows XP Service Pack 3. Windows Home Server Remote Access is not functioning anymore after installing the Service Pack 3. An attempt to access the updated computers using Windows Home Server’s Remote Access function displays a dialog that is prompting the user to add their homeserver domain [...]

Users with AMD processors that have been trying to install Windows XP Service Pack 3 might be greeted with a bluescreen error message after rebooting their computer that begins with STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC0000005 and contains the error text SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED. The computer restarts and the bluescreen error is displayed again. This is an endless cycle but [...]

Several users encounter problems and difficulties during and after installation of the two new Windows service packs that Microsoft released earlier this year. Both service packs will be automatically downloaded later this year to computers that have automatic updates enabled which could prove disastrous for companies who cannot afford that they computers stop working after [...]

I came in contact with a Windows Media Center PC only recently, specifically with Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. I noticed that it did not recognize DVDs that were stored on the hard drive of the computer which was kinda odd for a Media Center. Well a little research revealed a Registry setting [...]

Today was the first day, after using Wikipedia for ages I actually took the time to look at what the front page has to offer. I found separate part of Wikipedia named the Wikiversity. It contains many courses, lessons and whatnot on a load of subjects. From applied sciences to practical art, you will find [...]

I finally updated my old Nero 7 to the latest Nero version and tried to get rid of as many unnecessary Nero applications as possible during installation. To be honest, I only need the program to burn DVDs and CDs and not to recode videos, create covers or edit sounds. With all the care that [...]

I was witnessing some erratic behavior lately after installing several applications on my new computer. One of the applications was Skype and it did turn out that Skype did install a Skype Firefox Extension which causes many problems. My problem was that some images were not displaying at all but simply returned a The image [...]

The Internet is a big place with a lot of information. While most of it is helpful, there’s also a lot of rubbish. For example, social networking sites like Facebook can help you find long-lost school friends and keep in touch with them. Then, there’s Pipl. The site is a search engine. Nothing different about [...]

If you experience slowdowns or poor network performance in Windows Vista like slow browsing performance occasionally or all the time you might use a router or network device that is causing problems for Microsoft’s Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level. It’s not the routers fault or your fault but more something that is caused by how the [...]

When you build computers and purchase the peripherals by yourself you have to make several decisions. Will it be an Intel or AMD cpu for example, which hard drive will you choose from the hundreds available, which video card and which RAM. The newest hardware is normally the fastest but most expensive one and it [...]

It can happen that the tabs of the display properties are missing after installation of new drivers or a change of the video card. Only the contents of the first tab are displayed if this is happening and there is no obvious way on how to access the other tabs. The other tabs are still [...]

Victor send me an email some days ago asking if I knew of a way to convert a full website into PDF format. I knew that there were several ways to convert a single page to pdf but I was not so sure about complete websites. I started to perform all kinds of searches but [...]

My parents are using their HP printer most of the time to print text documents but every now and then they also use it to print a picture they have shot with their digital camera. Their normal printer settings have been optimized heavily so that the ink cartridges last longer. This includes the exclusive use [...]

Moving the Windows taskbar from the bottom to the right side of the screen was probably the greatest layout change that I ever made or had to cope with since I started with Windows 95. The taskbar was at the bottom for more than ten years and one day I have decided to move it [...]

You know, I have no troubles of linking to your websites or articles if they are great and make up for a good story. Beecher send in a link to one of his articles that gives some sound advice on how to build and setup the rock solid computer. It’s not the usual walkthrough that [...]

It happens several times a day that some applications steal the focus of the active window by popping up. This can happen for a number of reasons, when I extract files or a transfer finishes for instance. It does not matter most of the time when this happens but sometimes I’m writing an article and it does not only mean that I have to type some words again but also that I lost concentration and have to click to regain focus.

What’s a good way of catching the attention of someone who is advocating the use of biometrics? German interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble is pushing biometrics and data collection in Germany all for the sake of security and the fight against terrorism. The Chaos Computer Club, a renowned and popular club of hackers and privacy advocates, [...]

Working with several portable USB devices on one computer can be quite complicated when you consider that Windows is assigning the next free drive letter to a device that gets connected. This can lead to some confusion and a great tip that I would like to pass on is to assign USB drives to folders instead.

Microsoft published a release notes page together with the Refresh download of Windows XP Service Pack 3. The first part of the release notes lists the new and previously available functionality in this Service Pack. The second part however is more interesting in my opinion, it lists several issues that users might experience with this [...]

Microsoft likes to make things complicated from time to time it seems. When you right-click a file, folder or search result in Windows Vista you get the normal command menu with options to open, edit or print the marked objects. If you happen to press shift while right-clicking you will also notice that a new option has been added to the menu which is called Copy to Path.

Google Code University is an excellent resource for Computer Science students and programmers in general. All videos and Powerpoint presentations published at the University are released under Creative Commons. Four different kinds of courses are available right now, they are Ajax Programming, Distributed Systems, Web Security and Languages.

I got the inspiration for this post from the Download Squad article “Is this web site down for everyone or is it just you ?” which mentioned a service that would check if a website was down or if it was more likely to be a problem on the user’s side. Some guys mentioned in the comments that the website checking service would display false results from time to time which in turn convinced me to write a post about other methods on how you can check if a website is up, or not.

The Opera team is constantly adding exciting new features to the beta version of the upcoming version of Opera that is competing against Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8. One of this new features is the Opera History Search which is a full text search over all of the items stored in your history. The [...]

When you click on a file Firefox determines if there is a plugin that can handle the file type or if there is a so called download action defined. Download actions are user defined actions that come into effect when the box “Do this automatically for files like this from now on” is checked in Firefox during a file download.