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.

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.

I know it´s been a while since I published the last file host list. Finally, today, I decided to update the list, remove all dead services and add new services. I personally would like to know if you want me to keep the sites in the list that ask you to register before you can use their services.

A Beginner’s Guide to What Goes on Inside that PC published by extremetech a few days ago tries to explain the components of a personal computer without the “geek” language. It aims at a audience that did not have the time or desire to understand how a pc is working. The eight-parts article begins with an introduction and goes on by encouraging everyone to take a look at their own pc. (After saving all work and the like). It would be a good way to print the article to be able to read it and look at the turned off computer at the same time.

The guys over at techspot published a large article on tweaking winamp. They focus input and output plugins but cover other areas as well. The recommended Shibatch mpg123 input plugin for instance offers better audio quality and more features than the default nullsoft mpeg decoder.

Pandora is a online service that finds similar music to an artist, album or genre that you specify and which creates your unique radio station that plays the related titles. Unfortunatly it´s only available on their website and not in music players like winamp. Until now, that is.

Adware is another issue that seems to be plaguing the entire world these days and that means that people need to be aware that this is nothing anymore safe then the standard spyware is. There are many that will tell you that adware is nothing more than an advertising venue for online companies but that is false. Through adware these companies are actually collecting data about you so they can target your computer with advertising that will come up in parts as pop up windows or the computer can actually be hijacked and then all of your search options are then transported through the adware so the results that they want to bring to you can be filtered.

Spam is a big issue these days and people are always on the look out for ways to stop it. There is little that we as internet users can do about spam because there is always going to be a bunch of people that believe that spam is a good way to get people to buy things from them. There is little to this theory because so many people are so aware of spam that there is little in the way of sales from this type of email that it is going way down hill and very fast at that. There is not a matter of people actually stopping anything from going on even though there is a big field of research that is trying to help with the problem of spam and how to stop it from reaching a person.

How do you normally send files to a friend ? By email ? What if the file is rather big but you want to send it anyway ? You could setup a ftp server and give your friend access to it. The speed that your friend can download with depends of course on your upload speed. Still, ftp servers are the number one method to swap large files. The best thing, it´s not complicated to setup your own ftp server, just follow these easy steps:

Everyone has to start somewhere if he wants to try something new. I´ve been talking to many of my friends and I got the impression that many would make the switch to Linux if there would be some sort of standard, some fire and forget Linux that you install just like windows xp for instance. With Vista on the doorstep and TCPA (Paladium, whatever it is called now) changing to Linux becomes more and more attractive even for those users that don´t want to learn everything from the start.

If you happen to run a webserver that uses linux or happen to run linux as your operating system for the computer you work with you should know the basics of the shell. Sometimes you quickly have to find your way into the shell and a site like linuxcommand helps you alot doing so.

It is sometimes a good choice to disable USB drives and still use other USB hardware. This is especially true for computers and notebooks that are publically accessible from time to time. So, to disable USB Drives you simply fire up regedit and browse to the following key:

The avi bug which makes it impossible to delete avis in windows xp by chosing delete from the menu or hitting del at your keyboard is caused by Explorer reading the .avi file to determine file information as soon as you move the mouse over the file. This causes ‘permission denied’ errors when trying to simply move, copy or delete these files as they cannot be changed while Explorer has an open handle on them.

Raid which means Redundant Array Of Independent Disks has been mostly used as a technology for servers. This is slowly changing as users are becoming aware of the possibilities of a raid system. There are many RAID configurations out there the most common ones are Raid 0 (Striped Disk Array) and Raid 1 (Mirroring).

This little list might be helpful for some windows users. It is a detailed listing of windows keyboard shortcuts that most people don´t use because they simply don´t know about them. I´am not using many as well except maybe Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste the copied content and Alt+F4 to close a window. Shortcuts are a great way to work faster. The list is not complete but contains about 40 shortcuts.

The google cheat sheets provide a great overview of everything that is google. You have a list of all their services handy on one page (for example maps, mobile and musicsearch), a list of googledomains, information about the googlebot and references to large services that belong to google. (orkut, hello and picaso for instance)

The article “Ten things every Microsoft Word user should know” is for those of you who are still using Microsoft Word (and not Open Office or similar freeware products). I think most companies still rely on the Microsoft Office productline, also many computers come preinstalled with an OEM version. You get a great explanation and guide for every tip that shows you how to use the feature described.

I found a tutorial on the techarena forum that had some nice (standard) tips on how to speed up your windows operating system. You find tips that increase boot and shutdown speed, some that increase the overall performance by disabling certain services and features like indexing service and system restore. If you never tweaked your system before this article is for you.

Some ISPs are beginning to throttle bittorrent traffic. There is a possibility to overcome this throttling by encrypting your bittorrent streams. Torrentfreak.com posted a guide which tells you how to encrypt your torrent streams with three popular clients: Azureus, Bitcomet and µTorrent.

I found a sweet little linux guide for newbies. It´s basically a collection of 27 questions and their answers and starts of with general questions about linux, like “what is linux” and “What distribution of Linux should I install?”

Seems I´am in a posting spree at the moment. I found another great site that lists more than 3000 programming texts and tutorials on many subjects. The presentation is not really nice but the content is great. The content starts with a large linux section and ends with a even larger section that deals with many programming languages: From assembler to xml. The website is basically a large linklist to the tutorials.

A lot of my visitors already have a google gmail account or are asking me for an invitation. I thought it would be nice to share a great site that features lots of gmail tips with you. The site gmail tips the complete collection gives a rough introduction to the google mail service and lists more than 40 tips afterwards. For example tip 27 explains to you how you would add a hotmail email to gmail, tip 11 tells you how to connect securely to gmail.

Well I came upon this analysis of .com domain names in this article by Dennis Forbes called Interesting Facts About Domain Names. He takes a look at .com domains only because this is the most thought after domain extension worldwide. Some interesting conclusions that he draws are that the chances of catching a two or three letter domain name are exactly zero, unless you pay a brooker for it of course and that the chances to register a short domain name start with four-letter domain names.

I bought a Geforce 6600 graphic adapter last year from Asus and had the initial problem that the fan was to noisy. Even when I was surfing the internet or writing a text in Open Office. I was sure that this could not be correct and decided to search for a way to reduce the fan speed and thus the noise level when it was not needed.

There is a good guide at lifehackers with a rather large title: “How to format your hard drive and install Windows XP from scratch“. The article lists the obvious things that you need which are: A pc, a windows installation disc, other software that you would like to install, optional up to date drivers for your hardware and a (optional) backup internet connection to download drivers / other software in case of emergency.

A bios password prevents access to the bios for unauthorised users. Sometimes this password gets forgotten and you face the difficulty to find a way to enter your bios again. The article “how to bypass your bios password” explains in detail various methods that bypass the bios password. So, if you are in need, take a look and try the available methods.

Memory Manufacturer Corsair released a detail system building guide that goes into great detail and covers many aspects. The guide starts with the component selection for an high end system: Athlon 64 4200+ X2, A8N-SLI Premium motherboard, Zalman CNPS7000B-CU LED cooler, 2 GB TWINX2048-3500LLPRO memory, two eVGA GeForce 7800GTX PCI-Express video cards , Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic , Western Digital Raptor 36GB 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Drive , Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 300GB SATA Hard Drive, Antec NeoPower 480W Modular Power Supply, NEC-3540 DVD+/-RW , Sony DVD DDU1615 and finally the Lian-Li V1000B-W Aluminum Case.

CDs don´t last forever. They get scratches for instance and sometimes these make the CD or some sectors become unreadable. Now, what can you do if you desperately need the data on the CD ? The article Recovering Scratched CDs from hardwaresecrets.com tries to answer this question.

Most people use computers but don´t have the technical understanding how they actually work. How Computers Work: Processor and Main Memory is a complete book that explains the operation of a simple, but fully functional, computer in complete detail.

When I look at my taskmanager I sometimes see filenames that I don´t know. What is that file gives you the answer to the question. It´s solely based on user submissions, just like wikipedia for instance. Just enter a filename and the following information will be displayed: Name, purpose, description and if its safe or a malicious one. Great if you are not sure why a file is running on your system.

A friend of mine asked me to take a look at his computer because it reacted slowly and took ages to boot. He was running windows xp home and shared the computer with his wife and his two lovely girls who unfortunatly decided to install lots of “female” orientated applications like riding games, animated screensavers and the like. After getting rid of 185 spyware entries I told him that he could speed up his pc which had only 256 Mb if he would disable some features of windows xp.

I don´t have a lcd monitor yet but this might be useful to some of you who already own one. This is not supposed to be working for every flat screen out there but I think its nevertheless worth a try. Take a look at the following site and decide for yourself if you want to try this method.

I´am cautious when I read another article that claims to speed up your windows operating system by simply tweaking some settings in the registry. I learned the hard way that your os sometimes becomes unstable and you will have to restore it or do a fresh install. The article “Make your windows fast as never before” is one of those articles that makes this claim.

Phishing, which is a construct of the words Password and Fishing, becomes more and more common on the internet. Many people recieve daily mails from sites like ebay and paypal but also from financial sites like citibank that look authentic and direct you to a website that looks like a copy of the original site. They “phish” your login data or credit card information from that fake website.

When I tried to switch for the first time from windows to linux I felt left alone. The web was not what it now uses to be, tutorials and help documents were scarce and one had to have a friend who could help or try the trial and error way to get linux installed and configured. Linux is becoming more user friendly and lots of tutorials and help sites pop up that help beginners and guide them through the basic installation and configuration process.

I know, its not tech related at all: But I suppose many of you have the same sleep problems that I have. I use to work a lot and often stare at a computer screen for 10+ hours a day. When I´am finished I shutdown the pc and go to sleep. Most of the time I have problems sleeping right away and start to think about what I did today and what I have to do tomorrow.

It´s always a good idea to backup your hard drive(s) every now and then to prevent data loss. The guys, eh Gina, over at lifehacker wrote a nice article. It only describes the procedure for windows computers, all you need is an external hard drive, a ftp server and the freeware tool Syncback.

I´am like most of you using windows xp as my primary operating system. I always pondered if I should make a complete change to linux, make a dual boot system or stay with windows. Every decision would have advantages but also disadvantages.

Fix my XP is a site that has lots of windows tips that are especially useful for beginners. Tips that explain how to remove unused dlls from memory, fine tune your lcd display or how to open large folders faster can be found on the site. Take a look, you might be suprised what you find.

I found a great site with lots of tutorials in five basic categories which are software (mainly graphic based), web design and markup, programming, operating systems and finally business. Every category itself is again divided into subcategories, for example flash with its 920 tutorials is a subcategory of software.

Have you ever wanted a Windows CD that would install Windows by automatically putting in your name, product key, timezone and regional settings? And have it merged with the latest Service Pack to save time? Followed by silently installing all your favourite applications along with DirectX 9.0c, .Net Framework 1.1 and then all the required hotfixes, updated drivers, registry tweaks, and a readily patched UXTheme.dll without any user interaction whatsoever? Then this guide will show you how you can do just that!

There are several methods to reset and recover your windows administrators password. The fastest method is to use a freeware tool like Offline NT Password & Registry Editor or the linux live distribution Austrumi.

If you want to make the switch from windows to linux you should know some common differences between the two operating systems. A techrepublic article describes ten differences that every new linux user should know before making the switch.

If you are one of the people who download music from MySpace this little hack might be just for you. Everytime you look at a band profile a music player loads and starts playing the first tune of a maximum of four tunes. You can listen to all of them but download only some, sometimes you can´t download any.

I know that some of you are using a firewall and therefor the home pc firewall guide site might be worth a visit. The website has more sections than I can list here so i stick with some interesting ones and leave the rest to you. To start with a good one, Installig Security Products, a guide on how to install security type software on a new windows operating system.

At least in England. According to the english newspaper The Herald a man named Nigel Roberts sued the company Media Logistics (UK) Ltd which sent him unwanted emails.
He was able to take actions under the Directive on Privacy and Telecommunications, a European Union law allowing spam victims to claim damage.

There are several ways to save a website and they largely depend on your needs. If you only want to save textual information you could be finished by a simple copy and paste job. If you want to preserve the links you need to save it as html. Most browsers have the option to save a website locally but what if you need more than one page or would like the information of the links as well ?

I know that this has been in the news for some days but some of you probably have not heard about it, christmas is stress, you know. You can use the google translate feature to visit webpages that are blocked in your country. For example germans are not allowed to visit stormfrontdotorg or rottendotcom and could use this proxy to visit this sites.

Its late at night and I can´t sleep, I thought i try this complete list of all windows xp command line tools and parameters to finally fall asleep but even that is not working tonight.

Now this article over at tomshardware.com comes in handy. I told you yesterday how to encrypt your hard drives with the great true crypt freeware and recommended that everything would be encrypted and the system would be booted from usb.