Graphic card drivers for notebooks are usually not updated that often by the manufacturer of the Notebook. Nvidia on the other hand does not provide access to many graphic card drivers for Notebook graphic cards on their website and the desktop graphic cards cannot be installed on notebooks.

The guys from Laptop Video 2 Go have come up with a solution to this problem. They provide an inf generator and driver downloads so that most notebook users can updated their notebook’s graphic card by downloading those files from the website. The modded inf files not only work with most notebook graphic cards but do provide access to several hidden features as well that fix issues and add tweaks to the drivers.

Basically the user selects a driver that he wants to install, downloads the modded inf file from the website, replaces the inf from the driver package with the modded one and starts the installation of the driver.

continue reading "Install the latest Nvidia Drivers on your Notebook"

It is really annoying that Skype does not come with an option to pause and resume music playback in the background when the user receives an incoming call. The VOIP client Skype 4 currently does not provide a way to automatically pause and resume music on the PC and the previous version of Skype offered a way to pause but not to resume Winamp when a call was incoming.

Mute for Skype is a software that can do that, most of the time without problems. The lightweight application requires the Microsoft .net Framework 1.1 or newer. The developer of the plugin unfortunately misses to mention the supported operating systems on the website, it is working in Windows XP.

continue reading "Mute for Skype"

If you’re a fan of skinning your apps you probably already know all about user styles for web pages. There’s a great plugin for Firefox that enables you to change the look of webpages using css called Stylish. Once you have it, you can download (or create) user styles and change the look of any website with the push of a button.

If you want an awesome style for your Google Calendar take a look at the sleek design by Globes Designs innovatively called Google Calendar Redesigned. If you like a darker theme with a bit more contrast this is definitely for you. User styles are not always implemented well with choppy bits everywhere, but this design is totally beautiful.

You will be glad to know they have a Gmail design as well (in fact this spurred the calendar design) called Gmail Redesigned. This is essentially the same thing for your favorite email client, so you can have the same design throughout these two Google services. I you know any more cool user styles please let us know, I’d love to take a look at some!

continue reading "Redesign your Google Calendar with a custom skin"

I don’t know how many of you have tried Google Sites, which is a Wiki like application available for Google Apps users. Although the application itself lacks a lot of features (more on that a bit later), the framework, the development and the way things are going is awesome. You can use Google Sites for intraweb documents, customer management, blogging, file storage, sharing photos, anything you want really, let’s take a look at what this is all about.

The main difference between Google Sites and a Wiki is that Sites is tailored very well to a domain. This means that while Wikis tend to be community pages only, with sites you can restrict who is able to do what right down to picking out your Google Apps users. This gives great control over who can do what with the site. For example I use Google Sites for my blog management service Blogtastique, to give customers a cool way to follow what’s going on with their order. I can creqate file repositories, announcement boards, order detail pages. I can also only share the page with the specific customer, so noone else can take a peak into his or her order. The users can also upload files and share their comments, which make for a very rich user experience.

Pages are very easily editable using the type of rich text editor we all know from our Gmail interfaces. Just click edit, start typing, save, and you have your page. You can change the look of your site quite easily with the built in templates, or you can customize one for yourself. Customization is a bit limited, but flexible enough for most purposes. It doesn’t work by modifying css, which means you can’t do anything, but there are enough variables you can modify to dramatically change everything.

continue reading "Google sites - a different type of Wiki"

My defragmenter of choice has always been Auslogic Defragmenter, I have no idea how effective it is compared to other programs but it’s simple enough and looks pretty.

However I came across Piriform Defraggler the other day and I was interested in one feature it had… individual file and folder defragmentation. At first I thought this was pretty superfluous considering it would be difficult to notice much of an effect defragmenting a single file or folder…  however I have a laptop and not a huge hard drive so a complete defragment doesn’t take huge amount of time anyway.

If you have a large hard drive however then this could be a very useful tool. I’m thinking of large music collections or DVD rips which go into the hundreds of gigabytes worth of space.

continue reading "A Few Defragmentation Tools"