That’s probably the longest title that I’ve ever selected for an article here at Ghacks. A default Windows desktop contains several icons that have special “abilities” which stand in contrast to the shortcuts that users can create. If you take the Internet Explorer icon for example you notice that a right-click opens up a menu [...]

Alienware is probably best known for their high-end gaming computers and notebooks which always come in a futuristic great looking design. The AlienGUIse Theme Manager is custom version of My Colors from Stardock that can transform the appearance of Windows tremendously. Five Alienware themes are available after installation which can transform the Windows graphical user [...]

User generated content is not only popular on the web but becomes increasingly popular in Open Source development. The prime example is of course Firefox which has such an active community that thousands of extensions have been created for that browser. The Open Office development team decided to walk along the same road and add the ability to extend Open Office with user generated extensions.

Every company seems to think that they have to port their applications to the Internet these days. Adobe is the latest to follow this trend with the release of Adobe Photoshop Express [link] which seems to be a combination of a photo album and imaged editing application. Don’t expect it to be Photoshop on the web, it is not but it appears to be a solid web application with a nice interface.

I’m normally not using playlists when I want to listen to music. I either tune into some Internet Radio station or drop a folder full of music in my favorite music player XMPlay. Some of my friends however make a science out of it and create playlists for different moods or situations and they told [...]

My Casio Exilim digital camera is naming every picture CIMGxxxx.jpg with xxxx being a number between 1 and 9999. This naming convention makes it quite hard to find out any details about the picture unless you click on it or activate thumbnail view in the folder. It does make sense in my opinion to rename [...]

I’m the family’s computer guy and it is slowly spreading to family friends and even neighbors as well thanks to recommendations of family members. Recently my mum told my grandmother’s neighbors that I could take a look at their computer which was showing a bluescreen during startup and well, it’s hard to say no to [...]

A new version of Revo Uninstaller was just released and I thought it would be nice to inspect the new version since my last review dates a while back. Several new features have been implemented into this new version including improvements in the Advanced Uninstall Mode, interface improvements and safety improvements for the Uninstall Safe [...]

I just read the story over at Cybernet News and thought it was worth commenting about. Apple apparently found a way to shove the Safari browser down the throats of Windows users by bundling it with iTunes update. They report a new version of Safari when a user searches in iTunes for updates. This happens [...]

I have examined the new Autopatcher Updater before and the program was kinda buggy back then. Some time has passed and the Autopatcher team managed to produce several new versions and recently released version 1.04 of their Autopatcher Updater. It felt right to take another look to see what has changed since the early beta releases.

Recent Files View is another excellent software developed by one of my favorite developers Nirsoft. I discovered this application by chance at the Freeware Genius blog and immediately saw the benefits of using the application. Let me tell you what it does. Recent Files View lists the most recent files that have been accessed on [...]

I received some very nice responses in my last Ask The Readers article that was asking the readers for a way to extract archives – including multi part ones – that would reside in different folders in one go. The archiver that I was using was able to handle all archives in one directory but not in multiple directories.

Every Windows user browses for folders regularly, be it to save files in specific folders or to load files from folders. Windows itself offers no way of saving often used folders as favorites so that they can be accessed with just a click. I already did test several applications like Flashfolder but I did discover [...]

It can be sometimes quite handy to automatically move certain types of files from the Internet Cache to another location on your hard drive. I’m especially thinking of multimedia files like movies, music, pictures or flash games. Skrommel created a wonderful application named Cache Sort which observes the Internet Cache and moves files into folders [...]

A colleague of mine build a static html website a few years ago. He slowly but steadily created hundreds of html pages which was great for him because he could simply use one already finished file as a template for a new one. It did however pose a problem as well. Updating information across all files was very time consuming. Think of extending the copyright notice each year, adding advertisement to the websites or changing the navigation.

USB devices in Windows can be configured to be optimized for quick removal or performance. If the first option is chosen it is normally no problem to simply unplug the device from the computer without removing it safely. If however the latter is chosen unplugging the device from the computer can lead to data corruption and data loss.

Users who download and install the service pack 1 for Windows Vista are most likely not reverting to the old state their computer was in unless something stops functioning properly due to the service pack installation. If everything turns out well you might like the following tip [found at Digital Inspiration] that cleans Windows Vista [...]

Many file hosters require registration before you can use their service which is often sometimes that turns users away from the service. If you are looking for a simple file hoster that lets you upload files with a size of up to five Gigabyte without registration you might want to consider File Dropper.

The biggest fear of webmasters – besides being hacked – is the fear that the website becomes unavailable and that all visitors will see the dreaded “Cannot connect” message in the browser. This is extremely harmful especially when you are a full time webmaster whose life (literally) depends on those websites. No one can manually [...]

My old hoster had the habit of providing me with 20 Megabyte log file chunks that I could download to my computer. I did run a great forum back then that had lots of traffic and I always had to download several log files and combine them when they were downloaded on my computer. That’s one practical use for the software TxtCollector which combines text documents found in folders and subfolders that the user specifies.

It is possible to set the Windows Taskbar to autohide if the mouse is not in the area. It will automatically appear again if you move the mouse in the area of the taskbar. A user on the Donation Coder forum asked if there was a way to prevent this from happening and if it [...]

Text Stat is a small program for Windows that analyzes text files and html documents displaying a wide variety of statistics about it in the end. It displays figures about the amount of paragraphs, words, letters, sentences, printable characters, spaces, carriage returns, number of words per sentence, syllables per word and a word list with [...]

The Windows Task Manager is great for a first quick glance at the running processes and applications but it lacks functionality that is needed as well. If you wanted to check why an application or process is running you would have to check the startup settings which are not accessible in the task manager. This would mean to either look in the Windows Registry and open a system tool like msconfig or open a third party application like Autoruns from Sysinternals.

I had my first overclocking experience with my brand new Pentium 75 back then in the days when this was considered a fast cpu. A friend of mine actually introduced me to it to and we managed to make the computer a little bit faster that way. After that I never looked back and never [...]

This is not strictly software or web apps, but a Moleskine may be a great addition to many people’s lives. Think of it as your Outlook when you’re away from the PC. In reality all a Moleskine is, is a simple notebook, or diary (many types exist), but due to it’s quality production and excellent [...]

I like the Windows Vista Games menu that display a list of installed games on your system, games that Windows Vista recognizes as games that is. Boxart is displayed for some games while only the icon is displayed for others which somewhat makes the menu look ugly and out of shape. The difference between supported and unsupported games is visible and it would be much nicer if there would be an standard display for all entries.

There are tons of applications and other instances where you need to either test using dates, or you actually need random dates. If you want to write posts on your blog ahead of time, and post them randomly between the 1st of March and the 2nd of April, the random date and time value generator [...]

Way back in February I found a cool tool to browse Wikipedia from the desktop called IndyWiki, so let’s get our hats and whips ready and a take a look at the application. My first impression was that this is too simple, it doesn’t have any fancy buttons, it looks like it’s lacking some features [...]

Yesterday I spent about 4 hours trying to get a pdf right. I was making a subscription based newsletter for my website, so I obviously needed something of high quality. I couldn’t use Acrobat, since that costs an insane amount of money, and everything else I use couldn’t get it right. Sure, you can use [...]

There is no automatic way to adjust the priority of a process in Windows using the default tools supplied by Microsoft. It is possible to adjust the current process priority but this setting is only valid for the current setting. Once the process gets killed, for example by closing the application or rebooting, it reverts the priority back to the default one.

Avedesk was mentioned on one of my favorite websites Donation Coder and it sounded so incredible that I had to give it a try immediately. One could say that Avedesk adds widgets to your desktop, not the kind of useless widgets like the clock in Windows Vista. I’m talking about widgets that look great and provide enough functionality to justify their presence on the desktop.

Did you ever run an application that was designed for a specific resolution on your new shiny 1920×1200 monitor only to find out that it was almost impossible to work with it in that resolution ? I’m not only talking about old DOS games here but also about presentations for instance or applications that have been developed in house. Basically everything that goes full screen automatically could be affected as well.

Max was nice enough to send me an invite for the online application service Aviary, or more precisely the main website and the image editor application which are freely accessible after registration. Users can access their dashboard through the main interface which displays a list of featured images, collaborations and recent images alongside your latest activities.

One application to rule them all. If you regularly take screenshots of Windows or the Desktop, edit them afterwards and upload them to a free image host you might find SHUP helpful. The software has all those functions build in which means you do not have to open two or three applications to do the same.

What a busy week the last one has been. I was a little bit disappointed with the performance last week and had no good feeling about this one but the developers really surprised me with many updates to fantastic programs.

Several video portals on the Internet have restrictions in place that prevent videos about a certain file size or length to be uploaded to their website. The normal limit is 100 Megabyte per file and a maximum length of ten minutes. Video uploaders create several parts of videos that are larger or last longer than the default limits – I came upon videos with ten and more parts on Youtube.

Piky Basket is a Windows shell extension that lets you add files and folders from different locations of your hard drive to a virtual basket to perform file operations on all of the files and folders at the end. You basically select as many files and folders as you like from your system and perform a file operation on them afterwards.

I have been in contact with the creator of the excellent DefenseWall HIPS application for some time now and he was so nice to give away ten copies of his software to Ghacks readers. Let me first explain what the software does. DefenseWall HIPS is a Host Intrusion Prevention System that uses sandboxing and virtualization to protect the computer from dangers that are not stopped by anti-virus applications.

A program called Viewpoint Media Player was suddenly installed on my friend’s computer and he was so surprised that he had to call me and ask me if I knew why this program was installed on his computer. I have never heard of Viewpoint before but did a quick search for viewmgr.exe and Viewpoint Media Player to find out that it can be automatically installed with several programs from AOL and other vendors.

A visitor was asking me a while ago if there were really download managers for websites like Rapidshare and I simply told him at that time that they would exist. JDownloader is a Rapidshare Download Manager that comes with a lot of functions to make downloading files from Rapidshare and dozens other file hosting websites a breeze.

The Windows clipboard function is not really practicable. It stores only the last text string that you have copied and once you copy another one the previous one is not longer available. It happened more than once that I lost a text phrase that I still needed because I accidentally copied another item to the clipboard.

Locate is one of the fastest ways to search for files and content in files in Windows. It uses a file database which is created once at first run and then updated regularly to reflect the changes to the system. The initial scan takes a few minutes while the updates usually finish in a matter [...]

Calibrating a monitor, be it LCD or CRT monitor, can be a tedious task. I for one have always doubts about the settings that I have chosen when setting up the monitor for the first time. Questions about the monitor’s brightness, the colors, contrast are not that easy to answer if you only have to rely on your eyes and have no test patterns that help you determine the correct settings.

Where do you store your usernames and passwords ? In a text document on your computer ? In your wallet ? Storing sensible information like passwords, but also other type of data like information about medication or credit card numbers, unencrypted is a security risk. If someone is after those information he immediately knows how to use them against you.

I’m using three dedicated servers at the moment with more than a Terabyte of free hard drive space. I thought of some good uses for that space and came up with the idea to use it to store backups from my computers. The plan is to use the backup software Cobian Backup 8 to create scheduled backups and upload those backups straight to my root server using an ftp account I created for that purpose.

I always disliked resizing multiple images using the image viewers that I have been using throughout the day. It was not a problem if I had to resize one or two images but a folder with dozens or hundreds of images would simply take to long to resize or edit.

Assuming you have some kind of headset or at least a cheap mike with speakers in the worst case, I bet you’ve already tried using some voice-over-IP services and you may have liked it except its being rather inflexible, heavy and maybe even complicated to set up.

Windows XP is creating a backup of every patch that you install for the operating system. The files are placed in the Windows directory and start with $NtUninstall. Microsoft is creating those backups so that the user can easily uninstall the patch if problems should arise.

In a move that can only be described as desperate the RIAA, or better Cary Sherman, its President, suggested at the State of the Net Conference to bundle filters that check for copyrighted data with programs that would benefit the user such as antivirus applications to counter the problem with encryption that they are currently facing. He did not stop there though and suggested that the ISP would monitor, ehm, filter, the user as well through the likes of the modem for instance.

If you want to find out which file type is opened with which application you normally take a look into the File Types tab in Tools > Folder Options. Unfortunately though this menu that is displaying all registered file types is not listing lots of information especially if you consider that you cannot resize the window which means that you can only see several file types there and have to scroll a lot.