Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News back in 2005. Martin started his career as a tech support representative at a large German financial corporation which he used to finance his college education in English, Information Technology and History.
He quit college and his job when Ghacks began to attract a large enough readership. He made the decision to become a full time blogger and webmaster, and has not looked back since.
Martin is interested in all things tech. His primary focus is on desktop operating systems, web browsers, Internet services, and privacy related topics.
He published the book The Complete Windows 10 Privacy Guide: Windows 10 Fall Creators Update version in 2017. Martin writes a weekly column for fellow tech site Betanews as well.
You can reach Martin on Facebook or on Twitter. Please use the contact form at the bottom of the page to contact the author directly.
Martin has been quoted or mentioned in many major online and print publications, including Forbes, Lifehacker.com, ComputerWorld, LinkedIn, Reddit, Betanews.com, Bleeping Computer, TechCrunch, PC World, Tom's Hardware, Slashdot, Hacker News, The Register, and more.
Martin's articles on Ghacks
We have all seen and read about problems with WGA before and it seems some users are currently encountering a new bug in Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 which prompts for activation every time the computer is started even if the operating system has been activated before.
Ebooks are normally supplied as txt, pdf, htm or lit documents that most mp3 players can't read by default. Most of the mp3 players however have the ability to display images as long as they are in the correct size. This is the principle that eBook to Images uses to create images from eBooks that can then be read in mp3 players.
Microsoft Powerpoint has one huge disadvantage. It only supports local presentations and offers no way to show a presentation to users of a conference that take part from different offices. Most companies send the presentation by email to those users but this is not the best solution in my opinion.
My Pictures 3D is a 3D screensaver that offers virtual tours through different environments such as castles, exhibitions and a space station showing pictures that you have selected on the walls. This means that you can create a very unique screensaver by adding pictures of the last holiday or family meeting for instance which are then shown while walking through the halls.
If you choose to delete the cache whenever Firefox exits it's gone, right ? Wrong ! Sure, it got deleted from the hard disk but every file recovery utility, like Recuva, will be able to restore the deleted cache which means that everyone may take a look at each and every website that you visited during your last browsing session.
Blowfish Advanced manages to provide the user with several security and encryption features that I have not seen before in one utility. The first purpose of Blowfish Advanced is to encrypt - and decrypt - files offering eight different encryption algorithms, three data compression algorithms and keys with a length of up to 1024 bit.
The installation of Windows Vista is painfully slow and takes up to 30 minutes. If you reinstall Windows Vista regularly you might like the following method to speed up the installation of Windows Vista. You do need a high speed USB device (faster than 12000 KB/s, for example the OCZ ATV Turbo 4GB Flash Drive (USB2.0 Portable)) with at least four Gigabytes of RAM and a running copy of Windows Vista.
I'm using Firefox on my desktop computer and on my Toshiba notebook. They have been running independently for some time until I realized that it would make more sense to sync the Firefox profiles to use the same bookmarks, passwords and cookies on both computers.
Thunderbird portable is the portable version of Thunderbird, it does not require an installation which makes it an ideal tool for USB sticks and removable storage devices. I'm using Thunderbird on my desktop computer and decided that I wanted to use Thunderbird Portable on my USB drive to be able to check mails when on the road.
You might remember that I wrote about quitting my day job to become a professional blogger and Internet consultant and I would like to take the opportunity to write about the first 15 days of December which have been my first two weeks without a "backup" job.
Did you know that all editions of Microsoft Word support several startup parameters that can be helpful in more than one occasion? The easiest way to start Word with parameters would be to create a shortcut of the winword.exe, right-click the shortcut and select Properties from the menu and append the switches at the end of the Target line.
Windows XP does not save the location of the icons on your desktop which means that a resolution change will change the location of the icons on your desktop as well, the bad thing about this is that Windows offers no way to restore desktop icons. That means that icon positions change whenever you install new drivers for your video card.
Keyboards have limited space and offer only a certain number of accents that can be typed normally. Those are normally the accents that are used in the country where that keyboard has been sold, all other accents however are not that easily accessible and users have to use keyboard shortcuts to write down those letters.
OlFix is a tool that tries to repair several problems that users can encounter using Microsoft Outlook. The program is portable and does not require an installation, it should work with all versions of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. Its main features are that it can repair Outlook profiles, repair contact links, extend reminder folders, delete search folders, change message classes, find duplicates, set file extensions, start several Outlook repair command line options, repair the inbox and automatically find and delete extend.dat.
The Open and Save file dialog in Windows is not really optimized and Microsoft somehow misses to improve that dialog with every release of a new Windows operating system. Saving different file types in different folders always means to click through your folder structure whenever the file type changes which puts a strain on the right (or left) trigger finger.
This is the second part of the article that explains how to build an USB Rescue Stick for Windows XP. The first dealt with all the preparations while this one will deal with the creation of the bootable USB stick and the configuration of it.
It is always a good idea to have a rescue disk or stick at hand in case you encounter difficulties in your operating system. This could start by not booting properly, Windows not starting up or errors in Windows that prevent that you from working normally with it. I'm going to explain how everyone who is running Windows XP Service Pack 2 can create a USB Rescue Stick and use that stick to rescue and repair the system.
Are you 18 years of age or older and living in the United States ? Are you the owner of the computer and use either Windows XP or Windows Vista as your main operating system ? Then you might apply to join the Windows Feedback Program which will supply you with a free Microsoft application of your choice if your application gets accepted.
I have to admit that I like to play flash games from time to time and enjoy some tremendously. It happens that websites that offer flash games are not available at the time that you want to play the game which is why I would like to explain how you can easily save flash games on your hard drive to play them without an Internet connection.
Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1 has been finally released - sort of - and can be downloaded from the Microsoft download website. The links are already up and it is only a matter of time when the links do not point to a Ups sorry link not found message but the real download link of the Office 2007 Service Pack 1.
Do you read EULAs thoroughly every time before you accept the End User License Agreement or do you just scroll down to the bottom and click on accept without reading the agreement before ? I do the latter most of the time mostly because I do not have the time to read through it and probably not the knowledge of the terms used in the EULA which would lead to more investigation on my part.
Did you know that the Zune, the mp3 player from Microsoft, has a filesharing feature that is probably one of the best ever implemented in mp3 players ? Did you also know that Microsoft restricted playback of song shared using that filesharing option to three playbacks in the new Zune players ? The old players had an even tougher restriction set in place, their restriction was three plays or three days.
NBC offers two official ways to watch their tv shows online. The first is NBC Direct which forces uses to download and install DRM infested software that adds the permanent MediaAgent.exe process to your system wasting resources even though the NBC Direct client is not running.
I think it happens to everyone every now and then. We try to close an application and another one pops up in that moment and we accidentally close this one that we did not want to close at all. This meant that we had to open this program again while clenching our fists to trying not to cry out loud about this goddamn incident.
If you did update your version of Windows Vista with the latest release candidate of Service Pack 1 you might have noticed an annoying text in the lower right corner of your operating system stating Windows Vista (TM) Evaluation Copy. Build 6001 even if you are running a genuine version of Windows Vista.
What was the password again for that website ? I bet you have asked that question numerous times, I know that I did. I'm not that good at remembering passwords and it happens that one slips under the radar and I have troubles remembering it. This is not such a huge problem in Firefox with its Password Manager that reveals all passwords that you have saved before but it could be on in Internet Explorer.
Whenever you start Skype, which loads the process Skype.exe, another process named skypePM.exe is loaded. SkypePM.exe is the Plugin Manager of Skype that is always loaded during the start of Skype even if you are not using a single plugin in Skype. This is not really efficient considering that this process uses 15+ Megabytes of RAM for doing nothing at all.
The long awaited Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista is scheduled for a release later this week and Microsoft is doing its best to provide everyone, from the end user to the it professional, with information about the upcoming service pack 1. Five documents in total have been released that address specific user groups.
How do I open .docx files was an article that I wrote some time ago. It explained how users that did not use Microsoft Office 2007 were able to open .docx documents that they downloaded or received from users who were using Office 2007. Some time has passed since writing the initial article and I thought it would be nice to take a look at more methods and programs that let users open. docx documents.
I started to collect components for a new computer that I wanted to build last month and decided that it would be nice and helpful if I would post a monthly update on the components, prices and my decision. This is not only helpful for readers of this article but also for me because I know that some of you have way more knowledge of computer hardware than I have.
The Mikontalo Lights Project was created by the students of Tampere University of Technology in Finland. "The object of MIKONTALOLIGHTS was to create the world's physically largest colored graphics platform by using the windows of Mikontalo's D-staircase as light pixels. The platform was used to play Tetris and other games and present demos created by the students of Tampere University of Technology."
Drag and Drop is probably the more comfortable way to move emails around but keyboard shortcuts can speed up the process tremendously. That is what Nostalgy, a Mozilla Thunderbird add-on, is all about. It adds keyboard shortcuts to move and copy messages, change folders and display the folder pane.
Email spam is so common these days that it has become a part of our live to wade through the spam to identify the real emails that have been sent to our mail account. It can be a challenge for the average user sometimes while IT-professionals and experienced users identify legit and fake emails at a glance .
One cold winter days you might find yourself hanging around the web, visiting the same boring sites every day and staring at your screen without any purpose and new inspiration. In that case, it would be the right time to get up and check what the world looks like from outside too (alright, maybe I'm not the right person to give such advice). Or if it's too cold to go out at the moment, you may be interested in these advisory lists providing links to websites that are special in a certain way.
If you ask computer users about the anti-spyware software that they have installed to protect their system they will most likely name Spybot Search and Destroy or Ad-Aware. Those are the most commonly used anti-spyware programs. Some would probably name Windows Defender from Microsoft or Spyware Terminator or some commercial products.
The software Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery was designed for distributed recovery of lost passwords providing hardware acceleration for NTLM password recovery using GeForce 8 video cards which speeds up the process by a factor of up to 25).
I'm not that fond of online virus scanners because they always need special file access privileges and scan your files which could be a privacy issue as well. Infected or Not from Panda Antivirus however catched my attention by providing interesting statistics about infected computers on a worldwide and country wide scale.
Docsyncer was mentioned on the Digital Inspiration blog as a service that automatically synced Microsoft documents such as doc and xls with the Google Docs web service. This can be incredible helpful if you do use Microsoft Office and Google Docs. This could for instance be the case if you upload your Word or Excel documents to Google Docs to be able to work with them on a different computer.
I bet you have never seen such a tempting Trojan before. The Trojan named Melissa Strip, identified as TROJ_CAPTCHAR.A by TrendMicro and Trj/RompeCaptchas.A by Panda, starts by asking the user if he wants to play a game where she (Melissa) will strip for the user if the enters the correct code.
If you are looking for a quick way to copy music from your Apple iPod to a computer you might find the software iPod Folder which is available for Windows and Mac more than suitable. Users can start the transfer of the music with just three clicks. The first click selects the iPod that is connected to the computer, the second click selects the destination folder on the computer and the third finally starts the transfer of the music.
