I'm not using Internet Explorer 7 at all but I know some guys who like it so much that they might ditch Firefox for it. The new Internet Explorer 7 has basically the same functionality and expandability as Firefox. You can download add-ons for Internet Explorer 7 to add functions to it. The Windows Marketplace lists more than 550 add-ons for Internet Explorer 7. The major difference that I can see is that Microsoft offers free and commercial add-ons for Internet Explorer 7 while I do not know of a single Firefox add-on that is commercial. (correct me if I'm wrong)
Amazon offers a huge product catalogue on their different (country) websites which has one major problem and that is clarity. Navigating through the content can be really painful, especially if you only want to check the current price of several items that you would like to buy. One way to handle this would be to store all products as bookmarks and check them manually every day to see if the price was reduced. This is however not very practicable.
The free Amazon Price Watcher aids you in this task. It allows you to search many Amazon stores - including those for the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Canada) - using the Amazon Price Watcher interface. Just search for products in selected categories and save interesting results in a library. The library offers fast access to information such as price and availabilty including a price chart which displays the overall price trend.
It is very convenient to save login passwords for internet sites such as forums, blogs or paysites to login quicker to those websites. That is, it is great until you can't remember the password anymore but would like to know it again. This could be the case if you want to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox or Opera for instance. Protected Storage Pass View does not only reveal passwords that have been saved in Internet Explorer while accessing protected sites or using the auto complete form but also passwords that have been saved in Outlook Express and MSN Explorer.
Crap Cleaner has been released in a new version just a day ago and I decided to take another look at it. I removed all options during installation except the one that would create a start menu entry in Windows - no need for additional toolbars on my system. I especially wanted to take a look at the Issues tab which someone mentioned in the comments sometime ago.
The Issues tab in Crap Cleaner scans the registry for missing shared dlls, activex issues, unused file extensions, obsolete software and many more entries and displays them after finishing the scan. You may then click on fix all issues which prompts to backup your registry before continuing. After that the first issue is displayed with information why Crap Cleaner decided it is one.
I'm currently using the Screen grab extension in Firefox to save complete websites as pdf files to read them later or print them eventually. Screen grab has some limitations, mainly size of the website that should be saved and that it only works in Firefox. I sometimes use Opera or want to convert other documents such as emails to pdf.
DoPDF looks like the perfect replacement for Screen Grab. It is a freeware application for Windows and takes only a few megabytes of hard drive space. It adds a virtual printer to your installed printers in Windows and you can choose to make it the default one. Please make sure that the Print Spooler service is running during installation, otherwise the setup of the virtual printer will fail.
We had some reports coming in about some outages of the gmail - that is google mail - web interface which meant that some users could not access their mail accounts for several hours which seems to be a big problem for at least some of those users. In the time where customers for instance demand a fast, almost immediate, reaction to their emails it could become a matter of survival to receive and react to the mail.
So you have come to a website with many galleries that have a similar naming convention ? You would like to auto-navigate or automatically download all of the images without having to repeat the same step a hundred times ? Flipper, a firefox extension, could help you automate the task.
It is not that easy to use on first glance but it becomes clear after using the test gallery which was setup by the author of the extension. Flipper is working the following way: You click on the first image of the first gallery and hit CTRL + END afterwards which opens the configuration window of Flipper.
If you ever wanted to have a free software that would be able to handle all the different zip formats then you might want to take a look at the open source program called Universal Extractor. Universal Extractor can only be used to extract archives handling this task excellently. It supports a multitude of zip formats including the following popular ones: 7-zip archive, ace archive, arj, gzip, rar, tar and zip archives.
I was looking for a Firefox extension that would fill out certain forms automatically which would help me a lot because I'm filling out a lot of forms to test out new sites and register for products. The guys at downloadsquad found a nice Firefox extension called FireForm which does exactly what I was looking for.
20 minutes to increase the security of a computer, wow that must be a good guide. The guys at itsecurity have written a security guide that indeed covers the basics of PC security. I do know from first hand experience that many users do not follow simple PC security guidelines, e.g. they probably have a anti-virus solution but never update it.
I had a situation recently where I had to extract about forty emails with attachments in Thunderbird. Doing this manually wastes so much time and I was looking for a way to extract all the attachments automatically. Thankfully genbeta posted a reference to the Thunderbird Attachment Extractor extension which does exactly what I was looking for.
I have been using Netvibes to subscribe to and read feeds from other websites and recently decided to give Google Reader a try to see if the hype that it created was justified at all. I really like the options to customize the feeds into different windows and tabs in netvibes, I added some on different subjects such as tech and software and can switch between those tabs for fast access. Drag and Drop is used to move feeds around which makes this feature very fast.
The first time I saw the yubnub website I was thinking that no one would need this website at all but after some testing it became clear that it offers an easy way to access many services very fast without depending on bookmarks or links. If you do work with the command line in Windows or Linux you feel right at home, you enter a command and some parameters and yubnub does the rest.
Hey!Watch is a great new web 2.0 service that makes it easy to convert video files online. Hey!Watch offers advanced features that no online encoding service offers at the moment. You may upload your own videos and encode them into a great selection of formats or use a bookmarklet or firefox plugin to convert videos found on websites such as youtube and dailymotion.
There are many articles floating around on the internet covering this subject and I would like to stay at the basics this time. A way to secure Windows XP with little effort. You can't make a system 100% secure, there will always be ways to beat every protection. I collected a list of things that should be done to secure the system, it is not a huge list but it covers all the necessary steps I think.
I do not like Quicktime that much. I hate to use additional clients next to VLC to be able to view certain movies on websites. I also do not like the fact that you can't save movies easily if you do not use Quicktime Pro. I discovered a method that makes it possible to save movies from the Apple Trailer website to your local drive and watch them in your favorite movie player afterwards. I use VLC for this purpose but Quicktime Alternative for instance should be fine as well.
The name of this software distribution is probably a little bit out of line but the purpose is not. The goal is to reduce software costs for students but the compilation is also attractive to everyone else. The website offers a version of this distribution for Windows computers and for Macs. You may download it using the preferred method bittorrent to ease the load on the servers and reduce bandwidth costs.
About a month ago my mother called and asked if I could help her with a problem on her computer that I build and installed for her. The computer reacted slowly to her input and was opening unknown websites for no reason. It was immediately clear that some sort of spyware or even worse virus or trojan was responsible for this behavior. She was really desperate and I began to scan the system immediately.
I tried to install Kubuntu yesterday but the partitioner failed and I decided to try out Ubuntu today because I knew they were using different partitioners. I downloaded the Ubuntu iso image and burned it to a CD. I then changed the boot sequence in the bios to be able to boot Ubuntu from CD. The distribution that I downloaded is a live CD and installation CD at once which means it will boot the complete operating system from CD first and give you the choice to install it or simply use the live CD version.
Whenever I want to save a flash file, like a game or animation that I have been playing / watching, I have to go to the cache folder of Firefox and search for a file with the right extension and size. This is a lot of work if you have either a large cache or want to extract many flash files at once.
Today I'm going to write about my master plan to install Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista on my system to have them at my disposal next to my current Windows XP installation. I personally try to make the switch to Linux because I'm fed up with all the restrictions that Microsoft build (on pressure I assume) into Windows Vista. Nevertheless more than 99% of all my readers use Windows XP and I will continue writing articles for XP and Vista.
Lifehacker.com recently profiled the release of PortableApps Suite 1.0, a polished, light weight application that adds new functionality to USB keys, mp3 players, and external media by transforming these storage platforms into portable, private, personalized vehicles for launching programs and storing data.
Several security software solutions like xp-antispy exist for Windows XP and Security & Privacy Complete is one of them. The open source product offers to change security and privacy related settings in Windows XP. Everything is accessible from the main window and categorized in the following way: System, Internet Explorer 6, Media Player, Security Options, Services and Mozilla Firefox.
I'm very happy about the fact that Firefox 2.0 has a build in (English) dictionary which helps me correct most of the mistakes I make while writing articles here at ghacks. The build in dictionary is great but lacks certain features and that is why I went on a hunt for a better dictionary. Look what I found in my net today: The Sage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus.
Want to run the 5 big browsers (Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1,x and 2,x and Opera 9) at the same time?
Here is a little guide on how to do that.
Ever been to an website like www.nytimes.com and had to register to login? Of course you can register a fake account using a disposable email address (like 6url or dodgeit) But there are more people who do that, so why not have a database with these kinds of fake accounts?
If you are interested in stats about your general surfing habits then page addict might come in handy. This firefox extension records the time that you visited a website and displays some nice graphs showing the dates, the minutes you have been on those sites and the total amount of minutes that you were using firefox on that day. That is of course not everything: You may tag a site or more than one site and check the stats of those tags as well. If you visit cnn, bbc and yahoo for work you could tag them "work" and receive the exact amount of time that you visited those sites.
It seems that Microsoft added the upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 to the automatic upgrade feature of Windows XP. Automatic Updates will notify the user that a new version is ready for download giving the user the option to Install, Don't Install and Ask Me Later. It seems a pressing matter to Microsoft to get a large basis of Internet Explorer 7 users in a hurry to regain lost grounds in the waging browser war against Opera and Firefox.
I promised to write a second part of the article Top XP Freeware that every user needs and here it comes. I was concentrating on security aspects in the first article and will not write about every other freeware that every windows user should have on his system. I might miss one or two but I know that you will comment on this and help you me out.
Using Windows XP without those nifty little freeware programs is not a good idea. When you run it out of the box it is slow, offers many features no one needs, lacks many that everyone needs and raises privacy concerns that can only be fixed using third party tools. This is basically a listing of programs that I install everytime I setup Windows XP on a computer, the must have freeware utilities in my opinion.
The freeware Auto Window Manager adds additional functionality to the way windows manages the windows it displays. You could for instance customize that whenever a program opens it opens in maximized, minimized or default state. This setting should work with most programs and windows, i tried it with firefox and thunderbird for example.
There are times when it is safer to remain anonymous on the internet - be it that you want to write something about your current company on the web, live in a country that does everything to prevent it's citizens from accessing unbiased information or simply for the reason that you do not wish that someone could track what you are doing on the internet. In an ideal world every user should have the right to read and publish on the internet without the fear of loosing his job or life. The world however is not ideal and tools like FoxTor exist to help those people out.
Internet Explorer comes equipped with the same technique as firefox that allows users to create addons and offer them for download on a site that was specially created for this purpose by Microsoft. Ieaddons is the name of the site and looks like a typical slow-loading Microsoft website. Add-Ons are categorised in the four categories Security, Time Savers, Browsers and Entertainment.
Everyone in the world seems to have a digital camera nowadays and many seem to be happy using the software that came with the camera. I'am going to introduce some of the free products that I'am using with my camera - you might have heard about some already but I'am sure some are relatively unknown to most of you.
I've written a great deal about firefox and tons of extensions that have been developed for it but I've never done the same for thunderbird, the email client that is based on mozilla. I started using thunderbird about a week ago and imported all my emails from opera to it and I love this tool. It is fast, I can sort everything the way I like it and the spam mail recognition is awesome even without third party tools.
This topic has been covered before in my blog but I tend to take a look at older interesting topics from time to time and update them to reflect the changes that happened to the concept in the time between. One-Use-Emails, also known as Disposable Email Addresses and Throwaway Emails are really helpful when you do not want to give someone your real email address because you fear that they would abuse this information and probably sell the address to make a quick bug.
Songbird is a relatively new open source media player that is build from Mozilla and aims to revolutionize the media player market the same way firefox did to the browser market. Songbird is currently available in revision 0.2 "test flight" and runs on Windows 2000+, Linux and Mac just like firefox. Songbird comes with pretty much the same functionality as iTunes and more, due to the fact that it is based on the same core as firefox you can easily use songbird to browse between websites of radio stations, podcasts and blogs. Which means you play the songs and at the same time read what they have written in the same program.
System Safety Monitor 2 is available in a free version from the developers website. The tool basically works as a firewall preventing malicious software to be started automatically. The free version runs in paranoid mode which means you have to allow or disallow every process and get nagged quite a bit at the beginning. Once the majority of rules are established the software runs a lot smoother and seems to come forth only when you tend to install a new program or change existing ones.
You see lots of processes when you start your taskmanager, svhost.exe, csrss.exe, winlogon.exe and many more. A user who never dealt with those executables before has a hard time figuring out which are safe and which could be malicious because normally you can't say which program is using those files. A question like "Is svhost.exe a virus, is it safe ?" is normal and can be answered using the methods described below.
Beta and release candidate versions of Windows Vista, Microsofts latest operating system, can be download from the official Microsoft Vista website but getting a product key did not seem to be that easy. Everyone was able to download Windows Vista but this did not mean that you would receive a product key to activate the beta or release candidate. Without a product key Vista would only work for 14 days.
