I was browsing to a website today that actually required I have Real Player installed. Real Player? I definitely would not put that annoying Spyware/resource hog on my PC. Then I remembered I installed a version of QuickTime Lite to view sites that required that, so I figured there would be a cool alternate version of Real Player out there. Sure enough! Real Alternative is a great way to bypass installing the whole Real Player pig. Also, when installing it you can choose to just install what you need.
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
This article was written by MysticGeek, a tech blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.
If you dislike the new Windows Vista shutdown menu, you are probably in the majority. An alternative option is to create icons that will let you shut down, lock, or restart your computer without having to mess with that stupid popup menu.
I received so many emails about the Super Mario Bros wallpaper on my screen in the Outlook Desktop article that I figured I’d share the wealth with everybody.
We’ve all been hearing about the new IMAP support in Gmail, but how do we access that from Outlook? Those of you that have been waiting patiently will be happy to know all the instructions are on this page.
When you want to categorize all of your email messages in Outlook a lot of people use Folders to achieve this. The traditional drag and drop is a good way to keep them organized. However, in the blustering fury of your day, how many times have you caught yourself accidentally dragging a folder into another where it is not supposed to be? I caught myself doing that today and thought I would share this quick tip.
Should I turn off my computer every night? Is it better to have it Hibernate? Should I have set it to Standby? What is the best option for my computer? I get these questions all week when people are asking about their home PC’s. I believe the jury is still at on what is the best answer. Instead of going into a long explanation I advise people about what I do. I never turn of my home computer or my work computer for that matter and have never had any issues.
Google Calendar is simply a great calendar application, and for many of us it has become the logical choice. The only problem is that to add a new appointment you have to open the calendar. There should really be a simpler way.
If “My Computer” takes a really long time to open on your computer, you are most likely experiencing a well-known issue where Windows hangs while trying to search for network folders and printers before displaying anything to you.
I get home PC security questions all the time. So, I figured I would post my opinion on various methods for protecting your PC from viruses, spyware, etc. First off, I by no means endorse any pay for security suites except for one situation; and that is if you’re grandma is using a PC. They grew up in a non tech age and if you don’t want to be running over there every 10 minutes (which may happen anyway) just throw Norton or Trend on it. Set up auto updates and daily scans. Set it and forget it.
If you use the excellent Synergy application to share your keyboard and mouse between computers, you’ve probably noticed some weird behaviors in Windows Vista… especially when running any application that requires administrator permissions.
Have you ever wanted to just “stick” your Outlook calendar to the desktop? For those of us with multiple monitors it makes even more sense… just having your calendar open on the second monitor at all times would be a great productivity boost.
One of the nicer features of Outlook 2007 is the way it neatly groups your messages by date or other criteria, but it’s not always easy to see at a glance. There’s a little-known option buried in the settings that will shade the group headings to make them more easy to distinguish.
This article was written by Daniel Spiewak, a great software developer and friend of the How-To Geek.
This tip is absolutely and completely useless, and will even make applications that depend on timestamps have issues. It’s mostly just to be used as a cool trick you can show off to your friends, so we’re going to show you how it works.
Ubuntu Gutsy is the latest major release of the most popular Linux distro, released on October 18, 2007. Like all Linux distributions you can upgrade easily even while the release is in beta, but now that it’s been released you should have much better luck with it.
Nothing is worse than spyware, Adware, Malware … etc. However, Crapware comes in extremely close. Crapware is all the extra needless applications say Dell puts on their computers. They sell it as though you’re getting some great deal because your computer is coming pre-installed with say a 90 day trial of Mcaffe. Well, Crapware strikes it’s ugliness in many places. While rebuilding a computer this week I found a great example from Adobe’s Shockwave.
When you have hundreds of e-mails to go through in any given day, it can be difficult to keep track of them all. Going through them in the morning before having your coffee you may miss one or two that you thought were read. Here is a quick tip to show if the message has been read or not from the Reading Pane.
I really get annoyed with Error Reporting in Windows XP. It is just another wasted click to close the message … and especially if the system is slowing up and an error message pops up multiple times. I rely on Event Viewer to troubleshoot any issues with an OS anyway so … here is how to disable Error Reporting in XP.
It drives me crazy that YouTube videos start playing automatically. It’s especially annoying when you click on a link from a co-worker and then the phone rings… and then your speakers start blaring a completely inappropriate sound, usually accompanied by terrible dancing.
How often do you find a great article without the time to read it, so you bookmark it and completely forget about it? This happened to me constantly until I found the Readeroo extension for Firefox, which lets me queue pages for easy retrieval later.
If you use Ad-Aware se Version 1.06 you know all to well of the annoying sound it makes when a scan is complete. Here is how to disable that annoyance.
When you have a document up on your network that several users have access to, it is nice to know the time and date it is modified. For instance if there is an interoffice group project, team leaders can keep track of when a document is created, printed, or last saved.
So you’re looking at your Google Analytics traffic and you notice a large amount of visits coming from a particular traffic source… but where exactly are they linking to?
