How-To Geek

This article is part of Mysticgeek’s Realm, a How-To Geek blog focused on Cyber geekery.

One of the biggest complaints about Vista has always been the speed problems when copying files, especially large files over the network. If you want to dramatically speed up your file copying, then you want to take a look at TeraCopy.

So far in our series about free anti-virus utilities we’ve covered AVG, Avast, AntiVir and ClamWin, and today we’re going to show you PC Tools AntiVirus, by the same people that made the well-known Spyware Doctor anti-spyware utility.

Have you ever wondered how to remove the “Catalyst(TM) Control Center” item from the desktop context menu? After writing yesterday about how to remove the NVIDIA Control Panel, a number of readers wrote in asking how to get rid of the ATI version.

If you want an open-source anti-virus utility that lets you scan on demand instead of real-time, you may want to take a look at ClamWin, a utility based on the ClamAV scanning engine.

All settings and components can be controlled from the User Interface. AVG Free Edition includes more than just anti-virus protection.  Other components include:

Have you ever wondered how to remove the “NVIDIA Control Panel” item from the desktop context menu? If so, you probably didn’t realize that it’s trivially easy to remove.

One of our many great readers wrote in the other day asking why his computer was making a noise when he pressed the caps lock key. After thinking about it for a minute, I realized that he probably had accidentally turned on Toggle keys, which makes a sound when you press CAPS lock.

Earlier this week we took a look at free anti-virus application AntiVir which received great comments from everyone. Continuing with our series on free anti-virus tools, today we will take a look at Avast Home Edition.

So the Drives tab in DriveSpacio will show you a graphical view of all drives on your computer, with all sorts of great charts and graphs.

Over the next few weeks we will take a look at a few of the reliable free options.

If you’ve seen the screenshots of Google Chrome on XP vs Vista, you’ve probably noticed that the interface looks completely different. If you want to make your XP version use a slick black theme, you can do so with a custom hack.

As almost everybody knows by now, Google has released their Chrome web browser, a stripped down browser built for speed and an inline search bar known as the Omnibox. The only problem is that by default there are only 5 suggestions, but with a simple command line switch we can increase that number.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 – microsoft.com

If you’ve ever had booting problems, spyware or viruses, you’ve likely attempted to boot from the Windows CD and run some repairs… but sometimes that’s just not enough. Sure, you can easily backup your data using Ubuntu, but a much better option is to use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows.

Have you ever accidentally deleted the wrong file, or duplicated files while trying to select them with the mouse? Those types of mistakes can be extremely frustrating, but there’s a really, really simple way to reverse them.

If you want to send the email off to multiple contacts then just separate each email address with a semi-colon.  Hopefully this time saver will be useful to somebody out there!

The cool thing with email these days is you can pretty much use any client you want and still be able to check most of your web based accounts.  Most POP accounts such as hotmail or Gmail are able to be checked with any client.  Here we will take a look at how to get your Gmail into Windows Live Mail. 

If you are a fan of application launchers to quickly launch your favorite applications from the keyboard, you’ll probably want to take a look at a new one from Microsoft Office Labs called Speed Launch.

This article is part of Mysticgeek’s IT blog, a How-To Geek blog focused on IT geekery.

If you have a dual boot system and often switch back and forth from Vista to XP, you’ve probably already been annoyed with the fact that you have to wait until the boot menu comes up and choose the right OS… and half the time you step away and it ends up booting into the wrong one anyway.

After a number of readers have written in about how to remove the dotted black outline that sometimes appears when you make a file selection, I realized that I needed to write this up for everybody’s benefit, since there actually is a solution.

Have you ever had music playing loudly on your speakers when the phone rings… then you fumble for the speaker switch or the pause button on your music playing application while trying to answer the phone? Instead of bothering with that, I’ve always simply created a shortcut to mute the system volume instantly with the press of a key.

This article is part of Mysticgeek’s IT blog, a How-To Geek blog focused on IT geekery.

One of the many annoyances I have with Internet Explorer is the fairly small default width of the tab bar… as somebody who opens a lot of tabs all the time, it becomes difficult to manage. With a simple tweak, we can remove the command bar that usually sits on the right of the tabs.