Fix PC Errors

Audio drivers are a common failing point and can easily fall out-of-date.

Luckily there is a very easy way to update audio drivers without wasting any time.  Previously we had to search around manufacturer websites for hours looking for the correct driver.  If you have ever visited a driver manufacturer website, you probably know how hard they make it to find anything. The search functions never work either.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, you can now update your audio drivers in less than a minute with software such as Driver Detective, Driver Genius and Driver Updater. These are all great programs and they will update all of your system drivers, it is not limited to just audio drivers.

These programs also support all of the major manufacturers, so don’t worry about having an old or less popular driver. If an update for it exists, this software will find it.

Try it free and update your drivers now

Update Audio Drivers - Free Download

Quite often we get asked how to remove those annoying programs.

Well the first step is to try and remove these programs via the Windows installer. Of course this does not always work. In Control Panel, there is an option called “Add or Remove Programs”. This should be the first thing to try.

Now if that doesn’t work it can be difficult. Many programs leave remnants or have missing uninstall files and then can never be uninstalled. This clutters your PC and is also very annoying.

The best option in such situations is to use something like Perfect Uninstaller. This program has the ability to remove anything. No matter how hard it might be to uninstall, this product can handle it. It uses advanced registry editing and cleanup tools to fully remove any program that you don’t want.

So if you have something that won’t uninstall, give this a try. It is free to download.

Download Perfect Uninstaller - Free Download

If you need to recover lost photos, images or videos then you need not worry any longer.

There is a great new product that does exactly that. It recovers lost, corrupt and even missing photos from virtually any type of digital camera. It also has the capability to recover photos from hard drives, flash drives and pretty much any other type of media device.

The formats you can recover are not just limited to the typical image files (eg: gif, jpg, tiff, bmp). This product also recovers video files and sound files. So no matter what you have captured through your digital camera, it can be recovered (if necessary). Even if the SD card or flash drive has corrupted the files, there is still hope.

This product is called Stellar Photo Recovery and has become very popular for recovering data. Most of us have lost some important photos at one time or another, and with digital cameras it is all too easy to just press one button and lose data. It is also very common for image files to become corrupt due to the storage media they are on, so this is yet another reason for having this product on hand.

Try the free download below. It will allow you to recover files from any media device and you can specify which type of files to locate. It’s very easy to use.

Free download - Stellar Photo Recovery

The New Windows Live is launching pretty soon and looks to be a cool service. The new and updated Windows Live services will help you stay in touch easier, faster and better than before.

Along with this new service, there are also a bunch of cool new icons. And who doesn’t love a nice icon?

Below are some samples of the new icons that will be launching with the new Windows Live services.

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Fix Errors and Speed Up Your PC - Free Download

It looks like we will all have to wait a bit longer for the Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 release due to bugs, and lots of them.

The beta 2 release has been halted by approximately 17 bugs.  While the team is hard at work fixing the bugs, this will probably delay the release date to somewhere in late November. For now you can download the beta 1 version.

If you are still not using version 3 of Firefox, then you should upgrade ASAP, as there are many cool new features and interface tweaks.

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Fix PC Errors - Free Download

These days there are some fantastic open source products on the market. A huge amount of time and effort goes into these products and the fact that they are free is quite amazing. You can find products for almost any task and you can setup a PC to do almost everything without ever having to purchase a commercial product.

Here is a list of some of the best open source products available, some of these you should definitely test if you haven’t done so already.

Firefox - By now everyone would have heard of Firefox, unless you have been living under a rock. This is a great browser, secure, stable and pretty fast. It is a nice alternative to IE and works on all platforms.

Thunderbird - Thunderbird is a great little email product. In our office here we pretty much use Thunderbird for 95% of our email needs. This was developed by Mozilla and is also a multi-platform product. We have found Thunderbird to be much more stable that products such as Outlook/Outlook Express.

OpenOffice - OpenOffice is the free alternative to Microsoft Office. It does pretty much everything you will need, and has programs that are equivalent to Access, Excel, Powerpoint and Word. We have discussed this previously - see the post here on OpenOffice. 

Miro - Miro is a free internet TV and video player. It has thousands of channels can save YouTube videos and much more. Worth a look!

FileZilla - FileZilla is a free FTP solution. There is both a client and server version available, so it should be able to meet any of your FTP needs.  The client is available for all platforms, but the server is currently Windows only.

Gimp - Gimp is an image manipulation program. It isn’t Photoshop, but it is free. So if you have basic image editing needs then check this out.

uTorrent - uTorrent is a free torrent client. It is very lightweight, fast and easy to use. Highly recommended for downloading torrents.

Apache - This is probably the greatest web server available and yes it is 100% free. It also powers most of the servers on the web. If you ever need to setup a web server for home or office or any other needs, then use Apache. It works great on Windows and Linux.

MySQL - The world’s most popular open source database. MySQL is a powerful database program that can be used for almost any database requirements. The most common combination is to use MySQL with an Apache server. This works extremely well and is also used on most web server configurations on the web.

Well it has only taken a few years and feedback from millions and millions of annoyed users, but Microsoft has gotten the hint.

So for Windows 7, Microsoft will be working hard to dramatically improve dog slow boot times. This is a common issue that we deal with almost every week with our clients, so I think it is a great step for Microsoft to be moving in this direction. Hopefully they will continue to listen to the users.

In order to fix the boot times for Windows 7, Microsoft will focus on system services and reducing the number of services that boot (by booting only the essential core services), as well as reducing their CPU and memory demands. Basically it means the Microsoft programmers are going to have to stop being sloppy coders.

For now you can speed up Windows XP and Windows Vista boot times with our free download. 

With Windows 7 on the way, Microsoft has just released a new blog that is dedicated to the engineering of Windows 7.

The blog is headed up by two of the senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product and along with their team they will all post and comment at the blog.

The blog is intended to be a two way discussion with the developers and users of Windows. It will also give anyone interested in software development a good look into the challenges of a very large scale project - picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality. Windows has an added challenge of doing so for an extraordinarily diverse set of customers.

Overall this should be an interested blog to follow and it will be cool to see how Windows 7 will progress.

Windows 7 Blog can be found here

We just recenly posted on some of the new features coming out in MSN Live Messenger 9.0 and now we can happily tell you there are some leaked screenshots.

There are quite a few new features with new colors and headers. All of the dialogs are also styled properly. As far as features go, there is a major new feature called Groups (you can probably figure out how that works). There is also a photoshare feature which looks promising.

You can view some of the leaked screenshots here

From time to time we give people advice on how to make backups of their DVDs and for those of new to it, hopefully this quick little guide will put you on the right track.

Note: This info should only be used for backing up your own DVDs and not for circumventing copyright protection.

Backing up DVDs is a little more tricky to CDs. Especially if you are trying to backup certain movies and DVDs with encryption. This is where DVD Shrink comes in handy. This awesome piece of FREE software will allow you to easily backup any DVD.  DVD Shrink overcomes encryption with its own built-in algorithms, it also shrinks DVDs to a size that can fit onto a single DVD-R disk.

Using DVD Shrink is extremely simple. The software is lightweight and installs in less than a minute. Once installed, you simply select a DVD then click the “Backup” button and it will get shrunk to your hard drive or external drive. From here you can then burn the image using something like Nero.

Remember, this software is FREE and it is one of the best around for backing up your DVDs.

Download DVD Shrink here