Archive for September, 2008

Download Yahoo Messenger 9.0

September 26th, 2008

Yahoo Messenger 9.0 is now available and integrates with the latest versions of Windows XP and Vista.  Of course it comes with a bunch of new features and redesigned interface and is ready to compete with the latest release of Windows Live Messenger.

One of the new features is the Yahoo Messenger Pingbox. This lets users IM you without the need for Messenger or a Yahoo ID. There will also be a few new skins and more emoticons. Overall it is a better and easier to use product.

The new Pingbox feature:

Yahoo Messenger Pingbox

 

For all of you Yahoo Messenger fans, you can download the latest version below.

Download Yahoo Messenger 9 Here

 

No comments »

Posted in General, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Tags:

Repair PST Files

September 25th, 2008

If you have ever used Outlook, you are too aware of how annoying PST files are. They are hard to find, have problematic file sizes and they often become corrupt. Besides that, Outlook is a great product.

Anyway, for too long the management of PST files within Outlook has been a real hassle. Rolling back to older versions and trying to repair existing PST files never works well.

We have recently been playing around with a new tool that is a PST file recovery program. So far we have been pretty impressed with the product. It does a good job and works quite fast. So if you have any PST issues at all, give this product a try. The download is free, so you can try it out and see what you think.

Scan and Repair Your PST Files – Free Download

No comments »

Posted in General, Outlook Errors

100GB CompactFlash Memory Card

September 24th, 2008

There is a handy new CompactFlash memory card being released – and this one has a whopping 100GB of storage. I have been waiting for something like this for a long time now.

The new memory card is being released by Pretec and will be the world’s largest CompactFlash memory card. At 100GB that is pretty impressive. Not only are the cards data capacity storage impressive but the speed is awesome too. These things are not slow, with transfer rates of around 35mb/s.

These should be available sometime around the end of 2008. You can expect to pay somewhere around $600 for the largest card. But with competitors catching on, I would expect prices to be driven down soon after. So keep an eye out for these, they should be good!!

No comments »

Posted in General, Useful Stuff

Tags:

Cool New Blue Track Mice From Microsoft

September 12th, 2008

It looks like lasers are out, with the new Microsoft Blue Track Mice.

These new mice use blue beams and wide angle specular optics architecture instead of laser. I have no idea what that actually means, but these mice are looking pretty cool.

The advantages of these blue beams is that the mice will be more functional on a variety of different surfaces.  They should have no problem working on marble, granite, concrete, carpet, or pretty much anything. 

These should be out sometime in November, so put them on your Christmas shopping list.

No comments »

Posted in General, Useful Stuff

Cool Open Source Tools

September 10th, 2008

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.

No comments »

Posted in General, Useful Stuff, Windows Software

Easily Reactivate Windows XP

September 9th, 2008

For those of you thinking of reinstalling Windows XP, just note that you will probably need to reactivate it. While this is generally a pretty easy process, in some circumstances it can be problematic.

If the reactivation process doesn’t go correctly, you will need to deal with Microsoft support directly and this could be a very time consuming process. So try this instead.

Before re-installing Windows XP, there is a file you can copy that will help you avoid the reactivation process.

Make a copy of the following file, which you will then later replace after reinstalling XP. (So be sure to copy it to an external drive/usb drive etc)

c:\windows\system32\wpa.dbl

After XP has been reinstalled, boot into safe mode. Rename the existing wpa.dbl and replace with your old version. Now there should be no need for activation.

No comments »

Posted in Windows XP

Tags:

Prism Video Converter

September 5th, 2008

I was reading the latest version of a computer magazine lately and was happy to see they offered a free version of Prism video converter. Since my last video converter seemed to just not want to work after I upgraded to Vista I thought I’d give it a go.

If you want to give it a go you can download a version from download.com here

Basically the software lets you do all the video conversions you can do in most other conversion software, but with Prism I straight away liked to features;

  • Ease of output settings
  • Ease of adding files to convert

I have found with some other video conversion software that you need to have a great deal of knowledge on video and conversion to run the program. So I was pleasantly surprized when I found how easy this was to use.

This software lets you convert any video from any one of these formats;

  • avi
  • wmv
  • asf
  • mpg
  • 3gp
  • mp4
  • mov
  • flv

So basically you can convert all your videos for things like Youtube, iPods, mp3′s etc.

Here is a screenshot of the program

Prism Video Converter

Here is a simple run through on how to convert a video;

Select add files

Prism Add Files

It will then list out the movie you selected;

Prism List Out

Now select your output format;

Prism Output

Now click the convert button;

Prism Convert

The software will now take a while for the conversion to take place but once done you will find your video has been converted and placed in the output folder you selected.

No comments »

Posted in General, Useful Stuff

Tags:

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

September 4th, 2008

If you didn’t already know, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 has been released. It was actually released ahead of schedule by a day or so. This beta does have quite a few changes so if you are an IE nut then you will probably want to download this release. I won’t bother listing all the new features here, because I am sure those of you that are interested in IE 8 just want to download it. So I have provided the link below.

Download Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

I haven’t installed it yet myself. When I installed the previous version I had a lot of system problems – freezing and crashing. So I will let you all know how this one goes.

What I have heard though, is that Javascript runs much faster in IE8. This was from an unconfirmed test, but supposedly IE8 is over 30% faster in Javascript that IE7. Hopefully speed improvements will be noticeable in all areas of the product.

No comments »

Posted in General, Internet Explorer, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Tags:

Better Boot Times for Windows 7

September 3rd, 2008

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. 

No comments »

Posted in Windows Software, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Tags:

Google Chrome Browser

September 2nd, 2008

Google announced on Monday that it has been hard at work on an open-source browser known as Chrome, a beta version of which will be released in 100 countries on Tuesday.

The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Some of the features of Google Chrome include;

  • An address bar with auto-completion features called “omnibox.”
  • The V8 JavaScript virtual machine, advertised as significantly faster than existing JavaScript engine implementations.
  • A privacy mode, called “Incognito”.
  • Web applications can be launched in their own browser window without an address bar and toolbar.
  • Chrome includes an automatically updated phishing and malware blacklist using the Google Safe Browsing API.
  • Uses the WebKit Rendering Engine.
  • Puts individual tabs and plug-ins into separate processes, for security and accountability.
  • Integration of Gears.

Some Google Chrome screenshots;

Google Chrome

Google Chrome

No comments »

Posted in General

Tags: