Don't defrag flash drive

Should you defrag your flash drive? The answer is no. This article will gives you two reason why you shouldn't do so.

1. Flash drive does not work like a hard disk. There is no read/write head exist. Therefore, no matter where the data is save, it will not burdened the flash drive.


2. There is a limit in the number of time that you can write to your flash drive. Defrag process involves read and write. As a consequence, your flash drive will die sooner.

So, don't waste your time defragging the flash drive. Save it for your hard drive.

note: This article shows how long does a flash drive will last.

Drag file to print

This is a quick way to print a file without opening it yourself. What you need is a shortcut to the printer icon on your desktop. In order to print a file, just drag the file to the printer icon, and get your print.

To create a shortcut to the printer icon on your desktop,

1. Click on Start button > Printer and Faxes


2. Drag the default printer icon to the desktop

note: If you create a none default printer on the desktop, Windows will ask you to make it as default, the first time you drag a file onto it. You have to click on Yes, in order to use this feature.

Vostro 1400 Bios Update

Dell had released the bios update for Vostro 1400 notebook: version A08.

Fixes/Enhancements

1. Improve compatibility with Dell Wireless 1390 & 1490 Dell WLAN.


2. Fixed: System Hangs on Resume from S3 with Driver Verifier enabled.


3. Added enhancement for optical drives.

Grab it here

New Yahoo! Mail Addresses

Yahoo! Mail is now offering new mail address:

@ymail and @rocketmail

It is the new email address for the same great Yahoo! Mail.

If you have missed the desired username with Yahoo! Mail before, it is a chance for you to do so. Grab it while it is still available.

Link: New Yahoo! Mail

Portable Defrag Tool

Do you ever need a portable file defragmentation tool? Now you can bring one in your thumb drive. It is called Defraggler.

The main feature of Defraggler is that it is compact and portable. Another important feature of Defraggler is that it can also defrag individual files. Last but not least, this Vista support tool is brought to you by Piriform for free.

Link: http://www.defraggler.com

Give me C: drive

This is one of the quick way to explore the C: drive.

1. Press the Windows Key (usually it is located besides the the Alt key) altogether with the letter R.
2. Type in the forward slash "".
3. Hit the Enter key. It will open the explorer window with the C drive opened.

Note: For Windows 98 or ME, use the backslash "/". You can also type in the drive letter such as "C:" or "D:". Just don't forget the colon ":".

Add personal signature to Lotus Notes 7

Would you like to have every outgoing Lotus Notes messages signed automatically. Actually, it could be done.

To add a personal signature to Lotus Notes 7,

1. From the menu, choose Actions > Tools > Preferences.
2. Click the Signature tab.
3. Enter the signature text in the text area.
4. Select "Automatically append a signature to the bottom of my outgoing mail messages." to always display signature to all outgoing messages.
5. Click OK.

Note: To remove the signature, uncheck the check box in step 4.

Back up files with Windows Vista

Windows Vista (excluding Windows Vista Starter and Windows Vista Home Basic) has the ability to back up files, folders or the entire computer, via the Back Up and Restore Center.

To open the Back Up and Restore Center, open Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Backup and Restore Center.

To back up files, click on Back up Files, choose the backup destination, then click on Next.

On the next screen, select the type of files to back up, then click on Next.

On the next screen, configure how often to do the backup, then click on "Save settings and start backup".

That is all.

Your Desktop Snapshot

This tip will show on how to take a screen shot of a your screen. The very first step is to locate the Print Screen button (it might look like "Prnt Scrn" or "Prt Sc" or "PrtScn") on the keyboard. Usually it is located on the top right of the keyboard.

To take a snapshot of the whole screen, just press that button, and the picture will be copy to the clipboard.

Now, open the program to paste the image to such as Paint, or even Microsoft Word. Click on Edit > Paste. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+V. This will paste the image onto the working open document.

To take a snapshot of a current working window, hold download the ALT button (usually it is located besides the SPACE BAR), while pressing the Print Screen button.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 Final release download

Microsoft had finally released the final version of its Windows XP Service Pack 3. According to Microsoft, this update includes a small number of new functionalities, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system.

Windows XP SP3 ensures these PCs have all available updates and allows these PCs to leverage some new Windows Server 2008 capabilities, such as Network Access Protection (NAP). Although Windows XP SP3 does not include Windows Internet Explorer 7, Windows XP SP3 does include updates to both Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. It will update whichever IE version is installed on the computer.

As a conclusion, Windows XP SP3 combines all previously released performance, security, and stability updates. It also provides a limited number of new and enhanced functionalities, although it does not significantly change the Windows XP experience or bring functionality from newer versions of Windows to Windows XP.

Download Here

Protect your child from the Internet

Is everything on the Internet are welcome? Can you monitor what your child is doing on the Internet?

Now, you can. DNS expert David Ulevitch had offered a service called OpenDNS, in late 2005. The main objective of OpenDNS is to improve the Internet experience for everyone from system administrators at large organizations to parents at home. In other words, OpenDNS could block the bad sites and allow the good. The best part is that, this service is provided for free.

How does OpenDNS works for you? OpenDNS could do content filtering automatically, by categories, ranging from social networking to gambling, and more.  Don't forget the adult sites. All you have to do is to select which category to filter. Besides, OpenDNS could also monitor phishing Web sites via PhishTank.com data. If you really want to monitor what your child is doing on the Internet, OpenDNS also features Statistics.

Setting up OpenDNS on PC or network router is easy. It is just a matter of changing the DNS, register for an account and choose what to filter. OpenDNS provides a very good tutorial on how to do it in a very short time. Even a ten year old boy can do it.

As a conclusion, parents nowadays should monitor what their children are doing on the Internet. In order to do that, one of the free way to do it is via OpenDNS. Hopefully, we could save our children from the bad side of the Internet.

Link: OpenDNS (www.opendns.com)

Your Gmail Inbox Feed

Do you know that you can view your Gmail inbox using a feed.

Try it out:

https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

You will be prompted for your Gmail account username and password.

How to create an easy to remember, hard to break password

Choosing a secure password is easy. What you need is a combination of a alphabet in upper and lower cases, numbers, and symbols, and the most important is, it is a nonsense string (not in the dictionary). An example of good password is iH2c&1W. However, can you memorize it (or, a multiple of it)?

A good practice is to have a unique password for each application that you use. Do not share one password for everything. Once the password is revealed, the other person could access to all your applications. Once again, how can you memorize a multiple of nonsense like iH2c&1W.

One way to create the password is by using events or situations, that is relevant and important to you. For example, let say that you have 2 cars and 1 wife. One possible password that could be generated from this situation is iH2c&1W, using the first letter of each word, from the string "i have 2 cars and 1 wife".

If you find that it is still hard to remember passwords that are generated using this technique, perhaps you need a password manager. A password manager is an application that use a single password to access all your passwords. Some of password manager could also generate a good password for you. However, you don't have to memorize those passwords, since it is secured inside the password manager. You only need one password to access all your other passwords

As a conclusion, a secure password should be in the form of random alphanumeric and symbols. A password should be unique for each application. To create a password that is easy for you to remember, one possible solution is to generate it based on the events or situation that is related and important to you. The last resort is to use a password manager.

Open a Word 2007 document in an earlier version of Word

In the previous article, I have shown you how to open a Word 2007 document without having to install Microsoft Office 2007.

However, If you are running Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4, or Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista, or Windows XP with Service Pack 1, and already have Microsoft Word 2000 with Service Pack 3, or Microsoft Word 2002 with Service Pack 3, or Microsoft Office Word 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, or Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003, installed, you don't need the Word 2007 viewer. Fortunately, Microsoft had released the "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word file format", in November 19, 2007.

This pack will enable Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, to open, edit, and save Word files using the Word 2007 file format, although you may not be able to change some items that were created by using the new or enhanced features in Word 2007.

For examples, equations will become graphics, themes will be converted to styles, bibliography and citations will be converted to static text, and some charts and diagrams will converted to images. The changes are permanent (unless you didn't save the document).

Download here:
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word 2007

Disable Windows Autorun

This tip is useful for disabling Windows XP from running the Autorun.inf file.

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows
NTCurrentVersionIniFileMappingAutorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"

For further information, please go to

Nick Brown's blog

View Microsoft Office 2007 Files

To view or print a Microsoft Office 2007 file, on a PC without Microsoft Office 2007, just download the viewer from Microsoft. The viewer will allow you to view and print those files, and can even open password protected Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. However, you cannot edit those files.

Here are the download links:

Word Viewer 2007
Excel Viewer 2007
PowerPoint Viewer 2007

Backup folders with 7-zip command line

The 7-zip command line can be used to do a multiple folders backup. The good thing with 7-zip is that it support many compression method such as bzip2, gzip, zip and of course 7z.

Here are steps for doing a backup on multiple folders on Windows:

1. Download the 7-zip Command Line Version from http://www.7-zip.org/download.html.


2. Extract the content of the zip file to a temporary folder.


3. Copy 7za.exe to your system folder (for example C:\Windows\System32 for Windows XP).
   


4. Create a folder for your backup, for example C:\backup.


5. Create a text file in the C:\backup folder and name it backup.txt.


6. List the full path of the folders that will be backup, each on a new line.


7. Create a batch file in C:\backup folder and name it backup.bat.


8. In the backup.bat file, type
   7za u backup -up1q3r2x1y2z1w2 @backup.txt

To back up, just double click the backup.bat file. A command prompt will be opened and closed automatically when the backup process end.

As a result, you will get a backup file named backup.7z. The u command will instruct 7-zip to update the content of the backup.7z file or create a new one if backup.7z does not exist.

If you don't like the 7z compression method and would like to use the zip compression method instead, just add -tzip switch after the u command.

7za u -tzip backup @backup.txt

Now, the backup file that will be created is backup.zip.

To automatically run a backup at a specific time, please use the Scheduled Tasks feature for Windows XP.

Compiling LaTeX on Windows: An alternative method

The usual method to compile latex is by using "latex" command, and if the latex file contains bibliography, it will be a very tedious and repetitive job.

To produce a dvi file:

latex yourfile.tex
bibtex yourfile.tex
latex yourfile.tex
latex yourfile.tex

To produce a pdf file:

pdflatex yourfile.tex
bibtex yourfile.tex
pdflatex yourfile.tex
pdflatex yourfile.tex

However, for the windows user, with Miktex, there is an alternative that could simplify all those tasks - the texify.

To produce a dvi file"

texify yourfile.tex

To produce a dvi file and clean all the auxilary files:

texify -c yourfile.tex

To produce a pdf file (to clean all the auxilary files, just add -c as above):

texify -p yourfile.tex

To produce a dvi file and run the default viewer (add -p for pdf)

texify yourfile.tex --run-viewer