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I have tried over the years to make my PC experience better. I have tried all those stupid or good little applets that will add ease and functionality but sadly I have never made my PC work as nice looking as Vista, I ma sure many may disagree.

I just found a page on the American Pai blog that show a few ways to make your computer look like a Mac. There are a few ways, changing browsers, adding a dock, adding Yahoo widgets and of course iTunes and a Leopard background.

One of the problems that I always have with a lot of these changes is that although they may prettify your desktop they are usually built with a sacrifice to performance and even productivity. I am at this very moment working on my trusty laptop that is slow as hell because of all the little and big apps that I have installed in the name of productivity. If I have to do it over, and I often do, then I just install Windows XP and add a few addons. Read the rest of this entry »

I am home sick today and am really missing some of the nice things that I have at work, especially my dual monitors.

I work on a laptop so I have the laptop screen at home and at work and even though the resolution of 1280 x 800 is OK, with the extra monitor it is great. I know that there is always some resistance to getting people dual monitors but any Windows power user I believe has tyo really like the whole dual monitor setup.

Having things like copy and paste and drag and drop at your disposal is great on one monitor but is opened up to  a whole new level once you have that extra screen to place from and to.

I am not sure that I use my duals in the best way possible, actually I am sure I am not but there are a few good ways that I use my monitors

Having six or seven programs open all of the time I always use the laptop screen as my workspace and then have things like RDP sessions, or Firefox windows that I am using for supplemental info to drag onto my primary workspace.

Is this normal? Does anyone have better methods? I seem to never remember being taought how to best use dual monitors and instead just got excited to have them and started using or not using them effectively.

Today at home…I am missing that extra screen real estate.

I am not a big gamer at all in fact I hardly play any video games at all. I do occasionally spend an hour playing Call of Duty 2 on the laptop but even that is not enough to make me any kind of gamer, in fact I watch movies a lot more.

A couple of years back people told me how great modded Xboxes were for streaming movies to the TV and since I have a “couple of movies” on my PCs and some music as well I though it would be nice to steam from the computer to a Xbox. The wife though is not a fan of any video games so I had to rely on my two young kids to get me there at some point.

My son is now 4 and my daughter turns 8 in a week and true to form my young son has taken to video games like any young boy does so I have an ally. I did borrow an Xbox last year from a guy at work but it did not go over so well at home. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year as my seven year old daughter starts school and we meet the teachers I always have to ask if she needs a Mac. I have always wanted to try using a Mac and as a tech guy you would think I would have a closetful. truth is I have never used a Mac for more than 5 minutes.

A couple of years ago Apple announced and then moved over to the Intel platform, a platform that PCs use and now that there is familiar and easy to get hardware the computer modders of the world started getting to work to build a Mac out of generic hardware instead of buying a Mac made by Apple.

The modded PC hardware that turns into a Mac is called a Hackintosh, literally a Hacked Macintosh Read the rest of this entry »

I was handed a PC a while ago to help fix. It was not a work PC but instead one that a director had at home that was not working and I forgot about it until this week. What a mess. I wanted to write about this problem because the troubleshooting was a little complex and I got to use tools that I had not used before.

A Virus and a computer

First of all the PC was infected by more than one virus. The RPC connector would fail after a few minutes of use and the computer would reboot. I could not install any antispyware software or antivirus software because the installer service was corrupt and every time that I would drop Stinger from McAfee on the machine through a USB drive it would immediately get infected with the virut.b virus. Good thing was that when I plugged the usb thumb drive back into my main PC the virus would be found and removed from all of the files. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I woke up to my Blackberry 8703 sitting with a white screen saying JVM 523 error reset. This was not a good start to the day. I fought with this error across my laptop and the internet for hours today and hope to save you hours trying to fix this.

One of the big problems with the newer Blackberry units is that there is no reset button. Everytime I tried to reset the damn thing I would watch as it would boot up and just as I was about to put in the password - flash - the JVM 523 error would come back.

So now that I have fixed it I will tell you how to get your blackberry up and running again. first of all know that you will lose all the data on the blackberry so if you have no backup, sorry, you will now have a clean slate to work with. Fortunatly I am on a BES server so this is not a big deal to me. OK, now that you know that your data is gone….letting it sink in there….you will be able to rescue your connectivity to the world in two steps with two pieces of data. OK here goes… Read the rest of this entry »

I use Firefox and one of the plugins I like most is the Google Notebook plugin. With Google Notebook I can just click on a button in the taskbar in the bottom of the Firefox screen and see everything that I have copied and pasted into there.

I used to just save things occasionally in Google notebook until a few weeks ago when I had to remember an IP address between my kitchen computer and my living room computer. Think, think, think. I could write this down or write it or save it to a text file in a shared folder (I am very non-digital sometimes) then I thought:

“Hey why not use Google Notebook”

All I needed to do was open that little button on the bottom of my Firefox, copy and paste the IP address into that, walk over to the other PC and open Google Notebook on that computer and Voila (I never use that word in real life just online) I had the IP there to paste into the other thing I was doing.

One of the things that happens more and more to people these days is using multiple computers at home. I regularly use 1 computer at work but I regularly use three different computers at home. Part of my install for all of my computers is to install Google Notebook anyway

A new Firefox update was released this afternoon that fixes some pretty serious security issues.

MFSA 2007-25
XPCNativeWrapper pollution

MFSA 2007-24
Unauthorized access to wyciwyg:// documents

MFSA 2007-23
Remote code execution by launching Firefox from Internet Explorer

MFSA 2007-22
File type confusion due to %00 in name

MFSA 2007-21
Privilege escalation using an event handler attached to an element not in the document

MFSA 2007-20
Frame spoofing while window is loading

MFSA 2007-19
XSS using addEventListener and setTimeout

MFSA 2007-18
Crashes with evidence of memory corruption

No matter how bad they were they are fixed now and I have to admit it would take a lot for me to move away from this wonderful browser. Get it now!

Firefox - Rediscover the Web

A coworker of mine had mentioned logmein.com before and today I decided to try it our. If you have ever used RDP or WinVNC to remote onto a computer then you will understand the idea behind logmein.com.

Logmein works as a remote control program by signing up for an account and then installing an activeX control on a target machine (an end user can do this for you) and then you have this new machine listed on the logmein.com website. The site then uses port 80 (regular internet port) to create a VNC like connection to the remote machine and you then have shared desktop control with the other person. This is a really easy way to setup the application as you do not have to know the IP or any other info to setup your connection to the other computer.

Logmein also offers file sharing and a simple ftp type setting but this is only good for the first 30 days while you are using the Pro version of logmein after 30 days you revert to the free version and this only includes the remote desktop.

If you opt for the pro version of logmein it is $12.95 per month which is a little steep and the price drops to 9.95 per month per PC for 2-10 PCs. If all you want is remote access to a machine then the free account is all that you need. Also using the free version you seem to have access to as many remote machines as you want to set the application up on which is probably good enough for most people running a computer support business.

Last year Google came up with a suite of FREE third party software that would make computing easier and packed it up so that it couple be installed nice and easily for you to use. Here is what the Google Pack includes

Google Toolbar
The Google Toolbar allows you to search Google as well as all of the Google search sites and also give you access to a from filler and a nice easy way to get to Google Gmail and local bookmarks. A little used search button feature also allows you to search other sites, I use this feature to search the Internet Movie Database whenever I am looking for info from there.

Picasa
Picasa is a fabulous and easy to use indexer of all of your pictures on your computer. Picasa also includes a bunch of image editing options as well.

Spyware Doctor
Spyware doctor will constantly scan and protect you from spyware.

Norton Security Scan
Norton Security Scan is a free version of the famous Norton scanner and will find spyware, malware and viruses on your PC

Google Desktop
Google Desktop is a super fast indexer that will help you find anything on your computer really quickly. Google Desktop also includes a sidebar feature like people that have Windows Vista are also familiar with.

Firefox with the Google Toolbar
This is my favorite. I use Firefox as my default browser instead of Internet Explorer. Firefox is very secure and also includes a concept called extensions, extensions allow you to add functionality that people and developers have built to add to the feature set in Firefox.

Adobe Reader
Looking to view pdf files? Adobe acrobat reader is the program that is an industry standard for viewing pdfs.

Real Player
Real Player was the original media player on the internet. Real Player will allow you to playback almost every kind of media file and will index all of your media files for quick finding and playing be it an audio file or a video file.