Tech and life

One of the top monthly PC magazines, Maximum PC, has a pdf archive of back issues which you can read online or download if you wish. Obviously you won’t find the current issue there as this is only for subscribers and retail so the latest available issue in the archive is generally 3 to 4 months old but really that’s no problem. Many of the articles aren’t time-sensitive, for example Windows tips and how-tos, etc. And of course, the pdfs are searchable.

So download some back issues and see what you think. Do you know of any other tech magazines which have pdf archives? Drop a comment below and let us know.

If your Date Modified information in your file manager only shows day and month and not year, there’s a quick fix to get the year back. This seems to affect Windows Explorer, the file manager I use xplorer² and also the date display in my email client Eudora. It may also affect MS Outlook but I can’t confirm this as I don’t use it.

You won’t find a fix in the Options for these programs as they all pull the date information from the Date and Time format settings for your PC. In Windows 7, you’ll have to change the Short Date display to show the year and this will be then used in the other programs. It must have been modified by someone in the past to show only day and month. You can modify  the Short Date format by going to the Start button, Control Panel, Region and Language and on the Format tab, change the Short Date to include the year.

You can set up the Short Date display just as you want it by going to the Additional settings button shown on the image above. Once you apply it, that date format including the year will show up in your date information in your file manager.

This is a guest post by Liz Cornwell. She is @Aussie_Sheila on Twitter.

Everybody hates slow computers, but only a relatively small part of computer users try to do something about it and make their sluggish systems faster. Most people just assume that computer slow-downs mean it’s time to get a new one. They don’t even think about doing some maintenance and tweaking some settings with the help of various utilities. And that can make a lot of difference.

These days there are a lot of computer speed-up programs to choose from. Some of them have a limited number of tools, whereas others offer extensive functionality.

Auslogics BoostSpeed is one of the programs that have all the tools needed to speed up, optimize, and protect a computer. This program has more than 18 tools and a no-nonsense approach. Rather than providing dubious speed-up tweaks, this application focuses on genuine optimization techniques, such as disk cleanup, hard drive and registry defragmentation along with tweaking and optimizing Windows settings.

Auslogics BoostSpeed has an intuitive tabbed interface, which makes it very easy to navigate the program. You can choose to either perform quick auto-optimization or use the program’s advanced tools for extensive tweaking. When you first open the program, you will be prompted to run a system scan and repair errors. There is also a Quick Tasks bar on the right-hand side where you can erase browser and Windows history, cleanup temporary files, and optimize memory. These features are great for those who are looking for hassle-free one-stop maintenance software.

On the second tab you will find a very useful tool called System Advisor. This tool scans your computer and tells you what exactly is slowing you down, which errors need fixing, which security settings need to be changed, and which services are not in use and can be disabled. System Advisor is very quick and exceptionally easy to use even for complete computer novices.

The third tab displays a system information summary. There are four graphs that show CPU, RAM, disk, and network usage. This tab is really useful if you need to monitor your resource usage and computer activity.

The fourth tab allows the user to access all BoostSpeed’s tools. The tools are grouped together into nine categories – Disk Maintenance, Registry Maintenance, Free Up Space, System Status, Software Control, Privacy, System Tweaks, Speed Up Internet, and Disaster Recovery.

The Disk Maintenance section has all the necessary utilities to cleanup, defragment, and repair hard drives. The Disk Cleanup tool identifies and deletes junk files that take up valuable space. Disk Defrag defragments and optimizes files and free space on your hard drive, which speeds up access to files and folders. Disk Doctor is very similar to Chkdsk, but it has more options and its interface is a lot nicer. Cleaning up the drives once a week and defragmenting them once a month can make a lot of difference and make your computer run a lot faster.

The Registry Maintenance category provides access to Registry Cleaner and Registry Defrag. Both tools are very fast and efficient and it’s nice that Registry Defrag doesn’t lock up the computer when running (some registry defragmenters do that). Defragmenting the registry is probably even more important than registry cleanup, because it helps to free up RAM and makes your computer run more efficiently.

The Free Up Space category has a duplicate file finder and a tool called Disk Explorer. Disk Explorer is very useful if you are short on hard drive space and need to identify the largest files and folders on your disk, so that you can move them to a removable drive.

If you want to get to know your computer better, then have a look at the System Status section. There you will be able to get a lot of information about your computer, such as hardware and software configuration, running applications, processes, and locked files, as well as Windows services. One of the tools, Auslogics Task Manager, is a real gem and a great standard task manager alternative, as it provides a lot more information about everything running on your computer. This little application is part of BoostSpeed, but it can also be downloaded separately and is absolutely free to use.

When you have all the system information you need, you can move to Software Control. There you can disable unnecessary startup entries and uninstall unused programs.

Unlike a lot of similar programs, Auslogics BoostSpeed pays a lot of attention to protecting your privacy. There are tools to securely shred files, clean-wipe free disk space, and remove history traces, so that no data can be recovered.

If you want to fix faulty Windows settings and optimize them for your hardware configuration and Internet connection, use Tweak Manager, Service Manager, and Internet Optimizer. These tools will speed up your computer by simply fine-tuning Windows and disabling everything you don’t use.

And last but not least, BoostSpeed is absolutely safe to use because it backs up all changes that are made to your computer. But there’s more – it can also recover files that you’ve either lost or deleted by accident.

Auslogics BoostSpeed comes with a 15-day trial and costs 49.95USD (1 year license for up to 3 PCs). If you don’t feel like spending money on the software just yet, Auslogics has some freeware applications that can be used to perform basic computer maintenance: Auslogics Disk Defrag, Auslogics Registry Cleaner, Auslogics Duplicate File Finder, and Auslogics Task Manager.

About the Author: Liz Cornwell is a freelance writer who specializes in computer optimization, Windows tips and tricks, and software reviews. In addition to that, Liz is a regular contributor at the Element Moscow magazine – a top entertainment publication for expats living in Moscow, Russia.

Image credit: cellanr

I run a Windows 7 PC, an Ubuntu desktop PC and an Acer netbook with Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10. It’s important to keep my data and services synchronised between them so each machine is up to date with the latest files and cloud services, and so I thought I’d run through the software and services which I currently use:

Google Chrome

This is my browser of choice. You can use Chrome to keep your tabs, bookmarks and extensions synchronised. I’m using Chromium (the open source version of Chrome) on my Ubuntu netbook and Chrome on my Windows desktop and everything syncs just fine. To start syncing between Chrome/Chromium on your different devices, just go to the spanner/wrench icon at the top right of the browser on each of your machines and choose Options then the tab marked Personal Stuff. Click Set up sync and when it’s done you’ll see

At the moment you can choose to keep everything synced or choose to sync any or all of Apps, Autofill, Bookmarks, Extensions, Preferences and Themes.  Doesn’t have password sync yet but I believe this is coming in the next Chrome version. Of course, the Chrome Xmarks extension will also allow automatic synchronization of bookmarks, passwords and open tabs between Windows and Ubuntu machines.
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In Windows 7 and Vista, there’s a keyboard shortcut to bring up cascading windows of the open programs on your taskbar. Press the Windows key + Tab to see it in action now… Pretty impressive. And to cycle through the windows, first use the Ctrl+Win Key+Tab combination and then the left and right arrow keys to cycle. Pressing the Enter key or selecting the Window does just that.
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Anyone who has used Microsoft Word down the years will be familiar with the keyboard combination Ctrl-F to bring up a search box. Well, all that’s changed in Word 2010. Hitting Ctrl-F now brings up the Navigation pane on the left which is a little different, but I think an improvement – at least once you’ve tried it for a day or two.

So how is it an improvement? Well for me, one annoyance of search and replace in earlier versions of Word was the way the search box would jump around over the document when you clicked the Find Next button often obscuring the search results. Now in Word 2010, the search box is in the Navigation pane in the left panel. Search results are highlighted in the main window as you type your search word. If there are few enough occurrences, a snippet of text containing the words is displayed in the Navigation pane. Clicking on a particular snippet will take you to its location in the document and the words remain highlighted. The Navigation pane can be docked and undocked if you wish by clicking the down arrow to the right of the word Navigation. The pane can also be closed by clicking the cross next to the down arrow.

I was sceptical at first. Is this really an improvement? Well it’s not obscuring the search results any more but it doesn’t seem to be case-sensitive – searching for Table brings up Table and table and words like adjustable which end in table.

No problem. There’s a drop-down box which you can access by clicking the down arrow at the right end of the search box. Select Options here.

Now if you like, you can select Match case and Find whole words only to improve your search results – and if you like you can make this your default search option by clicking the Set As Default button. Incidentally, you can also select Advanced Find (the old style search box) from this drop-down menu.

Okay, so you’ve tried it and you still don’t like the new Navigation pane. Well, you can try remapping the Ctrl-F key combination to the old style search box, now called Advanced Find. I’m indebted to Jay Freedman for instructions on how to do this:

- Right-click the ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar and choose Customize the Ribbon.

- Click the Keyboard shortcut Customize button in the dialog.

- Select the Home Tab category.

- Select the EditFind command.

- Click in the “Press new shortcut key” box and press Ctrl+F (note that the “Currently assigned to” label shows that you’re taking the shortcut away from the NavPaneSearch command, which is what you’d change to if you ever want to restore the default.)

- Click the Assign button and then click Close.

I’ve also discovered another quick way to access this Advanced Find box by adding its icon to the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of your screen. Follow my instructions in an earlier post on the Quick Access Toolbar, but this time you want to go to All Commands and scroll down to Advanced Find (with the binoculars icon), highlight it, then click Add to add this to your Quick Access Toolbar. Now when you click the binoculars icon on the Quick Access Toolbar, as shown in the top screen shot above, the familiar old style search box should appear.

Finally, I should point out that clicking Ctrl-H to bring up the good old Find and Replace box hasn’t changed in Word 2010 – and you can also access Advanced Find by clicking the Find tab at the top of that box. Of course Replace still has that old annoyance of obscuring results just like the old style Find did.

So give searching with the new Word 2010 Navigation pane a good try out first before you revert to old habits… if you must – I think you’ll like it.

The new search feature (Ctrl-F) in Word 2010 is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

It’s possible to run a small office/home office (SOHO) set-up with a completely free operating system, software and internet services… but do you? Are there any commercial packages or paid online services you consider ‘must-haves’? I thought I’d quickly run through my paid/free stance and I’d love to hear your thoughts although I don’t think we need to get into a discussion on ‘acquiring’ commercial software for free.

Free operating system

If you run a Linux system, you’ll be familiar with free operating systems and open source software. I run Ubuntu Netbook Edition on my Acer Aspire netbook and I’m just about to try out Linux Mint on my second desktop. What holds me back from completely moving to Linux is my day job where I have to be able to work on Microsoft Word files. More on that later. I’m running Windows 7 on one desktop. Of course in the Windows world, once you’ve bought the OS, you can run a completely free set-up too.

Free software

I run a small office/home office (SOHO) set-up and work from home. Pretty much all the software I use is free or open source. However, I do some work in the publishing sector and they still rely very much on Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat. Many authors submit work in Word doc format (rarely docx I find) and authors and publishers usually expect work to be returned in doc format with Track Changes turned on. It’s a real shame that open source software hasn’t really caught on in the publishing field yet. So I have to use Microsoft Office to cope with clients who use commercial software. Yes, you could convert Word doc format to Open Office Writer odt format, turn on track changes in Open Office Writer then convert back to doc format but there’s always a worry that some formatting/changes will be lost in conversion. So for work, I have to use MS Word on my desktop running Windows 7. There’s a good recent discussion on office software, free and commercial, at How-To Geek.

The only other paid software I use on my Windows system is an old copy of Serif PagePlus for DTP and Serif PhotoPlus for photo editing. I haven’t upgraded these in years – the old copies I have are just fine. But a quick look on the AlternativeTo website shows that I could move to Scribus as a free alternative for DTP and there are lots of free alternatives (software and online services) for photo editing.

But for many working from home on a Windows system, I’m sure it’s possible to find all you need if you look at free software alternatives and online services. By the way, I don’t believe it’s necessary to pay for security software either. If you’re running a Window system, Microsoft Security Essentials is free for you and is probably all you need for real-time protection. If you’re running a Linux system, you probably don’t need any antimalware software.

Free services

Every online service I use is free…so far, although I don’t expect it to remain that way in the future. We’ve had it good so far. Like many of you I’m sure, I use a good spread of Google apps. Yes, they’re free but the downside is targeted ads, which I don’t mind, and the knowledge that they’re building up a fair old archive of information on you. So I try to use good alternatives to Google services when I can.

So over to you. Do you use a free OS? Is there any commercial software you must have on your Windows system? What about online services – anything you’re paying for? Drop a comment below.

Do you pay for software and online services is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

About a month ago, without any warning, my desktop Windows 7 system suddenly bluescreened reporting an ‘uncorrectable hardware error’. Everything had been working fine up to that point, I was just surfing the net and not stressing the system in any way. There was absolutely no prior indication that things were about to go pear shaped. I tried rebooting but soon after boot up was complete and I was on the internet again I got the same stop error code 124. I didn’t do a screen capture of the error message but here’s a very similar shot I found:

I suspected a motherboard problem. Although I had installed a new hard drive with Windows 7 recently, the other hardware components in my PC were about 5 years old including the Soltek SL-75DRV4 Socket A motherboard.

Unfortunately, I’m not a repair tech so I took it to a good mate who is. He diagnosed a problem with the voltage controller on the motherboard but because of the age of the motherboard, I needed a motherboard/processor/RAM replacement. But when he replaced the motherboard and tried to boot the hard drive with Windows 7 installed he got a blue screen hardware error. He couldn’t do a Windows repair to set up the hard drive with the replacement motherboard. He phoned Microsoft but they said a Windows 7 repair couldn’t be done – you have to reinstall Windows 7. A Windows repair for a new motherboard used to be no problem with Windows XP.

I had the Windows 7 retail disk and the product key but I didn’t want to have to reinstall Windows 7 on the hard drive as I had just got it configured and running as I wanted it. That seemed like a real backward step.

Eventually he managed to sort this problem without a Windows 7 reinstall. He plugged my hard drive in as a slave in another PC, booted up and deleted the motherboard drivers on the slave drive. When the hard drive was plugged back into my PC with the new motherboard, it found and installed the drivers it needed. I just had to go through Windows activation using the automated phone system and everything went fine. One month on now and so far no problems.

Just though I’d post this as a salutary tale. You never know when disaster will strike and it can be completely without warning. Data backups are obviously  important but in this case I was down for a couple of weeks while the problem was diagnosed, parts ordered and installed and the machine set up again.

If you use your PC or laptop as a vital part of a small business and it’s the only machine you have, you’d be well advised to have a backup machine ready to take over in the event of a hardware failure like this.

Setting up a Windows 7 hard drive without a Windows reinstall after a hardware failure is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

I have a PC with an older motherboard and I’m not able to set the BIOS to boot from a USB drive or USB stick, just from a CD or DVD. I may be able to do this if I update the BIOS but I don’t want to take any chances, so I was delighted to read a post last week by Trevor at How-To Geek offering a solution on how to boot from a USB drive using PLoP. I’ve tried it out and it works perfectly.

I followed the instructions in that post, downloaded plpbt-5.0.10.zip, extracted it to a folder, found plpbtnoemul.iso in that folder and burned that to a CD using ImgBurn. I plugged in my USB stick with Ubuntu and then booted up from the CD I’d just made. I was presented with a menu where I could select USB and sure enough I booted into Ubuntu on the USB drive. An internet connection was available after I entered my WAP password.

So if my system runs into problems, I now have the additional option of being able to boot up from my USB drive. This has the advantage of being easier to update with rescue utilities than a CD should I run into a PC disaster.

The original post on How-To Geek is really comprehensive and goes through all the steps involved in setting up the CD, and even a boot floppy disk for those older systems. If you can’t boot up from your USB drive, have a look at that post.

Booting from a USB drive when this can’t be set in the BIOS is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

If you’ve ever installed or reinstalled Windows, you’ll know how long it can take to track down and reinstall all your favourite apps afterwards. Well that’s all a thing of the past now with the advent of software installers which allow you to pick your favourite apps in one place online and install them all at once saving valuable time. You just check the apps you want, download the installer and away it goes working through your list.

I used Ninite to reinstall my apps after moving to Windows 7 but I’ve come across a couple of other installers recently and was interested to see which had the most apps available and just how many of those I’d actually want to install.

Ninite

They currently have 73 apps on their website of which I would install 28. No registration is required. Ninite Pro allows you to save and reuse your installer so you can set up multiple PCs but this is currently $20/month.

AllMyApps

They have the best choice by far with 117 apps just now and I would install 31 of these. You have to register for free to download a bundle and you can save your list for future installs. Great for PC technicians who are regularly setting up PCs.

Smart Installer Pack

This one is slightly different. You download the complete pack then check the apps you want to install. Currently, Smart Installer Pack has 51 apps and I would have installed 17 of these.

So for me, AllMyApps is currently the best choice with 31 apps I’d want to install and a great selection. It’s also a great choice for those who will be doing multiple installs. If you know of any other great software installers, drop a comment below.

Speed up a Windows install or reinstall with a software installer is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.