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Ever wanted to do something faster and easier, like, for example, resize a dozen of photos to fit the screen of your cellphone or install all your favorite applications at once? I know I have. There are a lot of tools to help automate such repetitive tasks, but unfortunately they’re very hard to find, even with Google.
This article will show you a few indispensable tools for computer users and web surfers, which will no doubt make your life easier and your computer experience more enjoyable. Oh, and they’re all free!
1. Image Tuner. This nifty little tool will save you a lot of time when resizing a bunch of photos or images to be sent in an email, posted on a forum or social network or downloaded to your cell phone to be used as wallpapers. Download and install it from http://www.glorylogic.com/ , then run the application and drag-n-drop or add the images you want.
You can select the output folder, size and image format in the right sidebar. A nice detail that surprised me is the proportions preservation feature, which helps a lot if you have mixed widescreen and regular images. A similar utility for Mac OS X is OSX Image resize, found at http://www.ironstarmedia.co.uk/osx-image-resizer/, which is also free.
» Continue reading 5 Amazing Tools You Never Knew Existed
I’m quite sure everyone reading this already knows what a torrent is. If you don’t, a quick search on Google for “What is a torrent” will give you the answer, and if you are in a hurry, here’s the short version: a torrent is basically an improved version of Peer-to-Peer, where you copy and share files directly from other users’ computers, instead of a central location like a web or ftp server. There has to be at least one computer dedicated to managing the transfers, called a tracker.
When you want to copy a file from a torrent, the tracker gives you the addresses of all other people that have that file, and manages your upload and download speeds (for example, those who upload at a higher speed, can also download faster, and downloading from the same country is usually also faster). So, you must give/upload as much as possible to get the highest download speed.
For a long time, torrents have been associated with illegal activity and cyber piracy, as the first ones to use them were people who shared movies, music, programs and other copyrighted files. Even now, most of the torrent users are doing this (whether that is good or bad for the copyright holders is another question).
But that is not the only way torrents can be used. Big and small companies are starting to realize that it is much more effective and cheaper to let their users host what they share, instead of keeping it on their servers, which can always go down due to overload or other technical problems (take for example Microsoft’s servers when they released the free test version of Windows Vista and 7, or CrunchyRoll’s frequently-inaccessible online-TV streams).
A few TV companies already started streaming their shows via torrents (although in a bit more complicated setup, which uses advanced copyright protection techniques). The Open Source community has been doing this for a few years now (users download software & operating systems like Ubuntu and OpenSuse via torrents), as they simply don’t have the money for the insane bandwidth they’re using.
So, as you can see, there is a future for torrents, and it’s most probably not going to fade away like P2P. If you are using or planning to use them, here are a few simple but powerful tips to help you get the highest download speed possible. They are a bit technical, so I assume you know your way around a computer (plus, the images should help a lot).
» Continue reading 5 Best Tips to Speed Up Your Torrent Downloads
Did you know that files are not actually removed from your hard drive when you delete them in Windows (I don’t know about other operating systems, but I think they’re the same), even if you empty the Recycle Bin?
The files and folders you “delete” are actually still on the drive, except they’re hidden. This was implemented into the file system to allow for a much faster deletion speed (it takes quite a while to completely delete a file, about 5 minutes per GB on newer hard drives) and to give the user a possibility to get his data back in case of an accidental deletion or quick formatting (full formatting removes all data, but can take up to a few hours to complete).
So, if you have any sensitive data and think that you can delete it anytime if the circumstances require it, you are in for a big surprise. Using a data restoration utility like Norton Save & Restore or R-Studio, anyone can undelete your files and open them, exposing all your secrets.
Let’s say you really don’t want that to happen. How should you proceed?
One way to do it would be writing unimportant data like music and movies over the deleted, now hidden files. This would physically remove them to make space for the new ones. But you wouldn’t know where exactly were they written on the surface of the disk (they could be at the beginning, middle, end, or scattered all around if your drive was heavily fragmented), so you’ll have to fill all of the free space with unimportant files to be sure they’re really gone.
» Continue reading How to Delete Files Permanently in Windows
Firefox 3.5 has been around for quite a while, yet you can still find add-ons and themes that were not updated to work with it (most of them abandoned). Some of them are great, providing unique functionality that you can’t otherwise get.
So, if you are already using Firefox 3.5 (which is faster and better in a lot of ways), is there something you can do about those plugins?
Why, yes, yes there is!
Firefox developers have built in a setting that you can change to allow installation of older add-ons and themes. It is disabled by default, as some of those plugins are incompatible with the new version and can cause crashes, freezes and other problems.
But most of them will still work, and the only way to find out is to try it yourself.
» Continue reading How to Install Old Add-ons in Firefox 3.5
If you’ve been actively using Firefox 3.5 for a while, you might have noticed that is starts slower and slower every time. This is because of a security feature which requires the browser to randomize security hashes and code every time it starts up.
This means it needs to reload configuration data and other information on every startup, and if you have downloaded a lot of files, surfed a lot of sites and have lots of passwords saved for each one, the process can be very slow (it can take up a few minutes!).
You can mediate this by buying a faster hard drive (an SSD would be preferable) and regularly clearing your browser’s cache, history and saved passwords (from Tools->Clear Recent History), but I’m assuming you don’t really want to do that  .
So I’m going to show you a very simple solution that will speed up Firefox’s startup time while keeping your data intact.
It involves deleting the files in Temporary folders, which are also scanned by Firefox every time it loads. You’ll have to do this about once a month, so I think it shouldn’t be a huge inconvenience. You have to open the following folders and delete all files inside (leaving those that can’t be deleted for any reason):
In Windows XP (replace “#USER#” with your username):
C:\Documents and Settings\#USER#\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
C:\Documents and Settings\#USER#\Local Settings\Temp
C:\WINDOWS\Temp
In Windows Vista and 7:
%TEMP%
You can copy each line into Windows Explorer’s address bar, replacing “#USER#” with your current username.
Let’s see how it helped me:
I had 3.95GB of files in these folders (after about 8 months of using Firefox). Browser startup time was 22 seconds (measured with a stopwatch) before I deleted them and went down to 11 seconds afterwards, which is exactly twice as fast. There were still about a dozen files left which could not be deleted, but their size was 1.67MB total, so they can’t make any significant difference.
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