Clear your Desktop

It’s amazing how fast your computer’s desktop can fill up with shortcuts and files and turn into a virtual candy store of colorful icons beckoning your mouse pointer: “Click me! Click me!” Most modern software puts a shortcut to itself on your computer desktop by default when you install it. Your web browser and email program might save files they download directly to your desktop. It’s tempting to leave documents on your desktop because you’ll know they’ll be in sight at all times. But at what cost?

A cluttered virtual desktop is as bad as a cluttered physical desktop. It’s visually distracting and makes it easy to get derailed from the task at hand.

Clear your virtual desktop by removing all the icons you don’t need. To maintain a completely clear desktop with absolutely nothing taking up space, you can disable Desktop icons entirely. Here’s how:

1. Drag and drop all the files you’ve saved on your desktop into the My Documents folder.

2. Delete all the shortcuts to software applications on your desktop that already exist in Windows’ Start menu.

3. To disable Desktop items entirely, in Windows XP, right-click the Desktop, and from the Arrange Icons By submenu, deselect Show Desktop Icons. In Windows Vista, right-click the Desktop, and from the View submenu, clear Show Desktop Icons.

4. Enable the Quick Launch toolbar to start up programs without having to navigate the Start Menu. Add shortcuts to programs or documents you open often to this toolbar for easy access. The limited real estate is a good thing: choose only the items you launch often. (For example, if you open the status.xls spreadsheet every other day, use a shortcut to that document, instead of a shortcut to Excel.) As for all your other programs? Fear not: they’re still accessible, safely tucked away in the Programs folder.

Wimax in developing countries

The technology may not be familiar to many, but Intel wants to put it firmly on the global broadband map. For developing nations, with poor fixed communication infrastructure, Wimax could offer a vital link to the digital world. Providing the silicon for Wimax modems is an important first step in its journey from pipe-dream to reality.

Wimax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) has, on paper, a lot going for it. Theoretically it can provide data rates of up to 70 mbps over distances of up to 50 km, although its actual range is dictated by many variables, including topography, environmental conditions and network capacity.

Hyped by many as a successor to wi-fi, it also has a vital role to play alongside the fixed broadband technologies of DSL and cable.

This role is best summed up as a hole-filler, plugging gaps left by DSL and cable, providing a lifeline to those in rural areas and countries with poor fixed communications infrastructure and opening up the net to a whole new generation of users.

BT will eventually offer Wimax in the form of an off-the-shelf self-install modem, similar to its plug-and-play DSL service which helped kick-start broadband take-up when it was launched in 2002.

Wimax is being envisaged as working hand-in-hand with 3G and other high-speed technologies to provide a "personal broadband" possibly in the form of a pocket modem that can connect a multitude of devices wherever the user happens to be.

Extracted from BBC News

Multiple Virtual Desktops

The more space you have to lay out your materials, the easier it is to get a job done. Modern operating systems make multi-tasking with overlapping windows on one screen possible, but that requires some amount of task switching and window resizing to get to what you need. A recent survey by Jon Peddie Research4 showed that multi-monitor computer setups can increase a computer worker’s productivity by 20 to 30 percent.

To use physical multiple monitors, your computer has to have multiple video cards or one video card capable of multiple monitors. If you don’t have that capability, use virtual desktops instead to separate your work into four distinct workspaces and focus on one at a time.

In Windows XP, download the free Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop Manager (MSVDM) from the Download link at the end of this post. After installing MSVDM, right-click your Windows taskbar and select Toolbars → Desktop Manager. The MSVDM toolbar displays
buttons labeled 1 through 4. Switch to another desktop by pressing a button, or use the Quick Preview button to see all four desktops in quadrants on your screen as shown in the fig. below:

Assign a different desktop background to each desktop to distinguish them visually. To do so, right-click the MSVDM toolbar and choose Configure Desktop Images as shown in the fig. below:

Click here to download

Making a difference to the World

When we talk about making a difference in the world, most people would say that they are not 'big enough' to make a difference in the universe. But I think differently and to explain my point of view here is a short story for all...

“The Starfish Story” by Loren Eiseley

Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.

He came closer still and called out “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?” The young man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.” “I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” asked the somewhat startled wise man. To this, the young man replied, “The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.”

Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, “But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!” At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, “It made a difference for that one.”

Speed up Mozilla Firefox

Sometimes Mozilla Firefox browser takes a long time to open a page, but this problem can be fixed by following few easy steps mentioned below:

1.Type "about :config" in the adress field.

2. Set the value of network.http.pipelining to "true".

3. Set the value of network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to "100".

4. Set the value of network.http.proxy.pipelining to "true"

5. Set the value of nglayout.initialpaint.delay to "0" (not availible in newer versions).

This will increase the speed of Mozilla Firefox to load the page immediately with any delay.

Disabling Anti-Virus from Device Manager

Lot of people always have trouble upgrading their operating system. They either get a Blue Screen of Death(BSOD) or Error Message box. There are million reasons why we might get that error message and one such reason is our anti-virus.

Here is a method to disable the anti-virus through Device Manager rather than the anti-virus application itself.

1) Start >> Run >> Type Devmgmt.msc

2) This will open device manager. Click on View >> Show Hidden Devices.

3) Expand the category which says Non-Plug and Play Drivers. If you look at the picture below, you will see that I have an exclamation mark next Panda File Shield Driver. Now this is where we need to look. Just like Panda(I have Panda Anti-Virus installed), you will find the following.

NAV OR SYM - Symantech or Norton.

The moment you find the driver for your anti-virus, right click on the file and click on disable.

4) Search for other files which fall under the same category and disable them and restart the computer.

There that's the other way you disable anti virus, when your normal application doesn't allow you to do that.

Spybot Search and Destroy 1.5.1.15

Spybot Search and Destroy searches your hard drive for so-called spy- or adbots; that is, little modules that are responsible for the ads many programs display. Many of these modules also transmit information, including your surfing behavior on the Internet. If it finds such modules, it can remove them. In most cases the host still runs fine after removing the spyware/adware.

Another feature is the removal of usage tracks, which makes it more complicated for unknown spybots to transmit useful data. The list of last visited websites, opened files, started programs, cookies, all that and more can be cleaned. Supported are the three major browsers Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, and Opera.

Download Freeware

Your Home page never being changed

Some websites illegally modify your registry editor and set their website as default home page, to stop this,

1. Right-click on the Internet Explorer icon on your desktop and select "Properties".

2. In the "Target" box you will see "C:\Program Files\Internet

Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE".

3. Now by adding the URL of the site to the end of this it overrides any
Homepage setting in internet options:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE"