Disclaimer: While all effort has been made to provide correct and useful information here, you should practice caution while using these tips and tricks. The information on this page is provided as a courtesy of Computer Wizard with the purpose of helping you to make better use of your computer. Unfortunately, we can not guaranty results, nor can be held responsible for any damages caused by the misuse of the data or the use of any software mentioned below.
The Internet is a great source of software. Many of these are free and extremely useful. There are free Antivirus software, a whole office suite that matches up with Microsoft Office, CAD (Computer Aided Design), and more!
So why spend hundreds of dollars on Software when you can get almost anything for free? Of course there are some limitations on these software, like can only be used on home computers, or just doesn't have as many functions as the commercial version of the software. But even with that they are extremely useful, and many of them doesn't have any limitations at all.
Now another thing with the freely downloadable software is the question of trust. There are software that is advertised as free and when you download and install them they infect your computer. After that you will be deluded with ads popping up, at best, or your system gets crippled by the malicious code that was in the software. So you need to know what are the reliable sources.
Fortunately there are many. And here's a list that can be trusted (you can click on the bold text to get to the downloads):
Actually the above covers most of the ones that are really good but there are some not listed there which worth their "weight in gold" (figuratively speaking):
And that's not all!
There's a great wealth of free (and safe) software that you can download and try. Here's the list of sites that you can browse and find great stuff:
Windows XP have a very useful feature called hibernation that can save you time and money.
When the computer hibernates it shuts down but before shutting down it saves the current state of the machine onto the hard drive. When the computer is turned on next time it simply restores the state that was in from the file, usually requiring only a couple of second. So it's much faster than shutting down and booting up each time. So if you are in the middle of something and have to leave for a longer time you don't have to close everything and when getting back open everything up again. You can just hibernate the machine and when you power it up you will get back right where you were in no time.
Here is how you can set this up:
- Right click on the desktop on an area where there is no icon.
- Select 'Properties' from the menu that comes up
- Click on the 'Screen Saver' tab
- Click on the button 'Power...'
- Click on the 'Hibernate' tab and make sure that you have a checkmark next to 'Enable hibernation'
- Click on the 'Advanced' tab
- There should be a section there called 'Power buttons' where you can select what should happen if you close the lid of the computer (in case of a laptop), when you press the power button, or when you press the sleep button on the keyboard (a button usually looks like a crescent). There are options for all of these and one of the options is the 'Hibernate'. I usually set it up so that when I press the power button it hibernates. It's very convenient and prevents accidental loss of data if someone bumps into the power button. You can still shut down or restart the computer by clicking on 'Start' and then 'Turn Off Computer'.
- Click 'OK' to save the changes and close the other window also.
- Test it out
Now you can just flip your computer off whenever you don't use it and get it up and running again in seconds. This will save you time and money on the electricity bill.
If you don't have a 'hibernate' tab or some other above mentioned feature is missing on your system then it's usually indicates that the the video driver is not installed, or not correctly installed, or it could be a corruption in the system settings. If that's the case call a professional to have this fixed.
It also could happen that the hibernation and wake up process takes a long time. It means that your hard drive is not fast enough or, again, there's some corruption in the Windows. But most of the time it works just fine.
Note: This tip requires the use of Firefox internet browser. If you don't have it you can click here to download it.
Firefox has some very useful add-ons. A combination of 3 of these can give you almost completely ad free browsing experience and speeding up the loading of pages which would be otherwise full of ads (like the weather sites). First I'm going to describe them and then tell you how to install them.
The first one is called Flashblock. This blocks Macromedia Flash content on the webpages. Flash is a format that provide really "flashy" animations that are frequently used for advertisements. Flashblock stops the automatic loading and playing of these, instead it leaves the space for it and displays a 'play' icon instead, giving you the choice to play it, or not. This is good because some site base their content entirely on Flash.
The second one is called Adblock – the name says it all. It simply blocks loading of certain parts of the page based on defined rules, example: pictures from www.annoyingads.com. When it's installed you can right click on images on the webpages and select 'Adblock image' and it will give you a window with the exact address of the pictures – it's wise to widen the selection so that it not only includes that particular picture but others in the same folder. Example: it gives you 'http://images.marketing.com/ads/T24-S2716a_main1.jpg', change this to 'http://images.marketing.com/ads/*' which will block everything from that particular server's 'ads' folder. But you don't have to worry much about that because of the next tool.
The third one is basically is continually updated database of rules to filter out ads. It's called 'Adblock Filterset.G Updater'. It feeds the database to Adblock and the result is nearly ad free browsing. Some will show up here and there but you can kill them easily by adding it to Adblock's list by right-clicking on them.
All right, here is how you can install them: Click on Tools in the menu, select Extensions, click on 'get more extensions'. That will take you to a website where you can find hundreds of add-ons. To save time click on the search box on the top right corner and type in the name of the add-on you want, like 'Flashblock'. This will get you a list of a couple items. Just click on the one you need. Then on the next page click on 'install now'. A little window will come up with some warning messages and you will need to wait for a couple of seconds before you can click the 'install now' button. After that it will be installed.
Go ahead and do this on the other two also. Then close down all Firefox windows and restart it. Try going to a heavy advertising site like www.weather.com and you should see almost no ads!
From time to time check if there are updates for these add-ons by going to Tools and then Extension and then clicking on the 'find updates' button.
E-mail is a wonderful tool that allows people all over the world to communicate with each other for basically free. Unfortunately when it was concieved its developers didn't think of the possible abuses. It's very easy to create an e-mail that looks like it was coming from somebody else.
Because its opennes opportunist people soon found that they could get an easy marketing money out of sending out solicitations for services and goods. The cost of sending out millions of these e-mail is practically nothing compared to sending out postcards or other conventional advertising methods.
Of course people don't like being bombarded with solicitations and having their inboxes filled with useless junk. So the fight began. Internet service providers started to implement measures to curb using their resources to send out massive amount of e-mails. But junk e-mail is still a lucrative business so counter-measures were quickly developed by spammers (people who send junk mail out).
To these day there'tr still billions of unsolicited e-mails are being sent out daily. As you probably noticed it.
First line of defense against spam is keeping your e-mail address available only to those who really need it. Have a private e-mail address that you only give out to friends. Never enter this e-mail on any forms in any website, except if you are absolutely sure that you sign up at a place that will not sell your e-mail address to a third party. Instead create a "disposable" e-mail address on Yahoo, Google or any of the hundreds of sites which offer free e-mail account. Use this one to sign up for accounts, etc. This e-mail address will inevitably go into a circulation and end up with spammers and you will get a ton of junk on that e-mail address but you can just ignore that.
The second line of defense is a spam filter. There's a great variety of them, some work well some don't. After trying out several of them I found a very effective one that is able to filter out nearly 100% of spam with great accuracy. It's called SpamBayes.
SpamBayes is based on a so called Bayesian filter that examines the probability of certain words showing up in spam and not-spam e-mails. It builds up a database of words and their probabilities. In order to work well you have to "teach" it first by pointing out which one is good mail and which one is spam. After about a hundred or so examined messages it will be able to make a very accurate guess on whether the new mail is good or bad. With further and further training it gets better and better.
Spambayes' home is: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
Unfortunately it requires a higher level of knowlegde to make it installed and work correctly But if you read and follow the instructions you will have no trouble.
IT'S FREE and IT WORKS EXTREMELY WELL