PC Tutorials Online

Not long ago, i talked about Why you shouldn’t use windows’ Defragger. Most of you realize that it’s important to defrag often to keep your hard disk fast and efficient. But did you know that the best time to defrag is just after you’ve started your system? That’s because defragmentation is quicker when the defragmentation tool doesn’t have a large page to handle.

You could fumble around the the start menu to start defragging at startup, but a better solution is to add a scheduled task. The other option is to do a regisrty hack, but a scheduled task is more customizeable, as you probably don’t want to defrag each time you boot up your PC. If you’re using a third party defragging utility, chances are it should have a built-in scheduler.

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NoScript, by Informaction is plug-in that allows you to disable unwanted Java script, Java and more on unwanted websites. This means malicious codes on websites have no way of running on your computer. Also, you can prevent video playback on sites that run using java script. And because it uses a white-list to allow sites, it means you customize it as much as you like. So to sum it up, this plug-in means:

• No worries of malicious code running.

• Prevent video from running, thus saving you bandwidth.

• Has a white-list to allow sites.

• And it’s FREE!

You can get it here: No Script
Your Anti-virus software will really appreciate it .

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What do you mean “suspend” your hard disk? This is a very common practice for quiet PC enthusiasts. It’s the instance of taking your hard disk and holding it in place using elastic. What’s the advantage? Hard disk noise is greatly reduced because usually when hard mounted, the hard disk transfers noise through the screws and onto the case chassis. This amplifies the amount of noise being made. I’ll show you how I did mine and best of all, if you have two pairs of old undies hanging round, you can do this mod for free!

First thing to do is to obtain some elastic. If you have some old undies, these would be perfect for this operation. Cut off the material part of the underwear, which will leave you with two loops of elastic, one from each.

Elastic; check!

I’m using a 5.25 inch drive to mount my hard disk; however you may be able to find somewhere else to mount it. Once you have you elastic mounted and secured, feed the hard disk drive through the elastic and verify that it isn’t touching the metal chassis. It’s a bit of trial and error, but you should find a sweet spot. Re-connect the Hard disk drive power and SATA (or IDE) and boot it up. You’ll be amazed at what you can’t hear anymore. The elastic magically absorbs the vibration, which in turn dampens the noise. Not bad for two pairs of old undies eh? Enjoy.

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could make free phone calls? By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of an application called Skype. If you haven’t, it’s all the rage at the moment. Skype is a free VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) program that allows you to make free phone call to other skype users for free. The olny cost is your interenet connection. This is excellent for making international phone calls because on a standard telephone line company, rates are expensive.

Another great feature Skype offers is the ablity to make video calls which is an attractive feature. So you’re probably wondering why everyone hasn’t made the switch to skype and ditched their phone company. This is where Skypes’ freebie run comes to a halt. To make phone calls to landlines or mobiles, a cost is incurred from transfering the VOIP data to a standard phoneline gateway. While rates are reasonable, its nothing to brag about. But if your buddies have skype on thier computer, you can still benefit. If you’ve built an effiecent PC, you could let it run all day to make and recieve phone calls. See Green IT: How to Cut your Power Bill.

That pretty much somes up Skype. There are other programs out there, but Skype is the best of them. You can download it from here: http://www.skype.com/download/

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I was editing my blog today and testing out a new plugin for me called Subscribe Remind. It automatically adds a small insert of text kindly reminding the user to subscribe to your blog. However, whilst it did add the supplied text to each post, it could be seen on every individual post on the homepage. Scrolling through your homepage with the same line of text every couple of lines did not look very professional at all. To fix it, a small change to the code was needed.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Open up subscribe-remind.php in your text editor.

2. Find the line ” if ( !is_feed() && !is_page() ) ” and add ” && !is_home() ” (without the quote) so that it looks like this:

if ( !is_feed() && !is_page() && !is_home() )

3. Save the file and reupload it to your /wp-content/plugins/subscribe-remind directory.
4. Refresh the homepage and that’s it!

Hope this tip was helpful. Let me know.

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Firefox is a great web browser, but in comparison to Internet Explorer’s startup speed, Firefox lags behind. This is because Microsoft integrated IE into windows and loads into the memory. Some developer has made a nifty program to load firefox into the memory at startup. Pretty sweet huh? Download your copy of Firefox Preloader today.

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Today, Firefox is a very popular alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. If you’re a user of Firefox, here is a list of tips that will make your web browsing experience easier and much more enjoyable.

Tip: Double Clicking empty space on the Tab Bar will open a ‘New Tab’

Tip: Middleclick/MouseWheelClick on a Bookmark on your Personal Toolbar will open it up in a New Tab

Tip: MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on a folder will open all the bookmarks in the folder in a new Tab(s)

Tip: holding down the Shift or Ctrl key when you RightClick to “View Image” or “View Backround Image”will open the image in a New Tab or New Window.

Tip: Unused menus or menu Items can be hidden by using the customizing your userChrome.css stylesheet

Tip: MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on a Tab will close that Tab.

Tip: MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on a History item will open the page in a new Tab

Tip: MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on the Back and Forward buttons will open the last/next page in a new Tab

Tip: MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on the Home button will open your homepage in a new Tab(s)

Tip: MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on the Throbber (the ‘busy’ icon at the top-right) will open the Firefox homepage in a new Tab

Tip: For those without middle mouse buttons or mousewheels, ctrl-click will also open new tabs for links, bookmarks, bookmark folders, history items, and toolbar buttons

Tip: Ctrl+TAB you can navigate in the tabs to the right

Tip: Ctrl+Shift+Tab you can navigate in the tabs to the left

Tip: Many Laptops mimic the MiddleClick/MouseWheelClick function if you click both right/left pads at the same time.

Tip: Set mutliple Home pages : Tools—->Options—>General and seperate each page with the pipe | symbol
(eg h**p://forums.mozillazine.org/|h**p://www.google.com|h**p://www.y..]h**p://forums.mozillazine.org/|h**p://www….|h**p://www.y…

Tip: Clear your Download history to make the download manager more responsive : Tools—->Options—>Privacy

Tip: Rearrange add/remove Icons on Toolbars: View—>ToolBars—>Customize….

Tip: Drag any link to the Download Manager Window to add & download the link

Tip: Pressing ctrl+enter will add h**p://www. before and .com after the text in the toolbar and load the resulting url. Similarly, shift+enter will add h**p://www. and .net, and ctrl+shift+enter will add h**p://www. and .org

Tip: You can work offline like in IE by clicking File>Work Offline. This means that you can browse your previously visited pages even when you’re offline.

Tip: If you wish to remove an item from your Address Bar Drop down menu, Highlight it WITHOUT CLICKING and use Shift+Delete

Tip: A bookmarks’s position Dragged & Dropped (ie. change position in a Folder or move from one folder to another or move to another position on the toolbar) by highlighting it & clicking on it (WITHOUT LETTING GO) and Dragging it to your desired position

Tip: A Folder can be move the same way as above tip but u MUST hold down the SHIFT key while Dragging

Tip: Former/current users of IE who are accustomed to copying items from “Temporary Internet Files” folder (FireFox calls it “Cache” ) can achieve the same results by Tools—>Page Info and then select the “Media” Tab, then Highlight the item u want to download and clicking “Save As…”

Tip: If u accidentally delete a bookmark and want to recover it, if it is not already open then, open the “Bookmarks Manager” (Bookmarks—>Manage Bookmarks) and either use Ctrl+Z or Edit—>Undo (in The Bookmarks Manager)

Tip: DoubleClicking a file entry in the Downloads Manager will open/launch the file (provided u haven’t moved it yet)

Tip: You can also directly download anything from a page by drag and dropping it onto the ‘download’ icon in your toolbar (provided you put it there in ‘right-click > customize’)

Tip: You can bookmark the current page by dragging the icon from the location bar to your Bookmarks folder. You can also drag it to the desktop to make an icon for that page

Tip: Of course, you can also do what the last tip said in the other direction: drag a text file, a link, a picture, etcetera… from your folders or your desktop to Firefox and it will open in Firefox

Tip: You can save all open tabs in a bookmark folder. Ctl-D, select the “bookmark all tabs in a folder” select or create a folder.

Tip: To stop animated gifs from moving, press the ESC key.

Tip: Instead of clicking the Back or Forward buttons, hold down the Shift key and turn the scroll wheel to back or forward

Tip: you can give “keywords” to your bookmarks by right-clicking the bookmark and then Properties. If you put a string in the keyword field now you can type that keyword in the address bar and it will go to that bookmark. For example, if I have a bookmark for the firefox website, I might give it the keyword “ff”. Now, when I type “ff” in the address bar, it goes to the firefox site. I find it is often faster than going through your bookmarks to find it

Tip: Ctrl and a number key will go to the tab indicated by the number. (e.g. Ctrl+3 will go to the third tab from the left)

Tip: CTRL+F5 refreshes the page without accessign the file cache

Firefox Mouse Tips

Middle Click
Note: Two-button mouse

For those without middle mouse buttons or mousewheels, ctrl-click will also open new tabs for links, bookmarks, bookmark folders, history items, and toolbar buttons.

Many Laptops mimic the MiddleClick/MouseWheelClick function if you click both right/left pads at the same time.

Clicking both mouse buttons at the same time also mimics the MiddleClick/MouseWheelClick function.

Tabs

MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on a Tab will close that Tab.

Personal Toolbar

Middleclick/MouseWheelClick on a Bookmark on your Personal Toolbar will open it up in a New Tab

Folders

MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on a folder will open all the bookmarks in the folder in a new Tab(s)

History

MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on a History item will open the page in a new Tab.

Back and Forward buttons

MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on the Back and Forward buttons will open the last/next page in a new Tab.

Home button

MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on the Home button will open your homepage in a new Tab(s).

Links

MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on a link will open that link in a new tab.

Throbber

MiddleClick/MouseWheel Click on the Throbber (the ‘busy’ icon at the top-right) will open the Firefox homepage in a new Tab.

Images

Middleclick/MouseWheelClick on “View Image” or “View Background Image” will open the image in a New Tab.

Double Click
Download Manager

DoubleClicking a file entry in the Downloads Manager will open/launch the file (provided you haven’t moved it yet)

Tab Bar

Double Clicking empty space on the Tab Bar will open a ‘New Tab’

Right Click
Customize Toolbar

You can adjust your toolbars to your liking. Right click on any toolbar, and select ‘Customize’. While this dialogue is up, you can move buttons around on your toolbars by click-and-drag to the new location. The window that pops up when you do this is a holding area for unused icons. You can drag any item from it onto your toolbars to have it made available, and you can drag any icon from your toolbars onto this box to hide that icon completely.

Tip: Some toolbar items, such as the Location bar, will expand to take up all available space.

Keyword Bookmark

Right clicking in a search box (such as the ’search mozillazine, powered by google’, on the left of this page) and selecting ‘add a keyword for this search’ lets you make an interactive keyword bookmark.

Here is how it works:

Give it a name, such as ‘Mozillazine search’
now, assign a keyword to it, such as ‘moz’
click ‘ok’

From now on, you can search mozillazine (or any other search box you used for this) from your address bar like this:

Enter ‘moz search topic’ in your address bar and click Go!

Drag’n Drop
Moving bookmarks and folders

You can change a bookmark’s position in a folder or move it from one folder to another or move it to another position on the toolbar by highlighting it & clicking on it (WITHOUT LETTING GO) and dragging it to your desired position.

A folder can be moved the same way as above tip but u MUST hold down the SHIFT key while dragging.

Icons

You can bookmark the current page by dragging the icon from the location bar to your Bookmarks folder. You can also drag it to the desktop to make an icon for that page.

Drag a text file, a link, a picture, etcetera… from your folders or your desktop to Firefox and it will open in Firefox!

Links

“Click-and-drag” a bookmark to the main content windown (which is the biggest on the firefox userinterface),so you can open it in a new tab !

Dragging a link onto a new tab will open the link in the new tab.

Downloading links

Drag any link to the Download Manager Window to add & download the link.

You can also directly download anything from a page by drag and dropping it onto the ‘download’ icon in your toolbar (provided you put it there in ‘right-click > customize’)

Mouse and Keyboard
Images

Holding down the Shift or Ctrl key when you RightClick to “View Image” or “View Background Image” will open the image in a New Tab or New Window.

Selecting text

If you hold down the CTRL key and left click on part of a web page, that section of the page will be highlighted. If you right click on the selection and choose ‘View selection source’, the source code for that part of the page will be displayed.

To quickly highlight text, especially long text fields. Left-click once in the window where you want the selection to start; and then shift-click in the spot where you want the selection to end (selection range). *this is a lot easier than click-selection-dragging, especially where there is a lot of text to highlight.

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RAM in PC’s today is extremely prone to damage and can render useless if the slightest damage is done. When there is a fault in hardware the hardware, the user must try and debug the problem. Memtest86 is a great utility to use to test memory.

Being a PC builder, I’ve repaired many PC’s and can tell you sometimes isolating problems isn’t such an easy task. If a memory stick is the problem, you could of course take one stick out and leave the other one in there and then vice versa. But if you only have one stick of RAM available, memtest86 can help you out. All you need is blank CD or Floppy disk. Memtest86 is a standalone program, so you do not need an operating system installed to use this program.

I could keep writing about it however everything you need to know is listed on the Memtest86 tech page. So if run into trouble with PC memory, use this program like you use your Swiss army knife.

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