So lets get down to basics, how can you speed up your PC?

First things first, the easiest, cheapest and quickest way to speed up a computer is by formatting and re-installing the OS, this does however bring in a few probelms, especially if you have hundreds of programs installed (Like me).

The second, more advisable way is to start uninstalling programs you do not use.  Many of these will have background processes, some which start on boot and then close back down, others will constantly run. Either way they all will slow down your computers boot time by a small but significant amount.

You can uninstall programs from the control panel, however this often leaves things on your computer which can still slow it down, for this reason I suggest using something like Perfect Uninstaller

Once you have uninstalled the useless unused programs off your PC the next step in speeding up your computers boot time is to clean up the registry. Registry cleaning is often considered insignificant, however a single registry clean up can cut your computers boot time in half! Registry cleaning is as simple as a single click with products like Registry Easy!

Once you have removed all these excess programs then your next step is to keep your computer clean, An Antivirus such as McAfee and some anti-spyware tools such as Adaware are pretty much essential here!

Once you have the basics out of the way you can look at more interior ways to speed up boot time on your computer. These small tweaks can massively increase your computers Boot time

Change your Bios to speed up boot time on your PC, make your Hard drive the primary boot device (Ususally CD drive as default) and reduce the time the boot program pauses to let you press the safe mood and system set up keys.

Remove the boot up splash screen to speed up Windows boot time, this can be done in MSCONFIG by checking the /noguiboot option.

If you are using windows vista you can massively speed up vista boot time by using the fantastic ReadyBoost system. This actualy turns a USB flash drive in to extra memory for your computer, and gives a huge boost to your computers boot speed in Vista!

And there you have it, some cheap easy ways to speed up computer boot time!

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Internet Security

Optimization And Tweaking Tools

Image and photo manipulation And Viewing software

Burning, Ripping And Encoding Tools

and more, check it out here.

Royalty-free describes material (icons) that may be used for profit, without paying royalties. Royalty-free media is usually acquired for a ‘one time only’ fee, although public domain imagery and many works created under a copyleft license are also usable without paying royalties or an initial fee.

Vixy allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube’s videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online. It is using a compressed domain transcoder technology (outline in Japanese). It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder.

Try Vixy

Watch:

Download Metacafe Videos Using Firefox – video powered by Metacafe

Download extension

What Is Open Moko?

OpenMoko is an open source mobile communications movement on a mission to create a platform that empowers people to customize their phone, much like a computer, in any way they see fit. It is a platform that focuses on innovation, usability, reliability, and quality.

OpenMoko’s heart lies deep into the components and resources of the Open Source and Free Software Movements. Moko is short for Mobile Kommunikations. ‘K’ is a tribute to all hackers around the world that build software that drives innovation into the platform. Open means that developers around the world can evolve the platform in anyway they like.

For more details via the press release -click here.

What is Any Video Converter ?

It’s a free software that enables you to convert almost all video formats including DivX, XviD, MOV, rm, rmvb, MPEG, VOB, DVD, WMV, AVI to MPEG-4 movie format for iPod/PSP or other portable video device, MP4 player or smart phone and It also supports any user defined video file formats as the output.

more

Who need more?..i want to Download

Corel® plans to change all of that by introducing the Corel® Snapfireâ„¢, Snapfire puts the fun in photo sharing, with it you can organize, edit & share your digital photos and videos and it’s quite simple to use, did i also mentioned that it’s absolutely FREE?

Organize photos and videos effortlessly

# Watch a full-screen slide show of photos & videos as soon as they are downloaded to your computer.

# Rate your photos and add captions.

Enhance photos with a few clicks

* Focus on what’s important in your photos. Crop to 4×6 so viewers notice the subject of your photo and not any distracting background.

* The Photo Doctor will let you know when a photo can be improved just by clicking Quick Fix.

Share all the photo fun

* Send stunning Snapfire Shows to friends and family.

* Let people see your photos instantly by embedding photos right into the body of your e-mail or e-mail larger photos as attachments.

This are just some of the features of this fantastic free software by Corel.

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Here’s a preview of the totally cool looking templates that you can download for free:

TemplateWorld templates are easily editable, 100% compatible with popular html and image editors, They are primarily geared toward a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels (with compatibility for 800×600 pixels, 1152×864 pixels and higher), they are are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License and best of all they are completely FREE.

I believe it will be just a matter of time before someone codes this templates to be compatible with the likes of Joomla, WordPress, Drupal and more.

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This 3MB piece of program is a no brainer to use, just download it, install , just paste the URL of the YouTube webpage you want to rip into YouRipper and the video, in Flash Movie flv format is downloaded onto your PC.

The only one downside as far as i’m concerned is that it only works for Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP..bummer

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Well than, AROUNDMe may very well be the script you are looking for

AROUNDMe is the perfect solution for you to bring people together around shared goals, activities and interests to form a shared knowledge network.The platform encourages participation in activities which introduces a person to like minded people. That person will form friendships with those other people thus building a social network around themselves.

The AROUNDMe me script is still a wok in progress but you can download it and have a go installing it on your server, it’s a pretty nice script as far as i can tell but as the people behind it has pointed out there’s still some weeks to go before it is perfected and bugs are squashed.

Learn more about the script and play with the demo version here

[Source]

MegaUpload today announced their new and improved premium account service and the introduction of their own version of a download manager, the Mega Manager.

Mega Manager is a standalone Windows client application for Megaupload and a generic download accelerator that we provide to our users free of charge.
You don’t have to buy a premium account or even be a registered user to use it!

Some of the Mega Manager Features:

Powerful uploading (up to 6 times faster than through a web browser)
- Upload at line speed
- Unattended batch uploads
- Resume broken uploads

Powerful downloading
- Resume broken downloads
- Unlimited unattended batch downloads (premium only)

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- Download at line speed (premium only)

FastStone Image Viewer for Windows boasts a nice design already, but you can customize it to your liking with several skins. Clicking a thumbnail puts a larger view of the shot in the lower-left pane, and you zoom in simply by dragging the mouse around. Though its image-editing tools can’t compete with those offered by a full-featured suite, there’s still enough here to make a decent amount of tweaks to your shots. You can resize, crop, remove red-eye, and adjust color, brightness, and contrast.As usual it supports all the major image types – BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA.

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JotSpot co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus wrote on Google Blog: “We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online,”

What exactly is JotSpot?

JotSpot’s product is a platform for building wiki-based applications. For example, the company has an online spreadsheet and calendar that multiple people can edit.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has sold its wiki system primarily to business customers as hosted collaboration software. Wikis are catching on within businesses as lightweight alternative to large-scale document management systems.
source

Read more about it at Google Blog

Have fun finding and downloading music with Google at g2p

g2p is a product of i-hacked

For example, someone might buy the word “Hosting” for the site and place his/her hosting affiliate link which could bring in some $$ especially if the site that displays this keywords receives much traffic.

DEMO

Now you can start a similar site for free, just download the open source PHP script and install it and voila! a word cloud site

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YouTube will continue to work on it’s brand and will retain all 67 employees, including co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.It’s a good thing that YouTube will continue with it’s brand, God forbid we hear names such as Gtube or Googtube thrown in the air!.

According to Google’s Press Release:

“The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “Our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers.”

With this purchase Google has catapuled itself to the top of the online video revolution,not to mention this has been Google’s most expensive purchase by far in it’s 8 year history.

Rumors are that Yahoo Inc will be pressured to make a similar move and may well end up purchasing Facebook.com for over a Billion dollars, although persuading the owner to sell is another matter all together.

“Yahoo really needs to step up and do something,” said Roger Aguinaldo, an investment banker who also publishes a dealmaking newsletter called the M&A Advisor. “They are becoming less relevant and looking less innovative with each passing day.”

Selling to Mountain View-based Google will give YouTube more technological muscle and advertising know-how, as well as generate a staggering windfall for a 67-employee company that was running on credit card debt just 20 months ago.

Read More:

Yahoo News

Google Press Release

In a twist of events popular P2P software Limewire is now suing the RIAA for Antitrust And Consumer Fraud.

It all began when the RIAA sued Limewire after Limewire wouldn’t agree to simply roll over and pretend the RIAA’s interpretation of the Supreme Court decision in the Grokster case was actually what the Supreme Court said.

to quote:

The court actually said that services could be found liable, if they were shown to actively induce infringement. The RIAA and the MPAA pretended this meant that any file sharing network that had unauthorized content was flat-out illegal. Of course, that’s a bit of a stretch.

The outcome of this lawsuit is what i am anticipating, i’ve always been a user of Limewire and believe it or not have never downloaded any other P2P software, Limewire is just what the doctor ordered, i’ve got myself the Pro version which is even better!.

Let’s wait and see what happens to this particular lawsuit..go Limewire!

source & more

You know how it is when you visit popular sites like New York Times and NY Post that always bugs you to register before you can actually read the content? Well no worries now thanks to BugMeNot.

With BugMeNot you can access almost any site that needs a login information.
Some of the sites you can gain access to:

* www.nytimes.com
* www.nypost.com
* www.washingtonpost.com
* www.chicagotribune.com
* www.latimes.com
* www.imdb.com

More at BugMeNot

As mentioned earlier Torpark runs off the Firefox Portable, an optimized version of the browser that can be run off a USB (Universal Serial Bus) memory stick on a computer.

You can find out more and download at : http://torpark.nfshost.com

source

The exploit affects what’s called Flash remoting – essentially the provision of server-based application services via Flash, as opposed to via HTML, Active Server Pages or some other wrapper. Though an exploit itself has not yet been discovered, Adobe engineers found that a certain form of Flash remoting command sent to ColdFusion servers (another acquired Macromedia technology) triggers an infinite loop process that will not stop itself.

source & more

Open source games are computer games assembled out of open-source software and open content.

Wikipedia has assembled quite a cool list of open source games and they have arranged it alphabetically (aww,how sweet..).

Start downloading some free games by clicking here.

Here it is:

Note

This option is only available for folders included in your user profile. Folders in your user profile include My Documents and its subfolders, Desktop, Start Menu, Cookies, and Favorites. If you do not make these folders private, they are available to everyone who uses your computer.

When you make a folder private, all of its subfolders are private as well.

You cannot make your folders private if your drive is not formatted as NTFS

Or if you have $39.95 to spare and want to password protect your folder than click here

Among the software listed are:

Inkscape

Inkscape is a Vector graphics application tool and suprising enough it also works with Linux and MAC.

HandBrake

Handbrake is a DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter tool.

You can view the full list of FREE softwares at Open Source Windows

enjoy!

WebPasties.com is just the site a fresh webmaster needs, it may not appeal to more advanced webmasters out there but it will surely be a good resource for the newer ones.

With WebPasties.com, you can easily create Polls,Slideshows,Forms,Podcast RSS,IM Buttons,Calendars,RSS Tickers and more.

The Form Mail feature will particularly be of importance to a beginner, Webpasties makes it so easy to set up a ‘contact form’ for your site and you can check it for yourself here.

What are the benefits of the Form Mail?

Save time and money with WebPasties’ no hassle Form-Mail:

Forget about having to ask your system administrator for help. No CGI. No boring README files, no configuration files, no nothing.

Route emails to different people based on the different subject selections they choose.

Radically customize your form-mail’s appearance with colors, borders, and fonts that match the look of your website.

You get what you do want, communication with your customers. You don’t get what you don’t want, vulnerability to mean and nasty email harvesting spambots.

Are you tired of people emailing you but leaving out critical information like order numbers or telephone numbers? With the Form-Mail pastie, you can require that people provide important information.

Create a simple way for people to add attachments. How many times have you received an email only to be followed by an additional email that say “oops here is the attachment. I forgot”?

Visit WebPasties Today!

Do you want to the cool Ajax comments feature to your WordPress powered blog?
Previously you would have to edit some files and it was rather complicated to do, you can find out what i mean by clicking here and here

Now however it has become a little easier with the AJAX Comments 2.0 plugin for WordPress.

Features:

* comment form validation happens server-side without refreshing or leaving the page
* Script.aculo.us Fade In/Out Effects make readers happy
* works with AuthImage captcha word verification plug-in to prevent comment spam
* still works traditionally if browsers don’t support JavaScript (or have it disabled)
* uses existing theme code to match styled comment threads when producing new comments
* 25-second server timeout ensures readers aren’t left hanging
* works in current versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape, and Safari.

Download & More….

Hackers made Firefox the latest subject of attack last week, utilizing software TechNet Security Center: Tools & Guidance to Defend Your Network that could capture extremely sensitive information, including credit card numbers and passwords.

On July 25, Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) Latest News about Symantec Security Response detected Infostealer.Snifula, which downloads malicious Trojans onto a user’s computer that can subsequently steal any information the user types into a form on the Web, according to Dave Cole, director of the Symantec Security Response group.

Source & More

dang…nothing is secure anymore

File Transfer

This is something so important, and finally Google has decided to add this feature to Gtalk.
With this feature you can send unlimited files and folders to your friends through Google Talk. There is no restriction on the file type or size and the peer-to-peer transfer is fast and reliable.

Voicemail

I like this particular feature, because you can now leave a voicemail to your contacts, and if they don’t use gtalk all that often they’ll receive an email with the message attached as an audio file.

Cool feature indeed.

Music Status

Last but not least is the “music status” feature that lets your friends see what you’re listening to by selecting “Show current music track” in your status menu. Your status message will change when your song does!

currently Google only support this music player:

* iTunes
* Windows Media Player
* Winamp
* Yahoo Music Engine

The bummer is that it only supports Windows machines…go figure!

via : Google

One of the cool thing about Firefox is it’s ever growing list of ‘plugins’ or extensions, whereby you will be able to futher enhanced your web surfing experience.

The Video Downloader extension is one of those essential extension needed especially if your a download freak!.

With one click on a small button in the bottom-right corner, you can download Flash videos from sites like YouTube and Google Video. Be sure to rename your file with a FLV extension to watch it. This extension also allows you to download other embedded media from Web pages.

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