You may have seen several posts and tips on this site in the past regarding the excellent open source password manager, KeePass, but today I’m going to point you to another excellent password manager: RoboForm. RoboForm (available in a free and commercial version) offers just about everything you would ever need for managing passwords. Here are some...

I have written several tips in the past about the remarkable (and free) Visual Studio Express Editions made available by Microsoft. If you are a user of Visual Studio, then here is a great article pointing out some tips and tricks you may not know about. Some points of interest from the article:Store Commonly Used Code Snippets in the Toolbox Using TODO, HACK,...

LMGTFY is this. It is the answer given to someone who, foolishly, has posted a question to a forum without searching Google for the answer first. In the future, this may be replaced with Bing, but for now it’s Google. People get really irritated when given LMGTFY as the "answer". But it is correct because people know the answer is there and it...

David Risley, owner of PCMech, turns 31 today. The absolute truth about Dave which is totally untrue but could be true if seen from a certain point of view just like Obi-Wan said: The Rubik’s Cube was originally the Dave Cube, as he did invent it. However the marketing department didn’t think "Dave Cube" was a good title, so it was...

When Windows Vista was initially released by Microsoft, a handy tool was made available which could scan your computer to determine if it is capable of running the then new OS. Well, now that Windows 7 is on the way, Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor has been made available: Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor scans your PC’s system, programs and devices to check if...

Someone was fortunate enough to recover a 300 baud modem manufactured by Livermore Data Systems, manufactured circa 1964. It is a true acoustic modem with the large transducers and all. And, the best part, it still works as the video below will show. This is as old-school as you can get concerning modems. Bear in mind this is pre-Hayes era. In the demo below,...

Although I should have done this last month when it was released, I finally got around to downloading Ubuntu 9.04 to see what was new. What I found that the most significant upgrades to the OS had almost nothing to do with the interface itself. From what I understand the Ubuntu team was going to revamp the UI in 9, but it couldn’t be completed in time so...

When it comes to keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys, virtually everyone knows about the Copy-Paste combination of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. However, there are lots of other universal keyboard shortcuts common across applications in various operating systems. For the most part the shortcuts on this list work across the board, but the functionality, of course, depends on the...

I made a decision a while back that the most icons I would have on my desktop is one column worth, meaning if the icons on the left side of the first monitor "skip" to another, there’s too many and it must be cleaned up. The only icon I have on the right is the Recycle Bin. I have entertained the idea of removing that from the desktop, but I find...

Do I have to say it? Spam. Or at least that’s what Symantec says, so you can take that for what it’s worth. Spam is one of those things that’s constantly changing to bust the roadblocks we put up against it. However we as email users are smarter now and we also have better tools to fight the junk. What’s the best way to filter spam...

If you use a signature either in your emails or message board posts, don’t put an image in it. I understand for some people it may be required by corporate policies, but if you have the option leave it out. Adding a graphic in your signature not only wastes bandwidth, but it detracts the reader’s eye from what you want them to see… your...

ReadWriteWeb posted their 2009 Web Predictions back in December 2008. We’re almost half-way thru 2009 at this point. Here’s a few from that list that were and weren’t (so far) true. Yahoo sells to a big media company, but it won’t be Microsoft. Status: Didn’t happen (yet – and that’s a big ‘yet’ because it...

As you get older there are certain high frequencies you can no longer hear. One particular frequency is called a "Mosquito Tone", which is near or at 17.4 kHz. Most people over the age of 25 cannot hear this tone. I’m 34, and I can’t hear it. A few years back a device called The Mosquito was introduced specifically to solve teen loitering...

Linux people in particular like the Telnet protocol because it allows easy command line interface access to PCs on a home network or small-biz setup. However if you have a Win 7 PC on your network, go to a prompt and type "telnet", the infamous "telnet is not recognized as an internal or external command.." shows up. Is the telnet.exe program...

If you do online banking and you have accounts with multiple banks, a feature a lot of banks offer is the ability to transfer money to and from external accounts for free. Of course every bank’s features are different, but the beauty of this is only one of your banks has to offer the functionality (since you can initiate the transfer from there). For...

So you want to be a programmer. But you don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars in training. You want something you can learn that’s cheap, always in demand and can be learned easily. Sound like you? Then you want to be a Microsoft Access consultant. MS Access consultants are always needed for companies both large and small. And the best...

Said honestly, Windows Live Movie Maker Beta, in a word, sucks. It lost so many features compared to the old Windows Movie Maker that it’s just not worth using. Are you stuck without a free video editor in Windows 7 at this point? No. You can install the old – and far superior – Windows Movie Maker in Windows 7. All you have to do is download...

One of the great things about online maps (i.e. Google Maps, Map Quest, Yahoo Maps, etc.) is you can find stores located in your area very quickly and efficiently. For example, you can search Office Depot and find all the applicable locations and then search for Staples to see which of the two is closer. Additionally, you can usually see the store phone number...

I have posted many tips in the past on system utilities available from both Sysinternals and Nirsoft. While these programs are excellent, on drawback is they lack any kind of auto-update functionality meaning you have to check for updates manually. To always make sure you have the latest version and are notified of new releases, check out Windows System Control...

If you consistently have a bunch of tabs open when using Firefox, one problem you may have is following the ‘breadcrumb’ of how tabs relate to each other. For example, if you are looking at search results on troubleshooting and then follow a link which opens a new tab and follow another link which opens another new tab (etc., etc.), the tabs can be...