This tip is geared towards Windows admins who manage Active Directory servers and end user machines. If you fit into this category, a tool you might find useful is the Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner. This free tool scans your entire network and diagnoses potential problems or warnings,  mostly as they relate to Active Directory. If any problems are...

Whenever you purchase a new PC from a major computer manufacturer, typically it comes with lots of stuff you don’t want. This is very annoying because you have to either reformat your drive or manually remove each program. For a simple one step solution, check out PC Decrapifier: The PC Decrapifier will uninstall many of the common trialware and annoyances...

A week ago, I ran a post about an article comparing 3 popular media players and several commenters pointed out VLC was their choice and were surprised it was left off the list. Well, the popular open source media player users will be happy to know VLC 1.0.0 is now available. This major release introduces many new features, new formats and new codecs to the VLC...

One way which viruses are distributed are through system script files such as files with VBS and JS extensions. One on the more well known attacks which used this method is the ILOVEYOU virus which spread as an email attachment and counted on the user running the script file attachment. To help protect yourself from these types of attacks, check out Script...

I made mention last week that if you were running XP illegally, you could still get Windows 7 by buying Vista, then buying the Windows 7 Upgrade and the total cost would be around $138. NewEgg now offers free Windows 7 coupons with certain Vista license purchases. The cost now? $109.99. With free shipping. This is something that wasn’t available last week,...

Opera is one of those browsers that has a very dedicated community, but pales in usage compared to Firefox and Internet Explorer. The perks of Opera have pretty much always been the same.Best native tab management Lightning fast operation in just about every way Low memory usage A user interface that just makes sense More options that are actually usable...

(Note: If you are running Windows XP or Vista legally, this article does not apply to you.) I’m not going to pretend for a moment that there’s more than a few of you out there running Windows XP illegally. You’ve seen the very nice $50 price tag of Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade and said, "Okay, I can afford that, but can I upgrade a...

I don’t think there’s any denying that Firefox 3.5 is late to the party concerning other browsers have had features (like private browsing) FF is only getting now. Regardless, here’s my real-world review on it. Instead of getting into the super-techy details on this I’m going to concentrate on what most would care about. Will 3.5 break...

If you are looking for a media player or are ‘re-evaluating’ the software you are currently using, here is a nice article comparing popular media players. The players compared are Winamp, MediaMonkey, iTunes and Windows Media Player, all of which are widely used. Features/functions compared are:File type support Searching/Filtering and...

First of all, I’m stealing the tagline of Miro HD Video Player for the title of this tip.  Miro is an open source application which connects to free Internet repositories of video and downloads them to your machine for viewing. You can think of Miro as a Tivo for Internet TV as you can save shows from their guide and when new shows are available, they are...