What is a keylogger? It’s something that records keystrokes and is normally used without the consent of the user. You’ve probably heard that keyloggers are a bad thing. It is when used for illegal purposes, such as having a keylogger app installed without your knowledge via spyware. But it’s not a bad thing when you are the one who installed...

Judging from the overwhelming positive response from Windows 7 users (including myself), I guess it’s no surprise that Gartner is telling clients to skip Vista entirely and just go straight to 7. What’s more is that it will happen relatively quickly as Microsoft appears to be on target for a late 2009 launch – and that’s ahead of schedule...

One really useful feature of Windows which I notice a lot of people do not take advantage of is the Quick Launch bar. This is the area in your taskbar which has the icons you can use to open programs. For many people I can see why they would not use it because between the programs they have open on the taskbar and the system tray, there really isn’t too...

Windows has always had the native screen capture functionality via the Print Screen button, but this is extremely limited to just capturing the full screen or the active window. Of course, then you had to paste this capture into another program to actually save the image making this a rather cumbersome process. Windows Vista now has a much improved utility for...

Most web sites will work with no issue using Firefox 3 or Internet Explorer 8. But there will be times you encounter a web page that will instantly crash your browser. One such example is crappy MySpace pages. It is very common to find pages with the following junk in it:Animated background graphic Animated Flash graphics Auto-play music player Other...

The fact Microsoft is offering Windows 7 free for an entire year to anybody who wants it is definitely a change for the better. It used to be that whenever any software maker released a product, they would do so, wait for the mountain of complaints to come in, then provide fixes. Concerning operating systems, that’s typically how commercial releases worked...

One of the eye candy functions that Mac OS offers is a feature called Expose. Wikipedia describes this feature like so: Exposé allows a user to quickly locate an open window, or to hide all windows and show the desktop without the need to click through many windows to find a specific target. It is very similar to the tab view function offered by browsers where...

(Note before starting: This should also for work Windows Vista the exact same way.) The way in which Windows 7 shows the date and time in the taskbar is like this:However you can make it look like this:Or this:Or any number of other ways by modifying the short date format in Calendar settings. To access this setting, you can get to it in several different...

Two of the most common dialog boxes you use are the save and open file prompts. As you probably know, there are shortcuts to common locations available along the left side which allow you to quickly jump to specific folders. If you would like to customize these locations, a simple way to do so is with the freeware utility PlacesBar Tweaker. With this utility you...

While most of us like to keep the items in our system tray to a relative minimum, there is no doubt that some programs are best served by being available in the system tray. The problem is this functionality has to be built into the program for this to happen. To get around this limitation, check out TrayEverything. Thanks to TrayEverything this can be done with...