Retro Friday: Does Using An Older Windows Make *You* Old?

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I’ll answer this question up front – no, it doesn’t. Aside from what I talk about in the video above, there’s this strange belief that any computer that’s old is worthless, and that those who use them must be equally worthless. Obviously, that’s not true. Those who know how to wield older computers and operating [...]

Top 5 Long Single-Player RPG Games That Will Work On Your Computer

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Many people don’t bother buying games for computers these days on the assumption their computer isn’t fast enough – even if the computer is brand new. Are they right? Most of the time, yes they are. One could quickly come to the conclusion of, “I’ll just run older games then!” That’s not always an option [...]

Why Does Your Firewall Matter?

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Sometimes you might find that the applications you’re using simply refuse to play nice with your Firewall, and even trying to allow exceptions into the software doesn’t seem to help matters. The temptation to simply turn off your firewall and be done with it might be pretty high. After all, all it does is complicate [...]

Rasterbate Your Photos And Make Cool Looking Wall Art

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Once your printer is in proper working order (see the article prior to this one), now you can do some cool stuff with it. Instead of the plain old boring documents you normally print, you can take any image and “rasterbate” it. What does “rasterbate” mean? Tiled printing. It’s the process where you take one [...]

How To “Write Protect” A USB Key

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Some USB keys have a physical write-protect switch on it, but many don’t. It is possible to make your USB 2.0 “write-protected” simply by modifying the file-write permissions on it. Fortunately this can be done without the need to hack the registry or use any apps. Check out the video below to see how it’s [...]

Five Plugins Every Minecraft Server Needs

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So, you’ve finally gotten your server up and running, have you? You’ve got a website, you’ve worked out all the gory details surrounding bandwidth and firewalls, you’ve managed to force your way through the unwieldy, arcane labyrinth of NAT, and now…you’re finally ready to open your doors to the world. Wait, no you aren’t- not [...]

SliTaz – A Linux Distro That’s Only 35MB In Size

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For those of you into the itty-bitty Linux distros, SliTaz is definitely worth checking out as it’s only 35MB in size. It’s rare that a Linux flavor comes along this good at a size so small. I checked it out and it looks really good (and functions well) for what it is. SliTaz is designed [...]

Retro Friday: Windows Messenger 4.7 And MSN Messenger 5.0

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If you can believe it, Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger, formerly Windows Messenger) is 12 years old; it had its initial launch on 12 July 1999. Amazingly, really old versions of the Messenger app still work with the service to this day. The versions seen in the video below are 4.7 and 5.0. Note [...]

App Of The Moment: ReminderFox

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I’m going to say up front that this app is not for everyone because it requires a very specific mindset to use it. ReminderFox is an app for use in the Mozilla Firefox web browser or Mozilla Thunderbird email client; it can best be classified as the “happy medium” between a full calendaring app and [...]

Is mscorsvw.exe Eating Up Your CPU Cycles?

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The recent reinstallation of the Windows 7 operating system on my laptop involved a ton of updates, several of which were updates with .NET in the title. Here’s an example of a few of them: On reboot after installing anything with .NET in the title, Windows will crawl along very slowly as if it’s doing [...]

My Experience With Acer eRecovery Management

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I made the the plunge and upgraded my laptop’s 500GB HDD to a 256GB SSD. In particular, this one. And of course the price dropped 25 dollars the week after I bought it. Hate it when that happens. And yes, I’ll be writing about my experience with using SSD soon. On a laptop you typically [...]

Online Video Tip: Posting In 720p Quality Is Still Your Best Bet

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Concerning online video quality, in the widescreen realm there’s 360p, 720p and 1080p. Most people almost never use 480p widescreen because it has a “weird” pixel resolution (853×480) that most cameras and software do not output, so 480p is almost exclusively 4:3 aspect ratio at 640×480. In literal pixels, 360p (usually) translates to 640×360, 720p [...]

Retro Friday: Using From-Provider Instant Messenger Apps For Windows 98 In 2012

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As I’ve said before, whether an older operating system (or operating environment in this case) is still usable today all depends on the apps. If the apps work, you can use it. If not, there’s really not much you can do about that. In the video below I test the instant messenger apps AOL Instant [...]

How To Speed Up Google Chrome 19

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Right after I posted How To Speed Up Firefox 13, several asked for a similar video on Google Chrome 19, so here it is. This isn’t as exhaustive as the Firefox video because Chrome doesn’t offer as many customization options (not on a native level, anyway). However, what you’ll see below will speed things up.

Crucial System Scanner Tool Makes For Stupidly Easy Laptop Upgrade Decisions

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You have a laptop and want to upgrade the RAM and maybe even swap out the hard drive with an SSD – but you have no idea what type of RAM is in your laptop or what SSDs are compatible with your system. With the Crucial System Scanner tool, it literally doesn’t get any easier. [...]

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