One of the criticisms of Microsoft has been that over the years their Windows OS  has attempted to be everything for everybody which contributed to a serious amount of bloat in the OS. Attempting to combat this problem, Microsoft has released their Live Essentials package as a separate package which is freely downloaded from either Microsoft.com or Windows...

As I am sure Google is the search engine of choice for most of our readers, they have just recently published an update to their search engine indexing process: Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s...

Included in the last round of Windows Updated patches released by Microsoft was, for some reason, a Firefox extension called “Search Helper Extension”. As part of its regular Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released an update for its various toolbars, and this update came with more than just documented fixes. The update also installs an add-on for Internet...

If you visit the Google homepage regularly, a few weeks ago you probably noticed they published a Javascript version of Pacman as their Google logo. Much to the dismay of some employers (I’m sure), Google has made their Pacman tribute available indefinitely. If nothing else this is just a time killer and a fun way to pay homage to the iconic game. Just...

When it comes to self hosted blog packages, WordPress is probably the most well known and widely used. While WordPress can be run on any web server, it is specifically developed to be deployed on Apache web servers. So for those of you who use Windows hosts and want a fully featured blog platform, take a look at BlogEngine.NET. BlogEngine.NET is an open source...

Giving the 10% of you out there who use the Safari browser a bit of love, today Apple released Safari 5 for download. I am a Firefox user, so I was curious about the new features offered by Safari and a few of them are actually pretty interesting:Safari Reader – this is a pretty good idea as it brings the content you are reading to the forefront while...

Recently, I have been reading a lot about a relatively new PDF reader product, Nitro PDF, so I decided to give it a try. After about a week of usage, I am pretty impressed. In fact, I have uninstalled SumatraPDF and CutePDF writer from my system and solely use Nitro PDF. This free product boasts an impressive list of features which most free readers do not...

Whenever a new major version is released for one of the big browsers, there are typically several articles posted which pit them against each other to measure relative performance. So right on cue with the initial releases of Internet Explorer 9, here is a fairly objective comparison of the new browser to Firefox, Chrome and Safari (sorry no Opera). The...

Changing it up a bit, I would like to pose a question to our readers to see what you think. When building/purchasing a computer, there are 3 essential hardware components which determine overall how fast the computer runs:Processor Memory Hard Drive (platter based, not SSD since they are not yet standard)To address the “what about XXX” up front:...

One of the very few programs I have gone on record as officially recommending is the excellent WinPatrol monitoring utility. So to keep you updated, earlier this week a new version was released which adds registry monitoring: I frequently get recommendations from pros on new registry locations which should be monitored.  In some cases, these locations are...