Web-based email is the future and it is now. We live in a world now where access to email from wherever you are is pretty important. Putting your email in the cloud (the Internet) is the best way to do that.

I am a big fan of Gmail. Rich bailed on Gmail because he thought they lost one of his emails. He is now using Hotmail. But, Gmail continues to rule the roost and I think it is a great email client and service.

But, Gmail is not without some annoyances. Some of those annoyances are big and would need to be solved by Gmail themselves (such as the addition of a to-do list). Others are small but can be “fixed” using Greasemonkey. Continued

Whenever you open or save a file in Windows Vista, you typically get the standard dialog box which has shortcut locations on the left side. You can easily customize these locations to add or remove locations to best suit your needs. Here is how:

1. Open a dialog box (either a Save As or Open dialog will work).
2. Right click on some white space in the locations on the left pane and select Open Favorite Links Folder. The folder: “C:\Users\Your Name\Links” should open.
3. Add or remove shortcuts as needed.
4. Your changes should take effect immediately.

Once you take a few minutes to configure your locations, this trick should save you quite a bit of time.

As you probably know, your hard drive is the most important component in your computer because it houses all your data. Unfortunately it is the most likely device to fail. While virtually all modern hard drives have S.M.A.R.T. technology built in to detect failures, one important factor you can monitor is your hard drive temperature with HDD Temperature.

HDD Temperature is a free program which, simply put, monitors and warns you when temperatures get to high on your hard drive. You can customize the temperature warning level as well as how the system responds to a tripped warning.

The free version is limited to a single hard drive, so if you have multiple hard drives in your system, or you want to monitor a server, then the pro version might be a better fit.