Whether you just built or bought a new PC, it pays to optimize your setup from the start

Nothing holds more promise than a brand-new PC. The hardware is fresh and full of potential, the OS is clean and clutter-free, and you have nothing but pure, unadulterated storage space awaiting your precious data. It’s an exciting time, indeed. But before you start dumping old files onto your new rig willy-nilly, and downloading every shiny bauble of an app that catches your eye, take some time to consider a more measured approach to moving in. After all, you only have this opportunity once.

The way you set up your new PC now will have a lasting impact on your experience over time. Do it haphazardly, and your experience will be plagued by disorder and regret. Do it thoughtfully, though, by following the course of action we prescribe on the following pages, and you will have a machine that’s primed and ready to meet your every need from the start.

Check Your Specs

If you’ve just built your rig or unboxed a sparkling-new PC, it’s always a good idea to verify the hardware specs to make sure all parts are actually performing as they should be. We’ve seen simple BIOS misconfigurations downclock chips by hundreds of megahertz.

Inspect CPU-Z's memory tab to see if your RAM is configured correctly for double- or triple-channel, and that the frequency is set to the level you paid for.

First download CPU-Z. This excellent free utility will query your CPU and report the model number, cache size, and clock speed of the chip in real-time. To test your CPU’s speed, put a load on it using, say, Prime95 and run a stress test. CPU-Z should report the correct clock speed for your chip. While you’re here, pull up Task Manager by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del. Select the Performance tab and make sure that each of your cores, virtual or real, is represented. Believe it or not, we’ve seen Hyper-Threading turned off occasionally on some systems.

Turn off Prime95, but keep CPU-Z open. Click the Memory tab. You should see the memory frequency reported under DRAM Frequency. This is the base clock, so you should double it to get the frequency of the RAM. For example, if your DDR3/1600 is reporting as 667, your RAM is actually running at DDR3/1333 speed.

TechPowerUp's GPU-Z will tell you what speed the PCIe is running at.

CPU-Z will also report graphics speed, but we prefer GPU-Z for more detailed info. GPU-Z will generate a CPU-Z-like interface. Pay particular attention to the default clock speed and memory speeds for your GPU. If you paid for an overclocked GPU, check that it is running at the speeds you paid for. GPU-Z will also tell you if SLI or CrossFireX is enabled or not and also at what speed the PCIe slot is running. Yes, it's possible that a new machine will have the GPU running in a slower slot, which may impact performance.

Stress It Out

If a component is going to fail, you want it to fail while it’s under warranty. For CPU stress tests, we prefer the free Prime95. Just download it and run the in-place stress test. A properly configured and cooled stock-clocked system should have no problem running Prime95 for hours on end. For GPU stress testing, FurMark is still quite popular, or you can run Unigine’s Heaven benchmark in a loop for a few hours. Keep in mind that stressing the GPU will also stress your PSU and cooling, so any shortcomings may crop up there, as well.

RTFM

Did you know your motherboard has a special USB port that allows you to make BIOS updates without a CPU being installed? No? Well it’s right there in the frakking manual. One of the first things you should do with your new machine is to read the documentation, particularly the motherboard manual, that came with it.

Store Your Extra Parts

Once you’re done building a new PC, collect the extra modular power cables, drive rails, special sound-dampening drive screws, and put them in one place. You could even store the extra parts in your case, as long as there’s room to spare and it won’t block airflow. You won’t thank us now, but you will in three years.

Get Drivers in Order

If you installed the drivers from the disc that came with your motherboard, your drivers are already way out of date. Any new PC should be paired with the freshest drivers available for the platform, as updates can add performance, enhance compatibility, and fix the wonkiness that usually occurs with the first drivers to ship.

High-end peripherals should be paired with the latest drivers to unlock all of the device's functionality.

The freshest drivers are usually available directly from the manufacturer of the component, so the best source for updated drivers for an AMD motherboard is AMD. If you’re running a fancy gaming mouse or keyboard, you’ll also want to install the matching drivers for them. These drivers unlock the full functionality of the mouse or peripheral beyond the built-in Windows 7 HID drivers.

Set Up Your Security

There’s no point in taking the time and care to set up a new PC just right if you don’t also make security one of your first priorities. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time before some form of malware gets in your system and mucks up the works, possibly even requiring a reinstall.

Thanks to AVG's free AV app, even cheapskates can be safe from malware.

Our Holiday issue antivirus roundup found Norton Internet Security 2012 ($70, www.norton.com) to be the best AV suite for purchase, while AVG Anti-Virus Free 2012 proved to be a very capable free solution. Before you do anything else, do this.

Prepare for Disaster

With Windows 7, everything you need for data backup and system repair is right there in the OS. Combine that with a large hard drive, and you have no excuse not to establish a full-fledged data recovery plan. With a secondary drive in place (either internal or external), head over to Control Panel, then System and Security, then Backup and Restore. Choose Backup Your Computer, then Set up Backup. Select the drive that backups will be saved to, choose the files to be saved, and set a schedule. Next, choose the option to Create a System Image, an exact copy of your drive—OS, system settings, program files, etc.—to use in the event your drive fails or your system stops working. Finally, opt to Create a System Repair Disc. This disc will save your bacon should your machine not start, allowing you to boot your computer from the optical drive and then retrieve the system image and backups you’ve dutifully created.

Decrapify Your PC

When you build a new PC, you have full control over the software that gets installed. Not so when you buy a system, which is practically guaranteed to host a number of apps you have little use for, or that slow your PC’s performance, or that constantly pester you with pop-ups. Get rid of that crap with PC Decrapifier. The free tool walks you through the process of removing unnecessary programs, startup items, and icons.

Transfer Your Files, Easily

It’s time to sully that pristine PC with craploads of junk from your old PC. Power users normally go manual by popping the old PC’s drive into a spare SATA port on the new rig. This lets you pick and choose what’s really worth moving. If you’d rather just do it on autopilot, check out Microsoft’s free Easy Transfer utility. It’s meant for newbies, but it can make the move to a new machine fairly painless. Run Windows Easy Transfer on your new PC (Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools), and it will give you options for the move: USB hard drive, the network, or an optional USB cable. The utility will ask you to insert a USB key where an executable will be installed. Run this executable on your old box, and it will package up all of the files into a single file that will be stored on an HDD or moved across the network to your new PC, where everything is unloaded into its proper place.

Tips for Trickier File Transfers

Moving documents from one computer to another is usually just a matter of copying-and-pasting onto an external hard drive and then to your new PC. That’s fine for office docs and photos, but what about apps that build media libraries, like iTunes and Steam, or saved games, which go wherever the publisher feels like putting them?

iTunes
If you’re using an iDevice, you might be stuck with iTunes as a media manager. Here’s how to move your music and other media (and keep your ratings, playlists, etc.) without having to rebuild your library.

First, open iTunes and go to File > Library > Organize Library > Consolidate Files. This will ensure that all your music is in one place. Once done, exit iTunes. Copy your iTunes folder, which should be under My Music (unless you’ve moved it) to your external drive. If you’re decommissioning your old PC, be sure to deauthorize that computer from your iTunes account. Open iTunes again and go to Store > Deauthorize This Computer. Enter your Apple ID and password.

Install iTunes on your new computer, and then copy the iTunes folder from your external drive to the Music folder of your new computer. Next time you open iTunes, hold down Shift while you double-click the launcher. You’ll be prompted to choose an iTunes library; look for iTunes Library.itl in the folder you just copied to your PC. You should now have your library, with ratings and playlists intact, on your new PC.

Steam Games
On your old PC, go to your Steam folder (C:\Program Files\Steam, by default) and copy the steamapps folder and its contents to your external drive. On your new computer, install Steam and launch it once, then exit it. Go to the Steam folder and delete everything in it except for steam.exe. Now copy the steamapps folder from your old PC into the Steam folder on your new PC, and launch steam.exe again. After a brief self-update, Steam should show your games as installed. You’ll have to do a quick file-verify as you launch each game for the first time, but that’s a lot faster than downloading them all over again.

Game Saves
Not all your games come from Steam, and not all that do have Steam Cloud to manage their saves. And it seems every publisher has a different method of storing saved games. That’s where GameSave Manager (free, www.gamesave-manager.com) comes in.

GameSave Manager hunts down all those weird game save directories and lets you back them up easily.

Run GameSave Manager on your old computer, and it will auto-detect the games you have installed, find out where the game saves are, and back them up, all via the Backup Gamesave(s) menu. Once you have a backup archive (a .gsba file), you can move it to your new computer and use GameSave Manager to automatically restore all your saves.

Configure Audio

By default, most motherboards and soundcards come configured for stereo speaker output. By default, most gamers today play with headphones. The problem is that most advanced audio cards feature algorithms tuned for the output mode. Cool features such as head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) and other filters that greatly enhance sound for headphones don’t get used unless you set the driver accordingly.

To do this, just dig into your soundcard’s control panel and set the default to Headphones for the best experience.

Calibrate Your Monitor

If you got a new display with your new PC (or if you’ve never taken the time to adjust your old monitor), it might be badly calibrated, degrading the image quality you see. For a quick-and-dirty fix, you can run the calibration software built in to Windows by clicking the Start button, then entering DCCW into the search bar. The program will run you through several simple calibration exercises, and adjust your monitor appropriately.

For a more thorough calibration, we recommend that you use high‑quality calibration test images, such as those found at www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/.

Disable Accessibility Shortcuts

Windows comes with a host of accessibility features that can be a great help for people with disabilities or other difficulties using computer hardware. There are keyboard shortcuts for some of these options, but the shortcuts are easy to perform accidentally, and can pop up unwanted dialogue boxes. These shortcuts are:

> Press shift five times: StickyKeys
> Hold right‑shift for eight seconds: FilterKeys
> Hold num lock for five seconds: ToggleKeys

You can disable each shortcut individually by performing it, then choosing to turn off the shortcut, or you can disable them all in one fell swoop in Control Panel > Ease of Access Center > Make the keyboard easier to use.

Adjust Your Power Settings

Whether you’re looking to save the environment, or just your battery life, you should pay a visit to your new PC’s power options. If you open the Control Panel, then select Hardware and Sound, and then Power Options, you’ll see the available power profiles. You can select one of the available profiles, or change your screen's brightness from this menu, but if you want more control, you’ll need to select a profile and click the link that says “Change plan settings.”

A new menu will pop up, where you can change how long the computer waits before it dims the display, turns off the display, or goes to sleep. Even more options can be found by clicking the advanced power settings button.

Share Files on a Network

If your new PC will be sharing a network with other computers running a version of Windows 7, you can create a Homegroup so they can all share files and devices (such as a printer). Be aware, however, that computers running Windows 7 Starter or Windows 7 Home Basic can join an existing Homegroup, but they can’t create one.

To create a new Homegroup, click the Windows menu, choose Computer, and then click Homegroup in the left-hand column. Now click the button labeled “Create a homegroup” (you’ll find it in the main window to the right). This will open a new window in which you can choose which types of files you’d like to share within the Homegroup (photos, music, video, etc.), and whether or not you’d like to share a printer. Click Next when you’ve made your decisions. After a few moments, a new window will appear with a 10-character, case-sensitive Homegroup password. Write this password down or print it.

To add your new PC to an existing Homegroup, obtain the password from any other computer in the Homegroup, click the Start menu, choose Control Panel, then Network and Internet, and then Homegroup. Windows will inform you of the existing Homegroup on the network and ask if you would like to join it. Click Join Now, choose the types of files you wish to share, and click Next. Enter the Homegroup password and click Next. You’ll see a message indicating that you’ve joined the Homegroup, and when you click Network on either computer, you should see each of the other computers in the Homegroup and be able to move files between them.

If you’d like to share other folders within the Homegroup, right-click them, choose Share With from the pop-up menu, and then select either Homegroup (Read) or Homegroup (Read/Write).

Create a Guest Account

Say a friend wants to borrow your new computer to “check their email.” You can limit the degree of access they’ll gain (and damage they can cause) by turning on the Windows Guest account. Sign in using your administrator credentials, click the Start menu, and click the large icon at the top of menu. Click Manage Another Account, then Guest, and then click the Turn On button.

Activating your computer's Guest account is one of the easiest ways to grant someone limited access to your PC.

To switch to the Guest account, click the Start menu, then click the arrow next to the Shut Down button, and choose either Log-off or Switch User. Click the Guest button to log in as a guest. Guest users can launch programs and access the Internet, but they can’t make Control Panel changes (including uninstalling software) or other changes to the computer’s settings. They also can’t access any files or folders protected by a password, and they can’t access other computers on the network, even those within a Homegroup.

Use an Alternative DNS

Each time you type a hostname into your browser and hit Enter, your computer initiates a DNS (Domain Name System) lookup. DNS is akin to a phonebook for the Internet: It converts that user-friendly name into the appropriate IP address. If you haven’t configured your computer differently, you’re probably relying on your ISP to perform these DNS lookups.

You might be able to speed up your web-browsing experience, as well as improve your online security, by switching to an alternative DNS resolution service, such as OpenDNS or Google Public DNS. We’ll show you how to configure your Ethernet adapter to use the latter.

Sign on as an Administrator and click Control Panel, Network and Internet, Network and Sharing Center, and then choose Change Adapter Settings. Select which network connection you wish to change, right-click it, and choose Properties from the pop-out menu. On the Networking tab, choose Internet Protocol Version 4 and then click the Properties button. Choose the General tab and then Advanced. Click the DNS tab. If there are any DNS server addresses already in place here, write them down before erasing them and then click OK.

Many people find that switching to Google Public DNS delivers a faster web-browsing experience.

You should now be back on the General tab in the TCP/IPv4 Properties window. Click the radio button next to “Use the Following DNS Server Addresses” and type 8.8.8.8 in the Preferred DNS Server window and 8.8.4.4 in the Alternate DNS Server window. Click OK and close the Network Connections Properties window. Restart the network connection by right-clicking it and choosing Disable from the pop-out menu, and then right-click it a second time and choose Enable from the pop-out menu. This should restart your connection using the new DNS settings.

To ensure your new settings are working, enter a hostname into your browser: www.maximumpc.com, for instance. If it resolves correctly, bookmark it, then click the bookmark. If it doesn’t, roll back the changes you’ve just made and retest.

Tidy Up Your Insides

Your computer has a lot of cables inside, from front-panel connectors to SATA and power cables. If your case doesn’t have a window, it might be tempting to just leave a rat's nest of wiring inside, but there are substantial benefits to an uncluttered chassis—better cooling and less dust, for example.

If you bought your PC from a boutique builder, it should have come with a decent wiring job, but if you built your own or bought an off-the-shelf system, there’s likely room for improvement.

Sloppy wiring can create pockets of hot air and dust in your case.

Many modern cases have cable-routing cutouts in the motherboard tray, and room behind it to route cables. You should route as many wires as you can behind the motherboard tray—usually your motherboard power cables, at least, can go back here. Route as many power cables from your PSU behind the motherboard and bring them back out near where they need to plug in; you can dramatically reduce clutter in your case this way.

If you don’t have any cutouts in your motherboard tray, you can still use zip ties to keep your cables organized and out of the way. You can also buy stick-on organizing clips to keep your cables attached to your motherboard tray, not hanging out in the middle of your case.

Routing cables behind the motherboard tray (if possible) can lead to a much cleaner and cooler build.

If you have a modular power supply, disconnect (and keep in a safe place) any cables you’re not using. If you don’t, use zip ties to bundle unused cables together, and try to keep them out of the way of your fans’ airflow.

Optimize Your Fan Setup

Your components will last longer if they run at lower temperatures. They will run at lower temperatures if they have sufficient airflow. That’s science.

Your case should have both intake and exhaust fans. You’ll need at least one front intake fan and one rear exhaust fan. Many cases have additional intake fans on the front or left side, and additional exhaust fans at the top of the case. This helps keep hot air moving up and out of your case. You should have roughly the same number of exhaust fans as intake fans, and you should make sure they’re in places that make sense, to create obvious paths for the air. Don’t create dead zones where hot air can stay trapped. If your case has filters for its intake fans, clean them regularly. If not, dust inside your case regularly with canned air.

Provide a consistent airflow pattern for your case. Here, cool air enters at the bottom and exits through the top and rear.

Many motherboards offer fan control in their BIOS settings; you can set your fans to ramp up when your system gets hot and ramp down when it’s cool, or you can wire your fans to a fan controller and set their levels yourself. Most motherboard manufacturers also offer a desktop fan‑control utility for use with their boards. Simple fan controllers just offer speed control; others, like NZXT’s Sentry series, also include temperature sensors, which you can use to automatically control fan speeds based on the temperature of various parts of your system.

Must-Have Apps and Utilities

No PC is complete without these key programs

Google Chrome
Google Chrome remains the single-fastest web browser out there. Couple that with exclusive apps and a fully customizable web interface, and you’ve got a browser that no PC should be without.
www.google.com/chrome

Skype
Installing Skype allows you to talk face to face with anyone, anywhere, so long as they have the software and a webcam. Skype also allows you to set video conference calls, call mobile devices, and make international calls for additional fees.
www.skype.com

Secunia PSI
Installing updates for all your software can be a tedious chore, which is why Secunia Personal Software Inspector is essential. Watch as it automatically updates programs in need, with no effort on your end.
www.secunia.com

Dropbox
If you find yourself using more than one computing device daily, Dropbox makes it easy to share documents across all those devices, including smartphones.
www.dropbox.com

KeePass
Using top-of-the-line encryption algorithms AES and Twofish, KeePass acts as a password manager, allowing you to store all your passwords (e.g., email, Facebook, online banking) in a single and secure database that can only be accessed by you.
www.keepass.info

Revo Uninstaller
These days, it's simply not enough to use Windows to uninstall your programs, as harmful remnants can be left behind. Enter Revo Uninstaller, a free app that not only uninstalls software, but allows you to manually remove additional data left behind.
www.revouninstaller.com

Sumatra PDF
Sumatra PDF is a free PDF creator and viewer for Windows. It's a relatively small file, starts up extremely quickly, and is tremendously easy to use. It can also read XPS, DjVu, CBZ, and CBR files.
bit.ly/aHICnC

7-Zip
7-Zip is a fast, free file archiver that can pack and unpack a huge range of files, from ZIP to TAR files. It features an extremely easy-to-use interface that presents users with all facets of the unzipped file, automatically organized by folders.
www.7-zip.org

FileZilla
If you need to connect to an FTP server, FileZilla is the best way to go. It's easy to use and highly customizable—you can even configure your own transfer-speed limits and transfer up to 4GB of files.
www.filezilla-project.org

Digsby
With Digsby you can consolidate all of your instant messaging accounts into one centralized hub, supporting AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and Google Talk. It's also a handy notification tool for personal email.
www.digsby.com

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
Yes, you already have an AV program (right?), but it never hurts to have a second opinion or line of defense. For us, that's Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware Free. It doesn't run auto scans, so it won't conflict with your other AV solution.
www.malwarebytes.org

SuperAntiSpyware
You could say that SuperAntiSpyware is the third prong in our three-prong approach to PC security. Like Malwarebytes', it provides yet another line of defense. And it's free, so why not avail your PC of this extra layer of protection?
www.superantispyware.com

If you’ve been in a public space in the last year or two, you’ve probably seen a QR code—a small, square two-dimensional barcode that looks a bit like a miniature crossword puzzle. They’ve been around for more than 15 years, but they’ve recently exploded in popularity, thanks to smartphones, which are perfect QR-scanners.

Unlike traditional supermarket-style barcodes—which codify an identification number—QR codes are binary representations of numbers or letters, and can be many different sizes. A tiny QR code can represent just 30 numbers, and a giant one can represent thousands of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. With that much flexibility, everyone can find a use for QR codes. In this article, we’ll show you how to make a distinctive, personalized QR code to put on your business card, or anything else.

Step 1: Get Your vCard

We’re going to avoid the obvious joke here and let you know that vCard is a standard for digitally transmitting contact information. You might have encountered a vCard attached to an email message in the past, but they work great in QR codes, too—most QR reader apps are designed to detect vCards and automatically enter the data into the phone’s contact list.

There are plenty of sites that will create a vCard QR code for you automatically (just a Google search away), but we recommend the web app here.

There, you simply click the Select a Code Action drop-down box, and select Create a vCard. Then, enter your personal information into the boxes below (image above), and hit Generate Code. Note that QR code size is dependent on the number of characters encoded, so you might find yourself dealing with a giant, unwieldy code that will be hard to fit on a business card. To get it down to size, we recommend using only vital information, like your name, phone number, and email address.

Another way to get around having a huge QR code is to have a personal website with your contact info (perhaps in a downloadable vCard) and to embed a link to that in a QR code. You can use a link shortener to make the URL and QR code as small as possible, which you will want for the next section.

Step 2: Personalize Your Code

One downside to QR codes is that by default they look a little impersonal. If you want to give your business card some visual appeal, there are a couple of simple things you can do. For one, you can give it a more interesting color scheme. The QR code generator we recommended defaults to black-on-white, but you can tell it to use any color for the foreground or the background. Make sure the background is lighter than the foreground, and that there’s decent contrast between the two. Otherwise, reader apps may have a hard time with it.

An even neater-looking trick, and one that’s still easy to pull off is to use a subtle color gradient. To do this, just open your image editor of choice (Photoshop and the free GIMP both work great), create a color gradient, and then use your QR code as a mask for that layer (image below).

If you want to go a step further by introducing a logo into your QR code, that’s entirely possible, as well. Just make sure to use the highest error correction setting (this can be set in the web app we recommended earlier) when you generate your QR code. This will make the code larger, but will allow it to be read even if up to 30 percent of the code is erased and written over.

For best results, don’t place your graphic or logo over the tracking boxes in the corners of the code. With some trial and error, you should be able to find out what scans and what doesn’t (image above).

With the exception of a few yahoos, when most of us think about searching the web, we’re thinking about Google. While Mountain View may be able to fulfill the bulk of our search-related needs, there’s no harm in mixing it up a bit. When looking for an alternative to Google, you could do a lot worse than giving Bing a try. Only a few years old, Microsoft’s upstart information-seeking darling has managed to incorporate a number of user-friendly features into the service’s already impressive set of capabilities. Care to give Bing a spin? We’ve put together 10 of our favorite Bing tips for you to trick out your browsing experience with.

Why Regionalize When You Can Americanize?

As any fanboy will tell you, Superman’s powers are only realized when he is in the presence of a yellow star like the Sun. Bing’s got the same thing going on with the United States: While there are many Bing regionalized portals, only the one enjoyed by default in the U.S. unlocks all of the search engine's features. If you’re living in America, no doubt you’re already good to go. If you live outside of the country, chances are you’ll need to do a little ticker work in order to get all the goodness out of Redmond’s search engine offering. Navigate to Bing.com, and look to the top right of your browser window. Click the name of whatever country you see up there—chances are that if you live in Ireland, by default the country you’ll click on will be Ireland. Doing so will open a page filled up with the various locales that Bing caters to. Click on United States - English, or United States Spanish if you hablan español. Boom! Welcome to the U-S-of-A.

Downplay Bing’s Good Looks

It’s a little known fact that Bing’s user interface was designed with the mullet in mind: Business up front and party in the back. Sure, the search service’s pages are pretty, but all of those high-definition pictures can be something of a distraction when there’s hardcore searching to do (or searching for hardcore. We won’t judge you). To rid yourself of Bing’s colorful backgrounds, navigate here and savour Bing in all of it’s minimalistic grey, white and orange splendour. Dulling up the joint can save you a few kilobytes of data every time you load the page moving forward. That might seem like small potatoes, but it adds up over time. This is a great solution for road warriors with a limited cellular data plan or individuals with slower rigs purchased at the dawn of the millennium.

Deck Out Your Desktop

Can’t get enough of Bing’s gorgeous background imagery? Then you're really doing to dig Bing Downloader,  a free jewel of a program that allows users to download those sexy Bing homepage backgrounds to their PCs. At this time, Bing Downloader is able to procure the background pictures from a wide variety of the search engine’s international portals including Canadian, American, Chinese, the United Kingdom and Germany. To snag yourself some new desktop wallpaper, simply locate Bing Downloader’s executable file, double click it and let the program run its course. For best results, fire up the program on a daily basis. In no time at all, you’ll have accrued a massive collection of Microsoft-approved background images to bend to your will. What you opt to do with them is entirely up to you.

Take to the Air

With Bing on your side, there’s no need to hop on an airline’s status page in order to find out whether or not your flight’s on time, cancelled or lost somewhere in the Bermuda triangle. Instead of entering your airline’s website URL, type Track Flight Status into Bing’s search field. At the top of your returned search results, you’ll find entry fields for your airline and flight number. Just pull the information off of your ticket or confirmation email, click Get Status and you’re in business.

If that’s not easy enough for you, simply enter your flight number, sans any other information. More times than not, Bing will understand what you’re getting at and provide you with the data you’re looking for courtesy of flightstats.com. While this might be great news for people that need to be on time for a flight, the flip-side of the coin is that thanks to Bing, you’ll never have an excuse for being late to pick up your in-laws at the airport again.

RSS to Impress

Being able to look up information on the web is great. Trying to read that information while away from your browser? Not so much. While you can opt to peruse your search results on another device with the help of services like Instapaper, Read It Later or Evernote by the time you get around to doing so, the results Bing returned to you might be cold. Instead, savvy Bing users might want to consider taking in their Bing searches in the form of a live RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed that can be viewed via any RSS reader. To rock this hack, simply add &format=rss to the tail end of any of the search results returned by Bing. Doing so will provide you with a live RSS feed version of your results that is automatically updated in real-time. Now that’s useful.

Search for Specific File Types

You are an important individual who considers their time to be a precious commodity. There’s not enough hours in the day to quibble over the masses of data that comes as a result of most web searches. Fortunately, Bing understands and endorses your picky data-scoffing ways. In an effort to keep you happy and provide discerning types such as yourself with only the most pertinent of information, Bing makes searching for particular file types online easy. If you know the information you’re looking for is contained in a PDF file, for example, type the topic of the file into Bing’s search field and add filetype:pdf to the search parameters. You’ll find that your search results contain only links that include PDF files. While this trick can be used with any just about any file extension, we’ve found Bing’s returned on searches for .mp3, .wpa and other oft-times DRM protected file types are pretty weaksauce.

Track a Package

In many parts of the world, sadomasochism has been an illegal practice for centuries. Luckily for those of you that derive pleasure from inflicting torment upon themselves, tracking a package over the internet was still a go the last time we checked. While you could waste your time navigating to your shipping company’s website and then hunting down the page’s tracking utility, if you’re looking for some immediate satisfaction, we suggest cutting to the chase by entering your package’s tracking number directly into Bing along with the shipping company’s name. For example, if Big Brown’s got your goods, you’d enter:

 ups # [tracking number]  

This trick works with the majority of the world’s major shipping companies. You’ll find the returned results to be as comprehensive as anything you’ll find on the FedEx, DHL or UPS’ websites. More than this, with all the time you’re saving on data entry can be used to get in some kinky kicks from other sources, like balancing your checkbook, getting your taxes done early, or comparing long distance rates.

Convert Sums Like a Champ

No matter whether it’s converting kilometres to miles, gallons to litres, or parsecs from a measurement of distance into one of speed—sometimes the math can escape us. Fortunately, Bing is more than willing to carry the two for its bleary-minded users. Using the search engine’s conversion capabilities is absolutely the bomb when it comes to planning your next Canadian road trip or sizing up the dimensions of a cabinet from Scandinavia to see if it’ll actually fit in your living room. To get the conversion party started, simply enter the measurement you’re being boggled by and the standard you’d like to see it converted to. For example, if you’re dying to what 5.65 cm works out to once converted over to the Imperial system of measurement, you would enter convert 5.65 cm to inches.  The same trick can be applied to international currencies: to get the current exchange rate of a Canadian dollar to its U.S. Counter part, enter CAD to USD as a search.

Get Your Math On

Less ghetto than Windows 7’s baked-in calculator application and easier to find than that old TI-89 calculator of yours that’s been packed away in a box since your graduated from college, Bing’s built-in calculation capability is a reliable tool in the fight against confusing math equations. Similar in function to its Mountain View situated nemesis, Bing allows users to crunch numbers by entering their math questions as a search. For example, if you wanted to know where 47 multiplied by 33 would get you, you’d enter 47 * 33 and click the search icon. The search engine  understands a wide variety number nerd operator mainstays such as percentages (% of), square roots (sqrt) and higher power (**). Need answers to some troubling equations? Bing’s got it going on, and can handle a respectable share of middle-of-the-road calculus and algebra computations.

Bing a-go-go

While Bing’s extensive functionality makes it a worthwhile addition to anyone’s laptop or desktop internet search toolbox, the search service also offers up some pretty impressive search functionality for use on smartphones and dumbphones alike. By accessing Bing via your handset’s web browser, you’ll be able to utilize all of the the same search functions we’ve talked about in this article from anywhere you can pick up a cellular signal. If you happen to be rocking an Android or iOS device, you can also opt to download the service’s free application. For those out there who refuse to take part in the smartphone revolution,  Microsoft also offers a lesser known Bing 411 phone number that can be called from any landline or cellular telephone. Just dial 1 (800) Bing-411, and you’ll be given voice driven access to, street addresses, movie time and up to the minute weather information, as well as other sweet features such as turn-by-turn navigation over the line—a definite bonus for folks without a GPS receiver.

A lot can happen in ten years.

When we sat down to try to list the 25 most important tech events of the decade, we began by listing, well, events. And it’s true that certain key events shaped the decade in tech. But it’s a moving target; there are also movements and trends that change how we view and use technology over the years.

So instead of trying to create list of discrete events, I’ve mixed them all up. Some relate to specific companies, some point to general trends and a few… well, a few are just odd quirks of our own.

The truth is that, while we have these ordered based on our own notions of relative importance (and a trend you might notice), these are all seminal moments, each in their own way. What might be the most important to us might be the least for you.

So contemplate our list, and then let us know yours.

Also, in case you missed our other coverage, please make sure you see our other year-end stories, including: 13 Biggest Tech Blunders of the Decade.

Let’s get into it.

25. We are All Authors

Whether it’s Facebook, blogs, online photo sharing, Wikis or any of a host of related activities, the ubiquity of broadband connections throughout the world has enabled a vast array of people – talented, untalented and in-between – to express themselves. There’s always someone in the world who knows more than you or I about a specific topic, and being able to tap into that vast knowledge base enriches all of us.

Also, everyone can create digital media. We all have cameras, camcorders and digital audio recorders, even if it’s just our cell phones. User-created content is everywhere, and it’s not just text. Trying to figure out what content is good? Now that’s a different story.

24. Curated versus open content

So we’re all creating content. That’s great, but who decides what content is great and what’s not? Or, on a more sinister note, who decides what’s appropriate or what’s not.

When we entered the 21st century ten years ago, there was a great hope among the Technorati that the Internet would become the great, unfettered open world of information, with the best and most useful info bubbling up to the top based largely on its own. Know-it-all editors would be banished forever.

Uh-huh. Sure.

Some of that has happened, to be sure. But whenever there’s a lack of control, someone wants to step in and impose it. Whether it’s Apple, deciding what’s appropriate for the App Store, the Great Firewall of China, DMCA or a host of seemingly unrelated organizations, commercial or public, control is being imposed. And freedoms are being restricted.

Like the physical world, though, for every reaction, there’s an opposite reaction, as we’ve seen with Wikileaks.

23. The rise of social networking

You can find me on Twitter as loydcase. Or on Facebook. Or on Quora or on… well, you get the picture. A vast array of people are now connected across a variety of social media platforms. At the same time, social media capabilities are steadily being integrated into more traditional applications, whether its gaming, photography or even our work lives.

Social media enables us to connect or re-connect with long-lost friends, or stay in touch with people we’ll never, ever meet in person. It also enables us to throw out questions we have to a wider, often more knowledgeable audience, or help out by answering those questions. And remember the problem of trying to figure out what user-generated content is actually good? Social media is actually pretty effective at helping the good stuff bubble up to the top.

Love it or hate it, social media will become increasingly more pervasive as time goes. We’ll all have to learn to either manage our privacy well, or become comfortable with every nuance of our lives being very public.

22. Everything is a Game

Checked into Foursquare today? Lined up another Xbox achievement? Played your Panera slot machine card?
The tenets of gaming are beginning to penetrate everyday life. We’re not entirely convinced that these are all good, however. After all, do we all want to live our lives in a world that’s a collection of giant Skinner boxes? Probably not.

On the other hand, we might see games that have the power to change the world, as World Without Oil tries to do, or see more game concepts get folded into training and education.

This much is clear, however: Play and play techniques that are built into the heart of modern board and electronic games will attract and shape a wide range of users. How that capability is implemented determines whether gaming will, in the long term, be a force for positive change or not.

21. DIY Culture

The broad reach of the Internet, the nature of internet communities and the ease of access to a wide range of digital tools means we’re seeing more people roll their own products. Even the open source movement has its roots in DIY culture, with groups of developers creating their own OS distributions. Gaming has seen a vast array of indie developers and even complex activities like launching a camera into space have become DIY activities.

DIY has become a huge phenomenon, spawning creations like the gaming phenomenon Minecraft or the Steampunk video series Riese: Kingdom Falling. So whether you simply build your own PC or create something more complex, you’re part of a broader movement.

20. The rise of broadband

Underlying the first three trends is the increasing ubiquity of broadband. A decade ago, cable modems were relatively new. Rates ran around $90 a month for a 2 megabit connection. Now the same fee will get you an unlimited 40 megabits down, and 8 megabits upstream.

Broadband isn’t everywhere, and there are still a lot of people who don’t have it. But even people who may not have a fat pipe running into their homes may use it at school, the local coffee shop or on the train.

It’s broadband that enables us to share photos and video. It’s broadband that enables multiplayer gaming. In the next 10 years, broadband will supplant cable TV, movies, sports, and more.

19. Wireless

I’m talking about wireless in the general sense, as in not needing wires. Whether it’s Wi-Fi or mobile broadband or Bluetooth or the emerging 60GHz frequency stuff, wireless technologies is already shaping up to be to the next decade what wide broadband availability was to the previous one. Coupled with smartphones and mobile PC technologies, wireless will enable us to be more connected than ever – for good or ill.

18. Media Electronica

Slowly, but surely, all media is becoming digital. The obvious forms, of course, are music and video. Movies are also increasingly becoming digital, though many are still shot on film.

Perhaps the most dramatic transformation, though, is how fast books are going digital. Google’s initiative to digitize every book ever written and ebook readers like the Kindle series from Amazon, are rapidly changing the way we read books, how they’re distributed, and how writers and publishers are paid. To be honest, we’re surprised at how fast this is happening.

Purely digital forms of art and media are cropping up too, ranging from electronic games to machinima. Even the creation of music is moving towards a purely digital incarnation. Query: In the coming decade, will we see an art masterpiece, created digitally and distributed digitally, that sells for millions of dollars?

17. Digital Distribution

Since all media is going digital, it’s natural that we’re simultaneously witnessing digital distribution become the norm. Since digital distribution is so disruptive, it’s no surprise that technology-focused companies have grabbed the leadership role in this evolution, and not media companies.

Apple’s iTunes is the big kahuna for music distribution, though Amazon is gaining traction as Zune fades into the background. Steam seems to be the leader in digital distribution of PC games, but Impules, Direct2Drive and GamersGate nipping at Valve’s heels. Netflix began as a company renting DVDs by mail, but has become the movie and TV show streaming king. The big game console companies offer online distribution of indie and some tier one titles. And this doesn’t even take into account the advent of streaming services such as Pandora, Last.fm, or Rdio.

Whether you read, listen, watch or play, it’s a sure bet that some part of that will be distributed digitally.

16. Green Energy

The Chevy Volt won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year Award. That, in itself, says much about how green power has captured the imagination of businesses and individuals.

While most power generation is still derived from fossil fuels, we’re starting to see greater emphasis on alternative power sources. Solar power seems to be getting most of the attention, whether its mega-generation facilities built in the Mojave desert or increasing numbers of consumers installing panels on their homes. Even so, other interesting alternatives are seeing the light of day, including tidal power generation and more wind farms.

Cars like the Prius have paved the way for automobiles with a stronger focus on plug-in capability, including the Volt, Nissan Leaf and Tesla Motors. The next decade will be a seminal one for alternative power.

15. iPhone

Contrary to popular thinking, smartphones existed before Apple shipped its first iPhone in 2007. Microsoft’s Pocket PC OS, which eventually morphed into Windows Mobile, existed in a number of different smartphones. Almost all were clunky and had user interface issues. RIM had been shipping Blackberry phones for years before the iPhone, and had its own dedicated following of “Crackberry” devotees, but the Blackberry was really focused on corporate email and scheduling, and lacked a wider audience.

The iPhone not only made smartphones sexy, but the app store opened up a huge new business for smartphone applications. Other smartphone makers have tried to emulate that with limited success – though Android seems to be gaining significant traction.

14. The Cloud & the Return of Big Iron

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, mainframe computers were the mainstay of computing, through minicomputers providing departmental access to computer resources. As the PC moved to the forefront, the era of big iron seemed to be over. But trends tend to spiral back, rather than move in simple straight lines, and now large scale servers are back in fashion.

Big iron is back, albeit in a different form than the mainframes of past eras. The reason is the increasing use of “The Cloud” – storage and compute resources that exist on the Internet, rather than locally on your PC. The cloud has major benefits, the biggest being easy access to data from any platform or location. Now we’re starting to see interesting experiments like OnLive, which is trying to deliver a robust gaming experience from the cloud using very limited hardware on the client end.

Valid concerns exist regarding data and apps on the cloud. If Google goes down, all your Google Docs are inaccessible. But the cloud is here to stay, and will likely shape how we use computing resources in the future.

13. Android & the Rise of Google

Google was once just a search engine, generating revenue with an advertising-oriented model. As the company amassed a gargantuan warchest from the vast amount of ad dollars the company collected, it began branching out. Some of these experiments proved highly successful, like Chrome and Gmail. Others were failures, like Google Wave. Honestly, even the failures were interesting.

It’s looking like Google’s biggest success after search will be Android. Taken as a whole, this open-source mobile operating system has surpassed Apple as the biggest smartphone OS, though iPhones sell better than any single Android Phone. Android is shaping up to be the Windows of the phone world, while iOS is, well, the Apple of the phone world.

12. PCs become commodities and the death of chipsets

We love our PCs. We build all our own desktops, and tend to mod laptops with larger amounts of storage and RAM. Even so, we know in our hearts that the PC is really just another commodity. When one of the primary selling aspects of many laptops is their appearance, we’ve moved beyond PCs being technological icons.

As PCs have become increasingly commoditized, only a few large companies can really stay in the PC business. At the start of the decade, we saw a half-dozen companies developing and selling core logic. Now we have Intel building chipsets for Intel platforms and AMD creating them for AMD platforms. Nvidia is out of the desktop chipset business, and its mobile chipsets are pretty much restricted to Ion. Via is only doing chipsets for its own Centaur-designed CPUs and SiS seems to have given up, at least in North America and Europe.

As CPU manufacturing processes have shrunk, more core logic functionality is being built onto the CPU. All modern CPUs now have on-die memory controllers, and soon on-die graphics will be mainstream. Only I/O functionality, which changes rapidly, will remain. The net result: lower costs for PC components and even more commoditization.

So while PCs are still essential, they’re now just part of the larger technology ecosystem that’s part of our digital lives. It’s easy to speculate that devices like smartphones and tablets may take over that spot in the next decade.

11. Windows 7

I mention Windows 7 not so much because it’s a great desktop OS. It is. In fact, you could make a case that Windows 7 is really the OS that Vista should have been.

But Windows 7 also represents a renewed and reinvigorated Microsoft. After Vista, the company was shamefully perceived as a technological also-ran, a dinosaur doomed to eventually fade into irrelevance. Now, Microsoft is looked upon as an underdog. From monolith to irrelevance to underdog in 10 years is a monumental seachange, and even though companies like Google and Apple still get more attention, Microsoft appears to be embracing its underdog role.
Additionally, Windows 7 Mobile looks to be a bigger success than its detractors predicted, though it’s still not in the same category as Android or iOS.

The real question is how corporate and technological leadership will shape up at Microsoft in the post-Bill Gates era. If Microsoft has more Steve Sinofskys waiting in the wings, the company will be in good shape.

10. Connected CE Devices

Most of the Maximum PC crew use Netflix Watch Instantly to stream movies and older TV shows to our HDTVs. Most of us do not use PCs for this. Some of us use game consoles, but several use Blu-ray players and TVs that are connected to the Internet with Netflix built-in.

We’re seeing more and more of these web-connected consumer electronics devices arriving on the market. You can control a Dish ViP-722k satellite DVR with an iPad via the 722k’s web connection. You can now do the same with Comcast’s newest cable boxes. An increasing number of flat panel TVs offer apps, widgets and simple web connectivity. It’s a gated experience, to be sure, with limitations. But being able to use a Blu-ray player, which only uses 18W when turned on, instead of a PC or Xbox 360, also saves power.

Of course, that opens up the possibility of really weird device connections, like IP enabled toasters. Overall, it’s a good trend. Our only real worry is security. Already, security issues have been uncovered with some HP web-connected printers. Will my refrigerator someday become part of an illegal botnet, without my knowledge? The crystal ball is cloudy.

9. Digital TV

If you read some commentators a few years ago, the changeover to digital television was shaping up to be a consumer electronics apocalypse. Viewers everywhere would go into fits of rage when their analog TVs never worked.

**Yawn**

As it turned out, the DTV transition, though delayed a few months, went smoother than anyone anticipated. Part of the reason was the legwork that all the broadcast stations had done, making sure all their broadcasts were digitally enabled. In addition, many people already subscribed to cable or satellite, which had already transitioned to digital in their set-top boxes. The sexiness of flat panel TVs has had a big impact, since all flat panel HDTVs are digital in nature.

8. Consoles Take Gaming Multiplatfom

At the start of the 2000s, PCs were pretty much the bleeding edge of gaming. Sure, console gaming was a big deal, but all the nifty new games that took advantage of new graphics features and pushed the state of the art when it came to raw technology ran on PCs. This culminated with the 2007 release of Crysis, a PC game that still hammers high end gaming systems.

Now, though, it’s a multiplatform world. New, innovative, and absorbing games are first targeted at one of the big three consoles. For a few years, it looked like PCs had become completely irrelevant for mainstream gaming, unless you were an MMO addict.

The pendulum has swung back a bit. For one thing, the console hardware cycle has lengthened, so we’re not seeing a new console every five years. Instead, the companies are iterating, with additions to existing platforms, like Microsoft’s recent Kinect add-on for the Xbox 360.

Game companies now maintain dedicated PC teams for large-scale titles, which work alongside console dev teams to make a PC version of a multiplatform game feel like a true PC title, and not a cheap port. Cool new indie games and digital distribution has helped, too.

We’re unlikely to ever see many AAA titles which are PC exclusive ship, though there are exceptions like Starcraft II. For the most part, it’s now a multiplatform gaming world, but what that means is that PC gamers mostly won’t feel left out. (Though I’m still looking for that PC port of Drake’s Fortune.)

7. The eternal battle: AMD versus Intel

AMD has proven more resilient than anyone expected, although its current CPU line is no longer competitive at the high end – or really, even the midrange. Still, the company is doing some really neat stuff, like its current effort to build DirectX 11 programmable graphics into the CPU die with its Fusion effort. Buying ATI Graphics seemed like a dubious move at the time, but it’s paid off in spades, giving AMD renewed energy. Dumping fabs seemed to have also helped.

In the early part of the decade, Intel appeared moribund. Netburst looked like a dead end, and the dual core versions of Netburst – the Pentium D – could have doubled as miniature space heaters. The Prescott generation was supposed to fix all that – but proved to be just as hot. Netburst had hit a wall, and future projects were cancelled. Intel put all its efforts behind an architecture originally developed for mobile PCs by its Israeli design team, known simply as Core. Eventually, Intel delivered the CPU internally called Conroe. The result was the fastest turnaround in a large technology company we’ve ever seen.

The Core 2 line, and its later iterations, reshaped the desktop PC. While AMD had been pushing the IPC efficiency mantra for several years, the Core 2 line legitimized that approach. Now Intel is all about performance per watt, and subsequent generations have improved performance without pushing up power draw. This effort allowed Intel to also push down into lower power CPUs, like Atom. Once again, a company that seemed like it was slowly being relegated to the backwater of tech companies that couldn’t keep up was again in the forefront.

6. The CPU Wars: AMD (ATI) Versus Nvidia

The battle for the heart and soul of graphics processing has been a back-and-forth between AMD (formerly ATI) and Nvidia for years. On the surface, it’s always looked like an uneven fight, with Nvidia’s rapid growth giving it vastly more resources than AMD’s graphics group, including some of the leading graphics architects.

AMD had some of its own cards, including the architecture team brought over after its acquisition of ArtX, which designed the GPU for Nintendo 64. AMDs graphics chips have been reflections of the company that built them – lean, spare designs that made the most of the resources available and were power efficient. AMD GPUs sometimes even briefly captured the raw performance crown for brief periods, as it did with the original Radeon 9700 and the more recent Radeon HD 5870.

On the other hand, you won’t find a more competitive corporate culture than Nvidia, and its GPU division has constantly come back with interesting, but brute-force designs, though they’ve only recently embraced the performance per watt mantra. They’ve held the raw performance crown more often than not, but have stumbled in other areas on occasion, as its issues with mobile GPUs in 2008 demonstrated.

It’s always been an interesting battle to watch, but as the Internet and even desktop apps become more visual, or more able to take advantage of parallel GPU compute resources, it’s also going to have a bigger impact going forward.

5. The Death of High Fidelity

Many of us have 5.1 or 7.1 channel audio systems in our TV rooms. We embrace high fidelity audio at Maximum PC, but we’re beginning to feel like this is becoming more of a rarity.

The iPod and related MP3 players, have pretty much killed high fidelity. Highly compressed audio is the norm, and some studies have shown that the new generation of music listeners actually prefer the sound of compressed music to uncompressed audio streams. That should be no surprise – you like what you hear most often.

Recently, an Audio Advisor catalog, which focuses on audiophile gear, arrived in the mail. We were amazed at just how many products were really pricey DACs and tube-based iPod docks that purported to make compressed audio streams sound better. Sigh—Hi-Fi is truly dead.

We do hold out some minimal hope, mostly because of Blu-ray. We’ve recently seen Blu-ray concert discs that use uncompressed PCM audio for 7.1 channel playback. It’s hard to see this ever becoming mainstream, however.

4. The GPU Achieves Parity

The CPU was the heart of the PC. If had been up to Intel, that would have been the case forever and ever. Almost single-handedly due to Nvidia’s efforts initially, with AMD stepping up in a supporting role more recently, the GPU is finally becoming appreciated at an equal partner inside the PC. Don’t believe me? Consider Intel’s new Sandy Bridge CPU, coming out early in 2011. Intel has been busy touting how effective its dedicated video block is for decoding and encoding video – without even touching the CPU cores. Sure, video is just a baby step, but it’s a pretty big concession from the Guys in Blue.

It helps, I suppose, that Intel and AMD are integrating GPU functionality into CPU cores. But really, it’s the applications that are proving the point. Whether high end apps, like Premiere Pro CS5 or math packages like Mathematica 8, GPU computing is gaining traction.

3. Space Exploration goes Private

As pressure has increased on the NASA budget, private companies have formed to build rockets, with the eventual goal of making near-earth orbit space travel a mainstream mainstay in a few decades. While a lot of attention has been focused on Virgin Galactic, whose design efforts are headed by Burt Rutan, most of the successful efforts have involved using existing launch vehicles to deliver commercial payloads into orbit.

The next decade should see increased activity, as these companies ramp up to deliver on promises of human travel into near-earth orbit. Who knows, maybe for the price of a typical luxury cruise, you’ll be able to pay a visit to an orbiting hotel before the next decade is out.

2. The Internet Bubble

We can’t really talk about the last decade in tech without acknowedging the Internet bubble of 2000-2001. Large numbers of startups crashed and burned as hugely overvalued companies discovered that investors really do care about making profits. We’ll have a moment of silence for companies like Webvan and Pets.com.

Was it a case of too much, too soon? If you look at some of the companies that sputtered out during the Internet bubble, you’ll find similar companies doing business in similar spaces today. What you won’t find is ridiculously overpriced valuations without business models that are geared towards making money.

Except for Twitter, of course.

1. The Fight for the Internet’s Soul

We’ll close with this last one which should give us all food for thought. As we write this, Apple has just announced its pulling the Wikileaks app from the iTunes App Store. Amazon’s hosting arm showed Wikileaks the door. And you can’t send money to Wikileaks via Bank of America or Paypal.

The Wikileaks saga is just one highly visible element in an ongoing battle for the heart and soul of the Internet. The Internet started out as a government-funded research project geared towards helping researchers more effectively communicate.

Since the advent of the Web – initially driven by Tim Berners-Lee, himself a researcher, the Internet has mushroomed into a gigantic hodgepodge of information wells and connected communities. It’s also become fertile ground for corporations, new and old, looking at the Internet as a vehicle for making money. We have no problems with making money on the web. But we do have problems when making money takes precedent over the free flow of information that was the hallmark of the early web.

This will only get worse as more governments get more involved. Given the huge array of different governments, conflicting laws and wide range of world views, there’s a real fear that we’ll get an Internet built on the least common denominator effect – a passive medium available for only the most vanilla, least threatening and least offensive information flows, all metered, regulated and paid for in microtransactions for each bit of data that flows.

The real battle in that arena has only just begun. And it won’t be won by hackers launching cyberattacks on commercial and government websites and servers, that’s for sure. It will only be won if each and every one of us who all have a vested interest in unfettered information access make our voices heard to all our governments and corporate entities.

This is just the beginning. Make yourself heard.

You don't need a full-size motherboard and plus-size chassis to build a great gaming rig. Here's how to build a tiny computer with a huge punch.

Forget big. For this challenge, I’m going small. My goal: to create a kick-ass gaming rig on a Mini-ITX motherboard. That means I need a discrete graphics card, a mobo with a full PCI-E x16 slot, a desktop processor, and plenty of storage. I also need a case that can hold it all elegantly, a PSU to power it, and enough airflow to make sure the rig doesn’t melt. Finally, it has to look good.

Why a Mini-ITX gaming rig vs. a traditional desktop? For starters, I wanted to see what kind of performance is possible from a small formfactor PC. More importantly, why wouldn’t I (or anyone else) want a rig that’s easy to move from room to room, or take on the road for a LAN party?

Ingredients

• Case/PSU Silverstone SG07 w/ 600W PSU $210
  •  www.silverstonetek.com     
• Mobo Zotac H55ITX-A-E LGA1156 $165 
  •  www.zotac.com     
• CPU Intel Core i7-870  $290   
  • www.intel.com   
• Cooler Stock Intel cooler $0
  • www.intel.com       
• RAM Corsair TW3X4G1333C9A 4GB Kit DDR3/1333 $90 
  • www.corsair.com       
• Optical Drive Silverstone SOD01 Slimline DVD Combo Drive $85
  • www.silverstonetek.com       
• Hard Drive 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black 7,200rpm $180
  • www.wdc.com       
• Solid State Drive 120GB Corsair Force F120 $300
  • www.corsair.com       
• GPU 1GB Gigabyte GTX N460OC-1G1 $230
  •  www.gigabyte.us       
• OS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (OEM) $99  
  • www.microsoft.com
• Misc 90-degree SATA data cable and zip ties $4  

Total: $1, 653

Picking the Essential Elements

In many ways, building a small formfactor PC is a distillation process. You can’t afford to include anything nonessential, but you can’t strip away anything you’re going to need.

Choosing the right kind of chassis for an SFF build is paramount. I chose Silverstone’s SG07 case because it offers plenty of cooling, an integrated 600W PSU, and room for two 2.5-inch drives, one 3.5-inch drive, a slimline optical drive, a Mini-ITX motherboard, and a full-size GPU, all in a package that measures just 7.5x8.65x13.75 inches. Plus it looks great.

I paired this enclosure with a Socket 1156 Zotac H55 motherboard with a PCI-E x16 slot, integrated Wi-Fi, and plenty of USB and SATA ports. This gives me room for a quad-core Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading, up to 8GB of RAM, one kick-ass GPU, an SSD or two, and a big ol’ storage drive. That’s all you need for a kick-ass gaming machine.

Because of the SG07’s cramped quarters, it’s trickier to build in than a more conventional chassis. Certain steps are out of order compared to a traditional build; others are skipped entirely. For this build you’ll need the parts listed above, plus a Philips-head screwdriver, some zip ties (optional), and a 2.5mm hex-head wrench (recommended for the last step).

1. Prep the Case

The SG07 requires significant disassembly before you can start your build (below). Start with the rear of the case facing you. Remove the three screws holding the top cover on, and then pull toward your body and up to remove the cover.

Silerstone's SG07, fully disassembled and ready for our build.

Remove the large case fan by unscrewing the three screws that keep it in position. Lift away. (Note that it will still be attached to the rear fan switch via a cable—you can remove the switch mechanism by unscrewing its two mounting screws). Remove the optical drive bracket by unscrewing the four screws holding it in place. The optical bezel is held on by a screw on the left side; remove it also. Take out the two screws holding the hard drive bracket, and then remove the bracket by lifting up and clockwise. We’re going to pull out the integrated PSU’s power cables so they’re ready to use when we need them.

Last step: the motherboard I/O shield. Remove all the little metal port protectors from the outside of the shield. Once all the ports are freed, insert the motherboard I/O shield into the case. Remember, it goes on the inside of the case, facing out. Press it firmly outward until it is seated evenly. Now, you’re ready to
start building.

2. Install the CPU

Since the inside of the SG07 is so cramped, you’ll want to install the CPU, heatsink, and RAM onto the motherboard before you put it in the case. Place the motherboard on a flat surface, then unclip the CPU retention bar and flip it back. This will lift up the load plate. Carefully remove the plastic socket cover, being careful not to touch any of the pins in the socket.

Hold the CPU parallel to the socket and carefully lower it into place. The notches on the CPU should line up with the corresponding ones on the socket. When the CPU is in place, lower the load plate over it, then secure the arm in its clip (below).

If the load plate doesn't close smoothly, don't force it. Make sure the CPU is oriented correctly.

3. Install the Cooler

For this build, we’re using the stock Intel cooler that comes with the CPU. Although it’s not as overclocker-friendly as an aftermarket cooler, it doesn’t have any compatibility issues with our mobo/case combo. The stock cooler should have thermal pads preinstalled; you can use those or replace them with your own favored thermal paste. (We prefer Arctic Silver 5.) For this demonstration, we’re using the stock pads (below).

Make sure all four of the heatsink’s pushpins are prepared by turning them away from the direction indicated by the arrows. Align the pushpins with the four mounting holes on the motherboard and guide the pins into their respective mounting holes. Once the heatsink is sitting loosely on the CPU with pins in place, press down firmly on two pushpins on opposite corners of the heatsink until each clicks and the cooler is secure. Repeat for the other two pins (below). The heatsink should be firmly attached without wiggling. Connect the cooler’s power connector to the motherboard’s CPU_FAN header.

4. Install the RAM

The H55-based Zotac board supports dual-channel DDR3/1066 or DDR3/1333 in its two DIMM slots. For this build, we’re using two 2GB DDR3/1333 DIMMS, for 4GB total. Since you’re populating both slots, you don’t have to worry about setting things up incorrectly.

Just open the two brackets on each slot, and make sure the RAM is oriented correctly—match the notch in the DIMM with the notch in the slot. Press down on the corners of the DIMM until it seats and the retention brackets lock into place (below).

5. Install the Motherboard

By now, you should have your motherboard prepped with a CPU, heatsink, and RAM. Align the I/O ports with the I/O shield and the four mounting holes on the motherboard with the standoffs preinstalled in the case. Secure with screws in each of the standoffs (below).

Now is a good time to connect your 24-pin and 4-pin ATX power connectors (top, below) as well as your front-panel connectors (middle, below). Since space is so limited, keep careful track of your cables. Wrap excess front-panel connectors in twist ties or zip ties and secure them to the bottom of the case (bottom, below). We’ll tidy up the power cables later, but we can take care of the front-panel connectors now.

6. Mount the HDD/SSD

The SG07 can accommodate two 2.5-inch drives and one 3.5-inch drive. With the hard drive cage’s retention bar on the left, slide in the 1TB hard drive so that its power and SATA ports are on the lower left facing you (above) and secure it with the four hard drive screws. Use two SSD screws to attach the SSD to the underside of the drive cage. Before you reinstall the cage, be sure to pull the SATA power cable between where the cage will be and the front wall of the case, then reinstall the cage and connect the SATA power and data cables (below). Because the case is so cramped, you’ll need to use right-angle SATA cables for the SSD and any other 2.5-inch drive you install. The HDD can use a standard cable, like the ones that come with the motherboard.

7. Install the GPU

Unscrew the retention bar holding the PCI slot covers and remove the covers (above). Hold the GPU vertically in line with the slot and press down firmly, aligning the rear of the card with the expansion slots. Replace the retention bar. Take the two PCI-E power cables from the tangle and connect them. Fold the remaining wiring and place it to the right of the GPU, out of the way (below).

8. Install the Optical Drive

We’re almost done! This is one of the trickiest steps, due to the stupid-tiny screws involved. Place the slimline optical drive in the optical drive bay as shown (above). Secure with tiny screws. Connect the SATA adapter cable and attach the 4-pin power connector to the PSU’s 4-pin Molex power connector (below).

9. Wiring and Reassembly

Now is a good time to tidy up your wiring. Every cable from the PSU should be attached to something: The 24-pin and 4-pin ATX power cables should be attached to the motherboard, the two PCI-E power cables should be plugged into the GPU, the SATA power cable should be connected to the SSD and HDD, and the 4-pin Molex cable should be attached to the optical drive’s power cable. Use twist ties or zip ties to secure cabling (below).

 Remount the optical drive tray using the four screws you removed in the first step. Connect the 18cm fan’s cable to the motherboard (below) and reinstall the top fan enclosure, reversing the process from the first step.

One last thing: Because of the intake-fan placement on our GPU, we’re going to want to rotate the SG07’s side-panel window and vent. Use a 2.5mm hex-head screwdriver to reverse the orientation of the side panel (below). Reinstall the case cover. Connect your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and speakers. All set!

Here we're removing and re-orienting the SG07 side-panel window to accomodate the fan on our GPU.

Packed with Power

Onboard Wi-Fi It means never having to say, “Could you find me a 100-foot Ethernet cable?”

CPU Cooler Though we used the stock cooler, the SG07/Zotac combo can accommodate several coolers, like the Thermaltake Slim X3 and Prolimatech Samuel 17.

Wiring Believe it or not, this is a pretty cleanly wired case. The SATA cords are secured to a tie-down beneath the hard drive cage.

Airflow A two-speed 18cm intake fan keeps the SG07’s internals well-ventilated.

Torture Testing the Wee PC

So, how does our new Mini-ITX rig stand up to the Maximum PC Lab’s zero-point configuration? Not well, at first blush. The wee PC ran 44 percent lower frame rates in the gaming benchmarks, and 17–24 percent slower everywhere else.

Hardly stellar, but a quick glance at last month’s $1,400 gaming machine build (“Builder’s Creed”) buoyed my spirits, at least where gaming is concerned. As we pointed out then, our zero-point machine is designed to go toe-to-toe with $7,500 multi-GPU gaming rigs, not budget builds. Plus, that box has the advantage of using a standard ATX motherboard, with plenty of room for expansion—something we eschewed in favor of smallitude.

Our small formfactor PC is svelte and powerful.

This mini-rig is indeed svelte: It’s just 7.5 inches tall, 8.65 inches wide, and 13.75 inches deep. You could stack three of ’em on top of each other and still take up less room than most of the systems we test in the Lab. And considering that the motherboard only has one PCI-E slot and two DDR3 channels, we think it holds up damn well. Just look at last month’s Acer Predator—that multi-GPU machine is less than 10 percent faster than my mini-rig, and it’s 20 percent more expensive, twice the size, and three times as ugly (in my opinion).

Alternate Configurations

Is my configuration the only possible one? Of course not. You could cut $300 by skipping the SSD, or go the other direction and add an aftermarket cooler and experiment with overclocking, opt for a different GPU or more RAM, or even add Blu-ray playback. And although I used the area between the GPU and the front of the case for cable storage, there’s plenty of room for longer GPUs, as long as they don’t consume too much power—our 600W power supply can’t handle a 5970, for example.

Finally, it’s worth noting that there are a few other Mini-ITX gaming boards out there. I happen to like the Zotac board used in this build because of its onboard Wi-Fi and plethora of USB and SATA ports, but Gigabyte’s GA-H55N, which adds USB 3.0—albeit at the expense of Wi-Fi and some of the other ports—is another option. Both boards feature full PCI-E x16 slots and the Gigabyte’s layout allows for a few more aftermarket cooler options.

The goal of this build was to prove to myself that a hand-built Mini-ITX gaming rig (as opposed to a more-expensive boutique SFF rig) was a probable—even reasonable—option. I believe I’ve done that, by building a $1,650 machine that performs well for the price, and is compact, quiet, and good-looking to boot.

BENCHMARKS

Our current desktop test bed consists of a quad-core 2.66GHz Core i7-920 overclocked to 3.5GHz, 6GB of Corsair DD3/1333 overclocked to 1,750MHz, on a Gigabyte X58 motherboard. We are running an ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card, a 160GB Intel X25-M SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate.

Our Builder's Creed rig consists of a quad-core 2.8GHz Core i5-760 overclocked to 4GHz, 4GB of Corsair DD3/1333, on an Asus P7P55D-E Pro motherboard. We are running an Asus ENGTX 470 GPU, a 60GB Corsair Force F60 SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium.

Are you ready to rock?  I should hope so.  I’m giving your hands a rest and your ears a workout this week, for none of the apps in the ol’ "freeware roundup" this time around are actually downloadable.  That’s right.  Zero.  After you read this, you will spend the course of your week installing absolutely nothing.

So what, then, am I profiling in this roundup?  Dust?  Nope.  Rock.  Every single Web app in this collection is specifically geared toward an audio pursuit of some kind.  I’ll show you apps you can use–through the comfort of whatever browser you’d like–to both create music and find new music to jam to.  If you want to go worldly, I’ll show you how to find the latest music streams from all over the world.

That’s not all, however, for not everything audio-related has to involve music.  The other two cool Web apps in this week’s roundup center on audio usability.  One lets you edit files online as if you were rocking an offline audio editor, and the other lets you craft up a message to your friends that will be read by one of those lovely, synthetic computer voices we’ve all come to know and love.

So that’s that.  It’s audio week in the Freeware Files–even though you won’t have to download a single executable to reap the benefits of these awesome finds!

Blindspeak

Nothing says, "thanks a lot, bro," like receiving a message, full of insults, being read to you by a synthetic computer voice.  At least, that’s the first thing I would think of to do after stumbling across Blindspeak.  But in all sincerity, this Web app is the perfect thing to use when you want to send a loving note to your elderly grandparents / lazy friends who, for whatever reason, aren’t down with the text, yo.

"Download" it here!

Myna

Sometimes, you just need to get your hands on an audio editor real-quick, but you just don’t have the permissions (or time) to install something like Audacity.  That’s where Myna comes to save the day.  This super-handy Web app lets you import (or record) audio and perform basic tasks like trimming, shuffling, and multitracking your selections.  You can fiddle around with a  few different effects–delays, equalizers, et cetera–in an Acid-like environment. It’s not a perfect replacement for the power of an offline editor, but I have no complaints!

"Download" it here!

Antenna

Finding new music or audio streams to listen to can be difficult, especially if you’re trying to make sense of the lists, upon lists, upon never-ending lists of possible online stations and/or streaming sites on today’s Web.  Yikes.  Antenna attempts to reduce this cacophony a wee bit by combing a list of online radio stations with an easy-to-navigate global map. Not only can you narrow down your search by country or genre, but you can also rate your favorites for easy access at a later time.

And, yes, this is an Adobe AIR app, so I suppose it’s not a true Web app per se.  Close enough, eh?

Download it here!

We Are Hunted

Want new music to listen to?  Unsure of where you’re going to find the latest-and-greatest jams that are popular in "the scene" before they hit the top-40 charts?  We Are Hunted is an awesome site for getting yourself more invested in music that’s cool before it becomes… cool.  Click on a band and title to stream the track.  If you like it, you can buy it, add it to a personal chart, or otherwise share it with friends.  The service itself determines popularity based on a crazy algorithm that considers blog posts, mainstream press, and other popularity-driven places to determine the 99 daily songs that are, simply, "cool."

"Download" it here!

Audiotool

Here we go.  Audiotool is a crazy, feature-packed Web app for creating your own music from the ground up.  And I’m not just talking about some cheesy "loop a few WAV files and call it a day" kind of an app.  Use actual virtual synthesizers to concoct your beats, riffs, jams–whatever–and assemble a pretty neat track (or remix someone else’s track) in a manner akin to an offline tool like Propellerhead’s Reason.  Well, a trimmed-down version of Reason, that is.

"Download" it here!

David Murphy (@ Acererak) is a technology journalist and former Maximum PC editor. He writes weekly columns about the wide world of open-source as well as weekly roundups of awesome, freebie software. Befriend him on Twitter, especially if you have an awesome app or game you’re dying to recommend!

 Sourced from: Maximum PC Features RSS Feed

Why Wipe Data Securely?

Whether you are preparing to reuse a hard disk for another operating system, clear off your junk shelves by passing along outdated drives to a friend or relative, donate an old PC to a charity or school, discard a too-small USB drive or flash memory card, or repurpose an SSD, you don’t want to leave any information on the storage device. With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door.

Why Erasing Files Is Not Enough

Sure, you could erase the contents of the drive, but keep this in mind: the act of erasing a file does not remove it from a storage device.

When you erase/delete a file from your computer, it’s not really gone until the areas of the disk it used are overwritten by new information. If you use the normal Windows delete function, the “deleted” file is sent to the Recycle Bin until the space it uses is required by other files. If you use Shift-Delete to bypass the Recycle Bin, the space occupied by the file is marked as available for other files. However, the file could be recovered days or even weeks later with third-party data recovery software. As long as the operating system does not reuse the space occupied by a file with another file, the “deleted” file can be recovered.

With SSDs, the erased file situation is even more complex. SSDs store data in blocks rather than in sectors as with magnetic storage. Overwriting a block was previously used involves copying the contents of the block to cache, wiping the block’s contents, delete the block to be overwritten from cache, writing the new data to cache, and rewriting the block with the new data. As an SSD is used with files that are deleted or changed frequently, the performance can drop unless the drive (and operating system) support a technology called TRIM that wipes out deleted data blocks as soon as the file using the blocks is deleted. TRIM is supported by Windows 7 and by some late model SSDs, but not by older Windows versions. So, disk wiping can be both a security feature and a performance improvement strategy.

Data Wiping Versus File Erasure

While erasing files simply marks file space as available for reuse, data wiping overwrites all data space on a storage device, replacing useful data with garbage data. Depending upon the method used, the overwrite data could be zeros (also known as “zero-fill”) or could be various random patterns.

Products that can be used for wiping hard disks might not be suitable for wiping other types of drives. In this article, we will look at methods for securely wiping hard disks, USB flash memory devices, flash memory cards, and SSDs.

Zero-Fill a Hard Disk

Time Needed: several hours (varies with size and speed of drive)
Software: Hard disk utility software from your drive vendor
Media: blank CD or floppy disk

Although writing zeroes across the entire hard disk surface (aka “zero-filling”) is not sufficient to meet government data sanitation (disk wiping) standards such as DoD 5220.22-M or the more comprehensive Standards and Technologies (NIST) Special Publication 800-88, overwriting the entire hard disk prevents most types of data recovery from being successful.

Here’s where to get zero-fill software from hard disk vendors:

Hitachi
Drive Fitness Test (see website for specific models supported)
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT
Select the Erase Drive feature to zero-fill your hard disk

Samsung
HUtil (see website for specific models supported)
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/Support_HUTIL.html
Use Tool, Erase HDD to zero-fill your hard disk

Seagate (including Maxtor)
SeaTools for DOS (see website for specific models supported)
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools
Use Full Erase to zero-fill your hard disk

Western Digital
Data Lifeguard Diagnostics (select drive model for specific version recommended)
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en
Use Write Zeros to drive to zero-fill your hard disk

1.    Determine the brand and model of hard disk you want to overwrite.
2.    Download a CD ISO image or a floppy disk image (depending upon your equipment) and use the image to create bootable media. The floppy disk image is self-contained: run it, insert a blank floppy disk when prompted, and the image is created on the disk. You will need to use a CD burning program that works with ISO images to convert the ISO image into a bootable CD.
3.    Restart your computer with the bootable media you created in Step 2.
4.    Select the hard disk to zero-fill when prompted.
5.    Choose the option to zero-fill the hard disk.

6.    When the program is finished, follow the on-screen instructions to shut down or restart your computer.
7.    Remove the wiped hard disk; you can now reuse or recycle the hard disk.

Secure Wiping a Hard Disk

Secure wiping goes beyond zero-fill operations, and provides an extra level of security. Most secure wiping programs are designed to meet DoD 5220 standards, which require three passes of overwriting with a special numeric pattern and verification. More information about this and other secure standards are available from the DataErasure website.

(Note that the 2007 revision of the Defense Security Service, Updated DSS Clearing and Sanitization Matrix (June 28, 2007) now recommends degaussing or drive destruction for maximum protection.

Stanford University’s Disk and Data Sanitization Policy and Guidelines, a must-read for understanding data wiping issues, recommends Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) for secure hard disk wiping.

Secure Wiping a Hard Disk with DBAN

Time Needed: several hours (varies with size and speed of drive)
Software: Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN); available from http://www.dban.org/
Media: blank CD (all versions) or floppy disk (version 1.0.7 and older versions)

1. Download the DBAN boot image ZIP file (we used version 1.0.7 and beta version 2.0 for this article); we downloaded the ISO image for CD burning, but a floppy disk builder is also available
2. Extract the contents of the compressed file.
3. Burn the ISO image file extracted in Step 2 to CD; see our article on how to do this, or use the built-in ISO CD image burning support in Windows 7. If you downloaded the floppy image builder, run the program to create a bootable floppy disk.
4. Restart the computer using the CD or floppy disk created in Step 3.
5. Press Enter to run DBAN in interactive mode.
6. Use up and down arrow keys to highlight the drive to wipe.
7. Press the space bar to select the drive.
8. Press M to select the wiping method.
9. Press F10 to begin the wipe process.

10. At the end of the process, shut down the system. You can reuse or recycle the wiped hard disk.

Note: if DBAN is unable to recognize your SATA hard disks, configure your system BIOS to use IDE mode rather than AHCI mode.

Wiping Flash Memory Cards and USB Drives

Programs such as DBAN or vendor-supplied hard disk utilities are limited in the devices they support: they are designed to work with internal ATA/IDE or SATA hard disks only. Programs that work with flash memory cards and USB flash drives often support hard disks as well, enabling you to use a single program for all disk wiping processes. Roadkil’s DataWipe can be used with any hard disk, floppy disk, or flash drive that has a drive letter.

Wiping Flash Memory Cards with Roadkil’s DiskWipe

Time Needed: Varies; from a few minutes to several hours, depending upon size and speed of drive and computer
Software: Roadkil’s DiskWipe, available from http://www.roadkil.net/
Media: Can be run from Windows desktop

1. Download Roadkil’s DiskWipe.
2. Extract the contents of the compressed file.
3. Open DiskWipe. If you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7, right-click the program icon and select Run as Administrator.
4. Select the drive to wipe.
5. Select the type of wipe to perform; DiskWipe can zero-fill the disk or write random data.
6. Enter the number of passes.
7. Click Erase to start the process.

8. At the end of the process, close the program. You can reuse the wiped disk.

Wiping SSDs

To solve write performance problems on drives that don’t support TRIM (check with your drive vendor for firmware upgrades) is to use wiper.exe (included with some SSDs) or to run the Secure Erase feature supported in most recent ATA/IDE and SATA drives. The Secure Erase feature can be activated on many systems by running Secure Erase 4.0 (HDDerase.exe), available from http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml. Version 4.0 works with most recent ATA/IDE and SATA hard disks and SSDs, but if you use an Intel X-25M, X-25E, or X-18M SSD, follow this link to download Secure Erase 3.3 http://www.iishacks.com/index.php/2009/06/30/how-to-secure-erase-reset-an-intel-solid-state-drive-ssd/.  Note that it is no longer being developed, and we were unable to use it on a system running an AMD 690 chipset.

Wiping Drives and Free Space with SDelete

SDelete is a free program from Microsoft’s TechNet Sysinternals collection. It runs from the command line, and can be used to wipe drives, wipe files, or wipe free space.

Time Needed: Varies; from a few minutes to several hours, depending upon size and speed of drive and computer
Software: TechNet Sysinternal’s SDelete, available from http://technet.microsoft.com

Media: Can be run from Windows desktop

1. Download SDelete.
2. Extract the contents of the compressed file.
3. Copy sdelete.exe to c:windowssystem32 (this will enable you to run it from any location)
4. Open a command prompt session with Administrator rights.
5. To wipe all files on drive X: and its subdirectories and to wipe free space, enter Sdelete  -p 2 –s  -z X:*.*  (to see all command-line switches, enter Sdelete with no options)
6. Wait; the program displays status messages as it runs. When the program is finished, you can reuse or dispose of the drive.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Disk Wiping Programs

We used demo versions of two popular data recovery programs to evaluate some of the disk wiping programs discussed in this article. To determine whether a typical data recovery program could recover files on a SD card wipe with Roadkil’s DiskWipe, we first of all formatted the card using a card reader. Ontrack’s EasyRecovery Data Recovery (available from http://www.ontrack.com) had no difficulty finding folders and files to retrieve.

However, when we used DiskWipe to wipe the drive using a one-pass blank disk (zero fill) operation, EasyRecovery DataRecovery was unable to find the file system, let alone any files or folders.

After reformatting the card, taking a few photos, and deleting the photos, EasyRecovery Data Recovery was able to find the new photos, but the contents of the card before running WipeDisk were unrecoverable.

To evaluate SDelete, we used SDelete to wipe all of the files on a hard disk, but omitted the –z switch; when –z is not used, SDelete deletes files and renames them, but does not clear free space. To determine what might be visible, we used a demo version of Disk Doctors NTFS Data Recovery software, available from http://www.diskdoctors.net.

Disk Doctors were able to locate the deleted folder and Outlook Express message folders, but SDelete had renamed them from their original names and DBX extensions (Outlook Express message folders). If you use SDelete, it’s very important that you take time to use the –z switch to clear free space on the disk (once a file is deleted, the space it occupies is free space).

We also used Disk Doctors to evaluate the effectiveness of a freeware program called Eraser, which can delete and overwrite files and folders from the right-click menu.  We created a documents folder with a subfolder called Figures and used Eraser to overwrite the folder and subfolder using its default settings.

Disk Doctors was able to locate the folders, but the contents are files with garbage names and are zero bytes in size – except for leftover word processing temporary files (files that begin with $). These filenames were not changed, which could enable a snooper to figure out the names of the files in the folder – although the files themselves were destroyed. By using more overwrites or different methods available with Eraser, a more thorough wiping may be possible

Conclusion

We’ve highlighted a variety of free ways to protect data on castoff drives from being retrieved. As you can see, your best bet is to overwrite data directly, but you also might want to consider using a program such as SDelete to scramble filenames first and then use a disk wiper such as Eraser or WipeDisk to finish the job.

Use demo versions of data recovery programs such as Ontrack Easy Recovery Data Recovery, Disk Doctors Data Recovery (various editions for NTFS, FAT, and flash media), and others to evaluate the effectiveness of your data wiping procedures. Remember, the full versions of these and other data recovery programs can save your data if you accidentally format or partition a disk because, until the data is overwritten, it’s still there.

Sourced from: Maximum PC How-Tos RSS Feed

Your OS drives your whole PC experience, so it’s your job as an enthusiast to keep it in a high state of tune

Twist cap carefully. Only pour into Maximum PC-approved computer tanks.

After installing a new OS, most people just jump right in and start driving it through all their favorite applications and games. Makes sense, right? The operating system, after all, should be a background player in the computing experience—a means to an end, with the end being web surfing, content editing, and wanton destruction in the first-person shooter of one’s choice.

The problem, however, is that most people, even a lot of self-described power users, never take the time to really tune the new OS, exploring its menus and setting up the interface for the fastest, most convenient operation based on personal preferences. And as operating systems offer more and more user controls, it’s the curious, performance-minded enthusiast who has the most to gain from tuning an OS to his or her liking.

It’s been about six months since Windows 7 hit the market, so we figure most of our readers have made their upgrades. For those who’ve made that jump, we present a bottle of our favorite Windows 7 tips, each designed to help you extract the very last bits of convenience and GUI-navigating performance from your own personal dream machine. And if you haven’t yet upgraded to Win7, we trust you will after reading this article, as its core features—let alone its actual Lab-benchmarked performance—kicks Vista and XP ass.

We close out our tuning session with a tip designed to supercharge the process of installing the OS. By loading Windows 7 onto a USB key, and making that key a bootable drive, you can do an end-run around slow optical-drive technology and install your OS in (pardon the pun) a flash.

It’s time to get started. Park your computer, but don’t shut down. This is one PC tune-up that can only be done with your engine running.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Committed Mouse Abolitionists

Let’s kick off this power-user party with keyboard shortcuts—tricks every enthusiast should memorize when mastering a new OS. We’re confident the following time-saving keystrokes will save you precious neural processing cycles, and make your mouse jealous with neglect.

Alt + P

In Windows Explorer, this shortcut activates a preview pane of your selected file, be it an image, sound, or video document. This panel is great for previewing images in your photos directory, obviating the need for fancier third-party software.

Windows + Up and Windows + Down

If a window isn’t maximized, pressing the Windows + Up arrow key will make it fill your entire screen. Windows + Down arrow will minimize that active window.

Windows + Shift + Up and Windows + Shift + Down

Hitting these three keys will vertically stretch an active window to the maximum desktop height (the width of the window, however, will stay the same). Pressing Windows + Shift+ Down will restore the window to its previous dimensions.

Windows + + and Windows + -

Pressing the Windows button with either the plus or minus key activates the Magnifier, letting you zoom in on the entire desktop or open a rectangular magnifying lens to zoom in on (and out of) parts of your screen. You can also customize the Magnifier to follow your mouse pointer or keyboard cursor.

Windows + Left and Windows + Right

These two shortcuts will make your active window fill up exactly one half of your screen—depending on which arrow key you use. And once a window is fixed to one side of the screen, you can repeat the shortcut with the same arrow key to flip it to the other side.

Windows + Home

This shortcut minimizes every open window on your desktop except the active window. Pressing this shortcut again restores all the minimized windows.

Windows + T

Like Alt + Tab (still our all-time-favorite Windows shortcut), Windows + T cycles through thumbnails of your open programs via the Taskbar’s peek menu.

Windows + E

Automatically opens up a new Explorer window to show your Libraries folder.

Windows + P

Manage your multiple-monitor setup more efficiently with this handy shortcut. Windows + P opens a small overlay that lets you configure a second display or projector. You can switch from a single monitor to dual-display in either mirror or extend-desktop mode.

Windows + Shift + Left and Windows + Shift + Right

If you’re using two or more displays—and you are, aren’t you?—memorize this shortcut to easily move a window from one screen to the other. The window retains its size and relative position on the new screen, which is useful when working with multiple documents.

Windows + [Number]

Programs (and new instances) pinned to your Taskbar can be launched by hitting Windows and the appropriate number key. Windows + 1, for example, launches the first application in the taskbar, while Windows + 4 will launch the fourth.

Windows + Space

This combo performs the same function as moving your mouse to the bottom right of the Taskbar: It makes every active window transparent (save faint outlines) so you can view the desktop underneath.

Track Your Actions with Problem Step Recorder

To aid their development of Windows 7 beta versions, the Microsoft engineers built in a diagnostic tool called Problem Steps Recorder that combines screen captures with mouse tracking to record your actions. You can launch this program from the Start Menu by typing psr.exe in the search field. Hit the Record button and the applet tracks your mouse and keyboard input while taking screenshots that correspond with each new action. When you stop recording, your session is saved to an HTML slide show recreating your steps, to which you can add comments and annotations. This tool is insanely useful if you need to create a tutorial for a computer-illiterate relative. Hi Mom, hi Dad!

Master Your New Font Manager

Font management is much improved in Windows 7. The Add Fonts dialog is history, and in its place is new functionality within the Fonts folder itself. First, the folder now shows font previews via each font file’s icon (visible with Large or Extra Large icon views). Second, fonts from a single set will no longer show up as different fonts; they’re now combined as a single family, which can be expanded by double-clicking the icon. Third, you can now toggle fonts on and off by right-clicking a font icon and selecting the Hide option. This prevents applications from loading the font (thus saving memory), but still keeps the file retained in the Font folder. Finally, Windows 7 includes a new fancy, free-flowing font called Gabriola that shows off the advanced antialiasing, text rendering, and “stylistic alternate” font flourishes afforded by DirectWrite (Microsoft’s API for 2D text rendering) and OpenType.

Next Page: Windows 7 Tips continued >>

Launch Games with Keystrokes

One of our biggest annoyances with Windows Vista was the Games Folder, aka the Gaming Grotto, aka the Gaming Ghetto. In Vista, Games for Windows titles and other game shortcuts automatically install to this directory, which you can only access with a Start Menu shortcut. This scheme prevents you from starting a game from the Start Menu search bar (aka the power user, keyboard-only method). Indeed, while you can launch any other application by mashing the Windows key, and typing its name in the Start Menu field, this isn’t the case for games installed to Vista’s Games Folder. Well, this oversight is fixed in Windows 7, and the universe is now home to slightly less evil.

Burn a Spittin’ Image

You can quit messing around with ostensibly free, malware-infected burning software, because Windows 7 comes loaded with a DVD and CD ISO burning application. Just double-click your image file and Windows will start a tiny program window to help burn your disc. It’s a bare-bones app, but it works!

Become More Wordly with Hidden Wallpapers

Besides its default desktop wallpaper, Win7 includes desktop backgrounds catered to your region (which is identified when you first install the OS). We Americans, for example, get six 1900×1200 images showing off National Parks and beaches. However, if your tastes run more international—don’t worry, we won’t hold that against you—you can grab wallpapers for other regions from a hidden folder. Type globalization in a search of your C: drive. The only result should be a folder located in the main Windows directory, and you should only be able to see ELS and Sorting folders nested here. Now search for MCT in the top-right search bar. This will display five new unindexed folders, each corresponding to a different global region. Browse these folders for some extra themes and wallpapers specific to Australia, United Kingdom, South Africa, and Canada.

Take Control of UAC

Despite good intentions, User Account Control pop-ups were one of the most annoying aspects of Vista, and thus UAC became a feature that most of us immediately disabled after a clean install. UAC in Windows 7 displays fewer warnings, but you can also fine-tune its notification habits by launching the UAC Settings dialog from the Start Menu. Just type UAC in the Start Menu search field and click the result. We find that setting the bar to just one tick above “Never notify” provides a comfortable balance between mindful security and incessant, Alice Kramden–caliber nagging.

Calculate Your Mortgage and Other Math Tricks

The reliable Calculator applet has been beefed up to do more than just basic arithmetic. You can now toggle between Standard, Scientific, Programmer, and even Statistics modes. In addition, the Options menu lets you pull out many new automated conversation tools, such as Unit Conversion (e.g., Angles, Temperature, Velocity, and Volume) and Date Calculation (e.g., calculate the difference between two dates). More templates give you the ability to crunch gas mileage, lease tipping points, and even mortgage estimates (yeah, right!) based on any variables you input.

Reveal All of Your Drives

If you use built-in memory-card readers in a 3.5-inch drive bay or on your desktop display, empty memory card slots will not show up as drives in My Computer. But that doesn’t mean they’re not still there. To reveal hidden memory card slots, open My Computer. Press Alt to show the toolbar at the top of the screen, and go to Folder Options under Tools. Hit the View tab and uncheck the “Hide empty drives in the Computer folder” option.

Use Devices and Printers to Quickly Dig into Hardware

Tired of switching between Device Manager, Properties menus for your devices, and the Start Menu to manage and use printers, digital cameras, mice, and other peripherals? Windows 7 comes to your rescue with its Devices and Printers dialog. Open Control Panel and select View Devices and Printers from the Hardware and Sound category. Right-click a device icon in Devices and Printers to configure the hardware, create shortcuts, troubleshoot, view properties, and run programs. Devices and Printers can save you a lot of effort. For example, when you use it to manage your computer, you have one-touch access to 12 different Control Panel and Explorer interfaces. And when you use a Windows 7–specific driver that supports Device Stage, Devices and Printers uses thumbnail art of the actual device, as shown.

Next Page: Windows 7 Tips continued >>

Calibrate Your Notebook’s Text and Color

After doing a clean install of Windows 7 on a notebook, the first thing you should do is tune and calibrate ClearType text and Display Color. Windows 7 includes two built-in wizards that run you through the entire process, pain-free. Launch ClearType Text Tuning by typing cttune in the Start Menu search field and opening the search result. You’ll go through a brief series of steps that ask you to identify the best-looking text-rendering method. For Display Color Calibration—useful if you’re using Windows 7 with a projector or large-screen LCD—search and launch dccw from the Start Menu. It’ll run you through a series of pages where you can adjust the gamma, brightness, contrast, and color of the screen to make images look their best.

Control AutoPlay Settings Like a Megalomaniacal Tyrant

Windows 7’s version of AutoPlay, like its predecessors’, lets you specify what to do with media types when you connect an external drive or insert a disc. Sure, you may have hated AutoPlay in Windows XP, but Win7 provides you with reasons to take a fresh look. As in Vista, Win7 lets you configure AutoPlay settings by media type, but you should poke around for more tweaking options. Open Control Panel, select Hardware and Sound, and then select AutoPlay. By default, Win7 uses AutoPlay for all media and devices; this can be unchecked, and from there you can personalize AutoPlay actions like a madman. Note that each type of media—music CDs, DVDs, software and games, media files, blank media, and video discs—offers you choices based on Windows utilities as well as third-party programs. Choose your favorite app as an AutoPlay default, or to keep the traditional pop-up AutoPlay menu, select Ask Me Every Time.

Solve External Hard Drive Hassles with Convert.exe

Windows 7 prefers hard disk drives that use the NTFS file system: Its integrated backup program cannot back up files from or to drives that use the older FAT32 file system. So, if you select a drive that uses FAT32 as the backup location, Windows 7 displays an error message. FAT32, a leftover from the days of Windows 98, works with both MacOS and Windows (which is why most external hard disks use this file system by default), but it lacks the features needed to fully support Windows 7 backup. Use Convert.exe to solve this problem. Open a command-prompt session and use the following command to change your external hard disk’s file system: convert x: /fs:ntfs (replace x with the actual drive letter of your external hard disk). Convert.exe will check your external hard disk for errors, verify there’s enough space for conversion, and then convert with abandon. While this theoretically will not destroy your data, we recommend you back up your files first.

Convert WMC Recordings for Use with Vista and XP

Windows Media Center (WMC) improved in the jump from Vista to Windows 7—you’ll find better integration of cable, broadcast, and Internet TV in the program guide, better support for widescreen displays, and a refined user interface, among other changes. But if you want to share your recordings with Windows XP or Vista users, or use the dozens of recording and file-conversion utilities made for those versions of WMC, you’re sort of screwed, as Windows 7 no longer uses the DVR-MS file format for recording. Instead, it uses WTV (Windows TV), and WTV files can’t be used by older versions of WMC or Windows Media Player.

You can, however, convert a TV recording from WTV to DVR-MS by using the conversion utility provided in Win7.

TV recordings are stored by default in the Public Recorded TV library. Open the library, right-click the recording, and select Convert to DVR-MS Format. At the end of the conversion process, the Recorded TV library contains both your original .wtv file as well the .dvr-ms conversion. The .dvr-ms file can be used with programs designed for Windows XP and Windows Vista Windows Media Center, and can be played on Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player in Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Command Windows 7 to Generate an Energy Report

As a power user, you may be concerned with power consumption, making the command-line utility powercfg.exe a must-see. To create a report on your PC’s energy appetite, press the Windows key and type cmd in the search box. Right-click cmd and select Run as Administrator. Now, select the box and type powercfg –energy at the command-line prompt, and hit Enter. Powercfg will run for about 60 seconds, then generate a report called energy-report.html in C:Windowssystem32. This report will notify you of anything in your computer that is keeping the CPU cycling, thus burning power and sucking notebook batteries dry. After you run the report, you’ll likely find that USB devices never entered Suspend state. While you might think the power consumption of a USB key is pretty insignificant, if it prevents the CPU from cycling off, that device can really hit where it hurts—in your battery’s nards.

Cling (Desperately) to Vista’s Taskbar

Let’s start with the bad news: Windows 7 eliminates the option to use the classic grey Windows 2000–style Taskbar. You’re also committed to the modern version of the Start Menu. But the good news is that you can still tweak the Taskbar to make it run like it did in Windows Vista, replacing the program icons with the names of each open app. Right-click the Taskbar and hit Properties. Check the “Use small icons” box and select “Combine when Taskbar is full” from the drop-down menu under Taskbar buttons. You still get the peek-view thumbnail feature of the Taskbar, and inactive programs remain as single icons, but open programs will display their full names.

Next Page: Windows 7 Tips continued >>

Exile Programs to the System Tray

All active programs show up as icons on the Taskbar, whether you want them to or not. While this is useful for web browsing or word processing, your taskbar can get cluttered with icons you would normally expect to be hidden away, like those for Steam or a chat client. You can, however, keep active instances of these programs hidden away in the System Tray/Notification Area by right-clicking their shortcuts, navigating to the Compatibility tab, and selecting Windows Vista under the Compatibility Mode drop-down menu. Just be aware that this only works for programs that would previously hide away from the Taskbar in Vista.

Manage Your Jump Lists

The Jump List, a list of shortcuts to files or tasks for a particular Start Menu or Taskbar item, is one of the most significant improvements in Windows 7. Each time you open a file or website, or run a task with a program that supports Jump Lists, Windows 7 stores the shortcut to the file, website, or task for reuse. Unlike Windows XP, however, Windows 7 doesn’t group these shortcuts into a single location. Instead, it stores shortcuts for each program’s files, websites, or tasks in a separate shortcut list—aka the Jump List. To see the Jump List for a program in the Start Menu, simply click the right-arrow icon. To see the Jump List for a program icon on the Taskbar, right-click the icon. Windows eventually removes items from the Jump List when it runs out of space, but you can override this. To make any Jump List item a permanent entry, highlight it and click the pushpin icon (reverse this process to unpin it). And if the idea of leaving an icon trail of all your recent history disturbs you, you can disable Jump Lists entirely: Right-click the Start Menu, choose Properties, and uncheck the two boxes under Privacy.

Organize Your Taskbar and System Tray

The programs that you pin to your Taskbar can be moved around to any order you want, whether they’re just shortcut icons or currently active applications. The Taskbar, if unlocked, can also be dragged to latch to the left, right, or even top of your desktop. As shown below, Windows 7 improves side-docked Taskbar support with better gradient rendering and shortcut support. It really works well if you’re using a widescreen monitor. Just as the Taskbar icons can be rearranged at will, the icons in the System Tray (actually called the Notification Area) can be dragged and set to any order, as well. Hidden Icons can be dragged back into view, and you can hide icons by dragging them over the white triangle, and dropping them into the Hidden Icon well—much easier than working through the Notification Area Customization menu.

Accelerate Your Start Menu

The Start Menu hasn’t changed much from Vista, but there are some notable improvements. The behavior of the power button has been changed to Shut Down, as opposed to Hibernate, which was the asinine default in Vista. But you can also change the button default to do other actions. Right-click the Start Menu, and choose Properties. From the Power Button Action drop-down, you can choose a new default button behavior. If you hit the Customize button, you’ll enter a world of opportunities that help you control what the Start Menu displays. Most options are turned off, but you may want some on, like the option to display recorded TV files, a feature that’s new in Windows 7. Also be aware that Start Menu items should be set to “Display as a link” if you want them to open up Jump Lists.

Arrange Files by Type, Month, Artist, and Other Options

Windows Vista introduced the concept of using the Details folder view to group files by criteria such as name, date modified, type, size, and other options. These choices are still available in any folder by right-clicking inside the folder and selecting them from the options menu. But Window 7 does Vista one better with its new Libraries scheme, which enables you to view the contents of multiple file locations in a single logical folder. And as you’d expect, each Library comes correct with contextual file-arrangement options that vary according to what’s being viewed. For example, in the Pictures library, you can choose from Day, Rating, Tag, and Month. For videos, maybe arranging by Length, as in our screenshot, is most relevant. You get the point.

Pin Folders to Favorites and Start Menu

Explorer’s Jump List shows your seven most frequently visited folders, but you can manually bookmark some favorites to the top of the list by pinning folder locations. Just right-click any folder—either on your desktop or from an open instance of Explorer—and drag that folder icon to the Explorer shortcut on the Taskbar. You’ll see a message that reads “Pin to Windows Explorer” before you release the mouse button. The folder will appear under a Pinned section of the Jump List, and you can remove it by clicking the “Unpin from this list” icon on the right side of the panel. You can also right-click and drag a folder directly to the Start button to pin that folder to the general Start list.

Next Page: Put an OS in Your Pocket >>

Put an OS in Your Pocket

How to load Windows 7 onto a bootable USB key

To complete your Windows 7 power-user experience, you may consider dropping the whole darn OS onto a USB drive. Whether you carry it around in your pocket or toss it in a desk drawer, it’s a perfect boot disk for emergency installs—including those times when you’re working with a netbook or some other computer that lacks an optical drive. Even better, your install times will be significantly reduced, thanks to your key’s flash memory—we shaved off minutes from our total install time.

Here’s how to create a schmancy-fancy boot key for either Windows 7 or Vista—but not for other OSes, so please don’t try! We’ve run a truncated version of this article in the magazine before, but because it was so incredibly popular—and so germane to this feature story—we’ve decided to share it again, this time with more detail and screens.

1. Format Your USB Key

Plug in your USB key and back up any existing data stored on it. You’ll need to format the key (thus erasing existing data) before you can make it a bootable device. We used an 8GB key, but a 4GB key will also work.

2. Partition that Key in CMD

Open up a command prompt as an Administrator. You can do this by searching for cmd.exe in your Windows/System32 folder, right-clicking the executable, and selecting “Run as administrator.” Alternatively, type CMD in the Start Menu search field and activate the command prompt using Ctrl + Shift + Enter.

You should now be under C:Windowssystem32 (assuming your Windows partition is the C drive). Type diskpart in the command line to enter the Disk Partition command-line tool, which lets you format and create partitions on active disks. Now type list disk to reveal a list of all your active disks, each of which is associated with a number. Make a note of which one is your USB key, based on the capacity. In this screenshot, our USB drive is Disk 2.

3. Format Away (Command-Prompt Style)

It’s now time to enter a load of commands to properly partition the key, and format for the NTFS (did you know this stands for “New Technology File System”?). In succession, enter the following—and type carefully, Jimbo!

Select Disk # (where # is the number of your USB disk. We typed Select Disk 2 for this job)

Clean (this removes any existing partitions from the USB disk, including any hidden sectors)

Create Partition Primary (creates a new primary partition with default parameters)

Select Partition 1 (focuses operation on the newly created partition)

Active (sets the partition to active, informing the disk firmware that this is a valid system partition)

Format FS=NTFS (formats the partition with the NTFS file system. This may take several minutes to complete, depending on the size of your USB key)

Assign (this gives the USB drive a Windows volume and next available drive letter, which you should write down. In our case, drive “L” was assigned)

Exit (quits the DiskPart tool)

4. Copy Windows DVD to a Desktop Folder

Insert the Windows 7 installation DVD into your drive, and view the files that it contains. Copy all of the files to a folder on your Desktop. We put the disc contents in a folder named Windows 7.

5. Turn Your Key into a Bootable Device

Now, go back to your command prompt, running it as an Administrator. Using the CD command, navigate your way to the folder where you placed the Windows disk ISO files. Your command line path should look something like C:UsersUSERNAMEHEREDesktopWindows 7 if you followed our lead on folder placement. Now type the following commands:

CD Boot (this gets you into the boot directory)

Bootsect.exe /nt60 L: (this assumes L is the drive letter assigned to your USB key from the previous step)

In case you’re wondering, Bootsect infuses boot manager–compatible code into your USB key to make it a bootable device. Also be aware that if you’re currently running 32-bit Windows Vista or 7, Bootsect will only work if you use the files from the 32-bit Windows 7 install disc. The Bootsect executable from the 64-bit version will not run in 32-bit Vista. Don’t forget it!

6. Load the USB Key with Your Install Files

Copy all of the extracted ISO files into the USB drive. You don’t need to do this from the command prompt. Just drag and drop the files from the Windows 7 folder into the USB drive using Windows Explorer. We also recommend copying your hardware drivers onto the same key so the installation wizard can find them.

Your USB key is now all ready to go! Plug it into your target system and make sure you enter the BIOS (typically by hitting F2 or F12) to temporarily change the boot order to allow booting from the USB key before your primary hard drive or optical drive. Now, when you plug the key into a machine, your system should automatically begin speedily downloading setup files off of the USB key and entering Windows 7 installation.

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Using just a small fraction of Google’s vast application offerings? That’s about to end!

Remember that old maxim that says we use only about 10 percent of our brain’s capacity? It’s been proven as hokum by modern neuroscience, but we think we can safely apply the same basic analogy to Google: The vast, vast, vast majority of computer users—even those practiced in hardcore nerdery—are almost certainly using a pitiful fraction of all the applications and features intrinsic to Google’s ever-expanding matrix of software code.

Sure, a Maximum PC reader may be well-versed in Google’s advanced search operators (Google allintext: “advanced search operators” if you missed that chapter), but we’re willing to wager that even the most curious among you haven’t taken the time to play with more than a few Google applications, let alone explore all their advanced features. Indeed, Google HQ is a fan-friggin’-amazing hotbed of R&D, but its developers are relatively quiet about the tools they’ve released. And that’s a shame, because Google’s constant innovation should get more press.

To address your inevitable Google knowledge deficit, we commissioned Gina Trapani to share her favorite tips. Gina launched Lifehacker.com, writes about Google for a bazillion media outlets, co-hosts the “This Week In Google” netcast, and pretty much makes it her job to know as much as possible about Google’s sundry apps and features.

Want even harder hardcore tips? Or did we leave out an application you really want to know about? Send your requests to comments@maximumpc.com. Oh, and by the way: Google Buzz was announced literally minutes before this article went to press. But we’ll certainly cover this app in a future issue—because if there’s one thing this world needs, it’s more social media options. FTW! —Jon Phillips

Maps

Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) is a mapping application and route planner that provides driving, walking, and public transit directions from your starting point to one or more destinations. Launched in 2005, Maps is based on technology created at Australian startup Where2 by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen (currently the lead engineers on Google Wave). Along with Gmail, Google Maps was one of the first web apps to extensively use Ajax, a JavaScript programming technique that updates map imagery as you pan and zoom, all without reloading the page.

Preview Which Streets Made Street View’s Cut

Not only does Google Maps display aerial imagery in Satellite view, it also offers a huge database of on-the-ground photos via Street View. To switch to Street View from the basic map screen, drag and drop the yellow “pegman” from the top of the zoom control onto the map. When you do, blue lines appear on the streets where ground imagery is available (throughout the United States and in select other countries). Drop the pegman onto the road of your choice, walk down the street by clicking the navigational arrows, and double-click any area of a photo to zoom in on it. Some images are so clear, you can read the hours on No Parking signs.

In-Car Navigation? In Maps Help, search “Using Maps with your navigation device” to learn how to send directions straight from Google Maps to your TomTom, Garmin, BMW, or Mercedes navigation systems.

Add Local Color to Your Map

Don’t miss out on the brave new world beyond the Map, Satellite, Terrain, and Street View features in Google Maps. Under the More button (located between the Traffic and Satellite buttons on the top-right of a map), you can overlay links to photos, videos, Wikipedia articles, webcams, transit maps (in some cities), and real estate listings. This feature is perfect when you want to know the history of a monument, find open homes for your Sunday real estate tour, or see what’s happening on the local zoo’s “panda cam.”

Check Traffic to Avoid the Madness!

Before you start the car, check for clogged arteries by clicking the Traffic button. By default you’ll see live, current traffic conditions—anonymously collected from drivers’ mobile devices—but you can change the day and time to see extrapolated predictions. To do so, in the Traffic pop-up click the Change link, and set the day and time of your departure. Things looking bad out there? Well, when you get directions in Google Maps, you can always opt for an alternate route by clicking and dragging the suggested route to another road. Or you could opt to ditch the car entirely: Click the Public Transit or Walking link on the right panel below the starting point and destination to see how you can get there by bus, train, trolley, or on foot.

Next up, Google Docs!

Docs

Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) is a web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application that stores any files you create in it, as well as files you upload. While Google Docs doesn’t offer all the functionality you’d find in Microsoft Office, its web-based collaboration features present a whole new world of utility.

Save Time on Formatting with Templates

This personal financial budget shows you exactly where all your money’s going. Oh well, at least the spreadsheet is free!

Whether you need an invoice, resume, or calendar, you don’t have to design it from scratch—just grab a template, thousands of which can be found in the drop-down menu of the Create New button. Various spreadsheets, text documents, presentations, and forms are broken down by categories like “Resumes and Cover Letters,” “Personal Finance,” and “Legal.” (Hint: Choose your language from the “Narrow by language” drop-down to hide foreign-language templates.) Google Docs will keep track of which templates you’ve used in the past for easy reuse. The spreadsheet templates—pre-formatted with built-in formulas and charts—are reason enough to check out Docs.

Conduct Surveys with Forms

Feel free to mix in “check all that apply” questions with those demanding “one answer only.”

Google’s form templates are awesome for not only collecting data from co-workers, loved ones, and website visitors, but also for tallying responses. In Google Docs, click the Create New button, and chose “form” from the drop-down. Now, enter your questions, as well as the types of answers each question should get. You can format answers for multiple choice, checkboxes, and other common survey criteria, as well as add section headers and choose custom visual themes. Clicking the “Email for” button will send your contacts a link to the form (you also can copy and paste the link to publish it yourself). When your recipients answer the form’s questions, a Google spreadsheet living in the cloud collects and charts the responses for you to see. For example, you can gather all your friends’ vital personal specs—phone numbers, home addresses, even favorite foods—with one simple questionaire.

Chat While You Crunch Numbers

When you give other people access to a document in Google Docs, a blue notification icon on the far right of the menu bar will inform you who else is viewing and/or editing the document while you have it open. In spreadsheets, this bar has a down arrow on it, which you can click to expand a chat panel. Not only will you be able to see real-time updates to your spreadsheet as others change it, you can instant message your collaborators as you work. This feature is conspicuously absent in documents and presentations.

Visualize Data with Interactive Gadgets

Once you’ve got a spreadsheet full of data, you’ll want interesting ways to visualize it without doing too much work. Enter Google Docs gadgets, which are interactive charts, maps, and other data visualizations you can embed in a spreadsheet, publish on a web page, or include on your iGoogle homepage. From your Google Spreadsheet’s Insert menu, choose “Gadget…” to choose and configure a gadget that displays your data in informative ways. You can create your own gadget or use one of the many provided, which include charts, guages, timelines, org charts, and the fun “Bars of Stuff.”

Ditch the Thumb Drive and Store Files at Google Docs

Files converted to Google Doc documents don’t count toward the 1GB storage limit. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files can all be converted and stored for free, but you might lose features and formatting.

Google Docs isn’t just for office files anymore: You can now upload, store, and share any kind of file, including music, video, photos, and zip files. A simple click of the Upload button will save files to your home in the cloud. File sizes can be as high as 250MB, and you get up to 1GB of space for storing non–Google Docs files. Once your treasures are uploaded, select a file and click the Share link to give others access to it. You can also share entire folders, creating a Dropbox-like meeting space for your friends and colleagues to work on files together.

See a Document’s Revision History

When multiple people are working on a document, things can change fast. To see who changed what and to compare revisions, open a document and from the File menu choose “See revision history.” You’ll get a list of all the changes a document has undergone. You can also select two revisions and compare them to see exactly what changed between them. Just be aware that revision history is available to anyone you share a document with—even your boss. So, if you don’t want collaborators or viewers to see the history, make a copy of the document, which wipes away the bread-crumb trail of its changes.

Get Your Documents Offline

Google Gears helps you keep your cloud business in sync.

One of the biggest concerns about keeping data in the cloud—instead of on your hard drive—centers on the question of offline access. So, if you’re wondering how you’ll work on your Google Docs files when you’re on a non-Wi-Fi-equipped flight, Google Gears has you covered. This free browser add-on for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari gives you access to your files offline, and syncs changes when you connect to the Internet again. You can download Google Gears at http://gears.google.com.

Next up, Google Wave!

Google Wave: Collaboration Made Easy

At first glance, it seems like there’s nothing Wave can’t do.

Google Wave (http://wave.google.com) is a new, real-time group collaboration tool that’s currently an invitation-only beta product. Combining features from email, chat, wikis, and forums, Google Wave is best described as a mash-up between a real-time wiki and multimedia chat. You do all your group collaboration in “waves” (note the lowercase W), which function as a hybrid conversation/document—wrap your head around that!—that multiple people can view, edit, and add to.

Waves are live documents and change right before your eyes: You can watch collaborators’ cursors move about with fury, keystroke by keystroke. You can also embed interactive content—like polls, YouTube clips, and slide shows—and easily discuss a particular sentence in a block of text with the inline reply feature. Wave is young and missing essential features (like the ability to remove someone from a wave), but there’s no mistaking its ambitions to change how power-users work together online.

Calendar

Google Calendar (http://google.com/calendar) is a scheduling application that offers email, SMS alerts, and collaboration features. The interface is similar to Microsoft Outlook’s calendar, with daily, weekly, and monthly views, as well as a customizable time period and agenda views. Launched in April 2006, Google Calendar officially graduated from beta status in July 2009.

Get Your Agenda via Email or Text Message

When you create an event in Google Calendar, you can also configure an email or SMS reminder to come to you minutes, days, or weeks in advance—great for remembering to order flowers for Mom’s birthday. You can also receive your daily agenda via email first thing in the morning. To do so, in the calendar list on the left, click the down-arrow button next to the appropriate calendar, then select Notifications. Check the “Daily agenda” box, and save your settings to get an email each morning at 5 a.m. in your timezone of the day’s upcoming events. You can also get your schedule via text message: Text the word day to shortcode GVENT (48368) to receive your day’s agenda. The word next will get the next event on your calendar, and the nday command will send back tomorrow’s events. (Standard text messaging fees apply.)

Quick-Add Events with Natural Language

We wish more apps—and even people—could intelligently interpret conversational language.

The Google Calendar app is quite remarkable in its ability to generate calendar items from events you describe in natural, conversational language. For example, if you type “Lunch with Mark tomorrow at 2pm at Maria’s,” Calendar will parse “tomorrow at 2pm,” scheduling the event for the correct day and time, and even fill in “Maria’s” as the event location.

Subscribe to Team Schedules, Birthdays, and More

Does your company give you a paid vacation for Groundhog Day? Your IT department can share your company’s complete paid vacation day schedule via Google Calendar.

You can instantly add sports team schedules, holidays, and your contacts’ birthdays to your schedule by subscribing to public calendars. In the Other Calendars module on the sidebar, click the Add link. From the drop-down, choose “Browse interesting calendars” to pick and choose from a selection of calendars, like religious or U.S. holidays, or your contacts’ birthdays (compiled from your Google contact entries and their Google Profiles). You can also subscribe to any public calendar, or any of your contacts’ Google calendars by choosing “Add by URL” or “Add a friend’s calendar.”

Incorporate the Weather Forecast on Your Calendar

Get the weather forecast for this weekend’s softball game directly on your Google Calendar. In Settings, under the General tab, enter your location (either city and state or zip code) and then, near “Show weather based on my location,” choose whether you’d like the temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Save your changes, and GCal will display a small weather icon for the next four days; click the icon to expand forecast details.

Next up, Gmail!

Gmail

When Google’s free, web-based email service (http://mail.google.com) launched as an invitation-only beta on April 1, 2004, initial speculation had it that the 1GB storage offer was an April Fool’s gag. It wasn’t a gag, and Google has only gotten more generous; as of this writing, Gmail storage capacity is up to 7GB. Thanks to all this storage space—along with threaded conversations, a powerful spam filter, conversation labels, and more—Gmail remains a standout amid other free webmail products that have been around much longer.

Access Gmail via IMAP

With IMAP settings, you can keep Gmail properly synced on all your sundry Internet machines.

While most email providers offer only one-way POP downloads of your messages, Gmail offers the more sophisticated, two-way sync protocol, IMAP. With IMAP, you can access your Gmail on multiple computers and mobile devices, and changes you make on one device are immediately reflected everywhere else. IMAP syncs the read and unread status of all your Gmail messages in all your labels (represented as traditional folders in your IMAP client of choice). To enable IMAP in Gmail’s Settings, click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. You’ll have to configure your email program using Gmail’s secure IMAP settings; click the “Configuration instructions” link to get the details for your email software.

Mute a Chatty Email Thread

Just check the box of a thread you want to silence, then mute it—mute it good.

When an email conversation is stuck in a never-ending “reply all” cycle and you wish you weren’t on the recipient list, open the conversation and choose Mute from Gmail’s More Actions menu. This will silence the thread, meaning that any new replies to it will skip your inbox and be archived automatically. You can still search for and find muted messages; you just won’t get notifications of new replies while it’s going on. To find conversations you’ve muted, enter is:muted into Gmail’s search box.

Master Gmail’s Keyboard Shortcuts

If you receive a lot of email, Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts are essential, and should be committed to muscle memory as soon as possible. To enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail’s settings, go to the the General tab, and select the “Keyboard shortcuts on” radio button. Now you can move forward and back between your messages using the J and K keys, tap R to reply to a message, C to compose a new message, and the / key to move your cursor to Gmail’s search box. Some keys even perform multiple actions. For example, if you’re done reading a message, press ] to archive it and move to the next message. See all the available keyboards shortcuts at http://goo.gl/hlBI.

Catch Embarrassing Email Mistakes Before You Send

Google has a very canny way of making us feel slightly incompetent, doesn’t he?

Just sent an email you wish you could take back? Told someone the file was attached and sent the message before you actually attached it? Gmail Labs, Gmail’s “testing ground for experimental features,” offers two tools that can help. The Undo Send feature gives you a few minutes to click an undo link after you’ve sent a message you immediately regret. The Forgotten Attachment Detector checks to see if you mentioned the words “attachment” or “attached” in your message but did not attach a file. If it suspects you’ve made a mistake, it prompts you with a dialog box that asks if you forgot your attachment—all before it sends the email. To enable Gmail Labs and get these and other Labs features mentioned on this page, click the Labs tab.

Send Repetitive Replies Faster with Canned Responses

Whether you need a uniform reply to server-outage complaints, or just want to tell that latest Nigerian 419 scammer that you thank him for thinking of you but aren’t currently interested, a Canned Response will get the job done.

When you receive a lot of email that requires the same response, you need not suffer the indignity of same-replying from scratch every time. Gmail’s Canned Responses feature (another tweak from Gmail Labs) lets you set up email scripts that you can choose from a drop-down to send as a reply to a message. For example, you could have a Canned Response called “thanks” associated with the message, “Thanks for letting us know, we’re working on it!” With Gmail Labs and Canned Responses enabled, open a new email, compose your canned response, and from the Canned Responses drop-down under Save, choose “New Canned Response” and enter a name for it. Then, any time you want to use the response when replying to an email, click the Canned Responses link, and choose its name from the Insert section. Canned Responses also work in filters. For example, you could say that any email from certain addresses should automatically get a particular canned response.

Send and Receive Mail from Other Accounts in Gmail

Which email identity does Gina want to use today?

Switching to Gmail sounds tempting, but what if you don’t want to change your email addresses? You don’t have to. Gmail comes with a built-in POP fetcher, which can retrieve messages from up to five existing email accounts and drop them in your Gmail inbox. You can also set up multiple “From:” addresses that match your existing accounts. This way, when you send an email in Gmail, you can have it originate from your Gmail account, or from your alternate “From:” addresses. To start using other email addresses within Gmail, go to Settings and enter your other account details in the Accounts tab.

Add an Email to Your Task List

If a message has a chore attached to it, just add it to Tasks, and it will loom over your to-do list like the proverbial albatross.

Gmail’s built-in to-do list application, Tasks, makes it easy to turn messages into to-dos. You can manage your tasks, subtasks, task descriptions, and due dates just by clicking the Tasks link in the Gmail sidebar. And if you’ve got an email message that contains a to-do item in it, choose “Add to Tasks” from the More Actions menu to add it to your list with a link to the message.

Next up, alerts and feeds!

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Crawler Alerts: Let Google Do the Search Work for You

Want to know how many people are referencing your name online? Setting up a Google Alert will keep you appraised.

You want to see the latest, greatest search results for a brand name, person, or any keyword, but find it too time-consuming to manually search Google every few days? Then turn to Google Alerts (http://google.com/alerts), which will automatically deliver these hits via email or RSS feed. Simply enter the keyword you want new results for, what sources you want to monitor (News, Blogs, Web, Video, Groups, or Comprehensive), how often you want the email alerts, how many results the alerts should contain, and what email address the alerts should go to. Then, as Google crawls the Internet and indexes new content that contains your keyword, you’ll get an email summarizing those results. If you’ve already got too much email, choose Feed from the “Deliver to:” drop-down to subscribe to alerts in your feed reader instead.

Reader

Google Reader (http://reader.google.com) is a news aggregator that lets you subscribe to website RSS and Atom feeds, organize them into folders, share items with followers, and read their content offline. Billed as “an inbox for the web,” Reader displays the number of unread items per feed (and per folder of feeds), just like an email client does.

Follow People in Addition to Feeds

Once all your pals begin following each other, your reads on good reads will grow exponentially.

Your friends are your most trusted informants, and seeing what they’ve been reading might bring you the news you care about more quickly than a faceless website could. To get started following people in Reader, click the “People you follow” link in the sidebar. You can find people to follow by name or email address, as well as configure access to your own shared items. Click the Follow button to add someone to the “People you follow” area, where each person’s profile will display a count of things they liked, shared, or commented on.

Read Your Feeds Offline To read your feeds somewhere other than in a web browser, try the free desktop newsreader FeedDemon (http://goo.gl/ALNW). It syncs with Google Reader, and maintains your subscriptions, tags, and read and unread item status whether you changed them on the desktop or in the web application.

Sort Feed Items ‘By Magic’

Is Doug Henning still alive? Something tells us he’d like this feature.

You can instantly see the most interesting feed items first, using Google’s version of magic: Hover over any feed, and from the drop-down menu change the sort order from “newest” (the default) to “by magic.” The “Sort by magic” algorithm ranks items based on your reading habits as well as global Google Reader activity to predict which items will interest you most. The more feed items you like and star in Google Reader, the better the magic will work.

Graph Your Reading Habits

Spending too much time reading, and not enough time writing? The Trends feature can chart this in living color.

How much time do you spend reading and sharing feeds? Click the Trends link on the Reader sidebar to get an overview of how many feed items you read per month, with navel-gazing stats like what day of the week and hour of the day you read feeds most. Trends also shows you which of your feeds are most frequently updated, inactive, and least subscribed-to, as well as how active your Reader friends are. To see how much you interact with an individual feed, click it and then click the Show Details link on a feed’s blue menu bar to see a bar graph that displays how many items that feed has published compared to how many you’ve read.

Next up, Chrome!

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Chrome

Google Chrome (http://google.com/chrome) is an open-source, tabbed web browser developed with a focus on simplicity and speed. Its design is extremely minimalist, stripping away many of the menus and buttons common in other web browsers. A mere 16 months after it launched, Chrome is the third most widely used web browser, after Internet Explorer and Firefox. The latest stable build of Chrome is available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Willing testers can also use beta versions of Chrome, which include previews of new features that are in development.

Customize the ‘New Tab’ Screen

Stabbing a tab with a thumbtack insures it will remain stationary on your thumbnail view.

When you open a new tab in Google Chrome, by default you get the aptly named “New Tab” screen, a smart grid of thumbnail previews of your most visited websites. You can customize the look, layout, and position of the thumbnails on this launcher page to make it more useful. To remove a thumbnail, hover over it and click the X in the upper right-hand corner. To relocate a thumbnail to a different position in the grid, hover over it, then drag and drop it to its new location. To pin a thumbnail to a spot—so it’s always there, no matter how often you visit it—hover over it and click the thumbtack button on the upper left-hand side.

Honey, I Hid the Pr0n If you want to web surf without leaving behind traces of your activity—“to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays,” according to Google’s faux-naïve language—you can activate Incognito mode, which is under Chrome’s Tools menu. Downloaded files and visited webpages won’t appear in the browser’s history, and new cookies will be closed upon exiting the incognito window.

Manage Tab and Extension Memory Usage

Chrome is a speedy browser, but once third-party extensions are in the mix, you’re a bit vulnerable to memory leaks and slowdowns. To see what’s eating Chrome’s memory, launch its internal Task Manager using the Shift+Esc keyboard shortcut. Much like the Windows Task Manager, it will show you how much memory, CPU, and network bandwidth each tab and extension is using. Select a runaway memory hog and choose “End process” to nix its greedy activities.

Sync Your Bookmarks—Everywhere

If you’re running Chrome on several computers, you don’t have to worry about missing bookmarks you saved while working on another machine. Press Ctrl+Shift+B to launch the Bookmark Manager, and click the “Synchronize my bookmarks…” button. Sign into your Google account, and Chrome will merge and sync the bookmarks in your current instance of Chrome with every other installation of Chrome that has sync enabled (and is signed into your Google Account). Chrome actually saves your bookmarks in Google Docs. After you sync your bookmarks, you’ll find a Google Chrome folder in your Google Docs account with a Bookmarks subfolder, and all your links stored within. This way, if you want to access your bookmarks from a different browser, you can access them by logging into Google Docs.

Add Features to Chrome with Extensions

The latest stable version of Google Chrome includes support for third-party extensions: installable plugins that add features to Chrome, like ad blocking, email notifications, or a session manager. To start exploring extensions, choose Extensions from the blue-wrench menu on the far right of the Chrome menu bar. If you have extensions already installed, they’ll be listed here. Otherwise, click “Get more extensions” to browse a catalog of extensions categorized and ranked by popularity. We especially like the One Number extension, which adds a button to Chrome’s toolbar that displays the number of unread messages in your Gmail, Google Reader, Google Voice, and Google Wave accounts.

Picasa

Google’s Picasa photo management software (http://picasa.com) comes in two flavors: desktop software you install on your PC or Mac, and an online version called Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com). While you’ll want to sort, organize, tag, rate, and edit the gigabytes of digital photos you’ve collected on your desktop, Picasa’s Web Albums interface makes publishing and collaborating on those photos easier.

Group Your Photos by the People in Them

Both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums can recognize faces in your photos, and let you identify those faces by assigning Name Tags to them. Once your photos are loaded into Picasa on the desktop, it will scan them and place all the images with faces in them in an Unnamed People album (under People in the left column). Browse that album, and add a name to each person pictured to identify them. If you’re signed into your Google account, link those photos with the corresponding person in your Google Contacts list. For each person you identify, Picasa creates a person-specific album, and continually scans your library for new photos that include faces matching ones you’ve already tagged. Picasa will ask you to confirm its name tag suggestions on faces it finds. The suggestions are often, but not always, accurate. Regardless, you can always correct an inaccurate name tag. Picasa Web Albums also uses name tags, and can list photos by the people in them. To turn on this feature, click the Try It button on the right side of your album list, in the Name Tags section.

Put Your Photos on the Map

Picasa let’s you geotag in a Google Maps view, and you can also “View in Google Earth” by hitting the link at the top right.

You can easily add location information—aka geotags—to your photos and display them on a Google Map, with each photo pinned to the location where it was shot. To assign location data in the desktop app, click the Places button on the bottom right, between People and Tags. In the Google Maps panel that appears, search for an address. Once you’ve found the location where a photo was taken, click OK in the “Put photo here?” dialog. In Picasa Web Albums, choose a photo, and in the information panel on the right, click the Add Location link to find an address in Google Maps, and then put the photo there. Once you’ve geotagged your photos, you can view a map of photos by clicking the View Map link for an album.

Automatically Sync Photos (and Edits) on Your Computer to the Web

Behold, the Picasa desktop app in all its glory.

Once you publish a photo album in Picasa Web Albums, you don’t have to re-upload an image by hand every time you change a caption, add a name tag, or crop a photo. Instead, you can automatically sync changes to photos. To do so, go to the desktop app and select an album or a folder of photos. Toggle on the “Sync to Web” control, and sign into your Google account. Now, configure your sync settings—what size photos should be, whether they should have a watermark, whether they should be public or private—and start automatically syncing that local album to Picasa Web Albums. With web syncing on, any photos you add to the album or edits you make to existing photos automatically update in Web Albums—all without having to manually upload them again.

Get Arts-and-Crafty with Your Photos

Notice that you can set the aspect ratio of your Picture Pile so that it matches the dimensions of your desktop.

The desktop version of Picasa comes with several built-in tools to create nifty projects from your photos. To get started, choose an album or folder of photos, and from the Create drop-down menu choose Picture Collage, Movie, or Gift CD. Picasa’s built-in Movie Maker tool can create photo slide shows with music, transitions, text, and captions, and includes an option to instantly upload your project to YouTube. The Picture Collage maker organizes a set of photos into various layouts, such as a picture pile, grid, contact sheet, or mosaic. You can save the collage to edit later, or set it as your desktop background. Finally, the Gift CD maker burns a disc of selected photos and an accompanying slide show.

Make Your Photo Albums Collaborative

Inviting friends and family to collaborate on albums is as simple as sending a quick invite.

When you’ve taken photos at an event with other attendees—say, a wedding—everyone’s got his or her own pictures, and they’re not always stored in the same place. But when you share a photo album in Picasa Web Albums, you can allow others to edit the photos in it, as well as add new photos to make that album collaborative. In both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, choose an album or folder of photos, and click the Share button at the top. In the Share Photos dialog, enter the email addresses of the people you want to see the album, and check the “Let these people contribute to my album” box to grant them permissions. Now your collaborators can add and edit photo captions, apply name tags, edit the photos themselves, and add photos to the album. Just remember that any photos added by collaborators will count toward your Picasa storage quota, which is 1GB if you haven’t yet upgraded from a free Picasa account.

Upload Photos via Email

Don’t even try uploading a photo go Gina’s Picasa account. You will be stymied!

Sure, you can upload photos to your online albums from within Picasa itself, but you can also upload photos via email—a perfect method for your camera phone. To set up your secret upload email address, go to Picasa Web Albums and click the Settings link in the top-right corner. Under the General tab, in the “Upload photos by email” section, check the box next to “Allow me to upload photos by email.” Enter a secret word to get your unique email address, and click the Save Changes button. Now add that secret email address to your contacts. Next time you snap a photo from your smartphone and want to instantly upload it to Picasa, send it via email to that address. To add a photo directly to a particular album, enter the name of the album in the subject line of your message.

Next up, Search!

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Search

The front door to the grandaddy of all of Google’s web applications—its web search engine—is an unassuming text box that doesn’t give you any hint to what it can do. In July 2008, Google’s index exceeded 1 trillion unique websites, and a billion new web pages are purportedly added per day. Here’s how to twiddle Google’s knobs and levers to find your needle in that haystack.

Find Business Hours, Restaurant Menus, and What’s Nearby

The Maximum PC crew can’t get enough of Google’s savvy in finding food menus.

Get business hours in your Google search results by searching for the business name, city, and the word “hours.” For example, a search for Seaworld, San Diego hours includes the days and times the park is open, right on the results page. Likewise, a search for a restaurant name and the word menu (like Ranchos Cocina Ocean Beach menu) includes a blue link directly to the menu in the first result. Finally, when you visit Google.com in the browser on your location-aware iPhone or Android phone, you’ll see the name of your current location. Click the “Near me now” link to see restaurants, coffee shops, banks, and ATMs in your vicinity.

Calculate, Convert, and Get Local Time Instantly

Google’s search box doesn’t just return links to web pages, it can also perform calculations and conversions, as well as tell you the local time in places around the globe, and what time a plane flight might arrive. For example, search for 20% of 37.45 to see how much you should tip the waiter for dinner. To see what the local time is in faraway places like Tokyo, you would search for what time is it in Tokyo. Google also comes in handy while you’re cooking: Enter quarter cup in teaspoons when you can’t find your measuring cup. Finally, to quickly check whether a flight is on time, search for it by airline and flight number, e.g., JetBlue flight 185, and you’ll get arrival and departure times at the top of the results page.

Find Images and Videos of a Certain Size and Type

Sure, but can it find a video of a Simpsonized Christopher Walken reading Goodnight, Moon?

Google Image search has special filters you can use to specify the size and type of the image you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for desktop wallpaper images of the moon that are 1024×768 pixels, first go into Google Images, search for moon, then in your results, click the Show Options link to set the exact size. In those options, you can also narrow down results by the type of image you’re looking for—images that contain faces, a photo, clip art, or line drawing. Google’s Video search offers similar options. You can specify the length of a video you’re looking for as well as whether it’s a cartoon, slide show, or high quality.

Add Custom Sections to Your Google News Page

Google News (http://news.google.com) comes with built-in sections like Top Stories, Business, Entertainment, and Sci/Tech, but you can also create a custom news section that you monitor over time. For example, to track news related to the Apple iPad, in News, search for iPad. Then, at the bottom of the search results page, click “Add a custom section for iPad to Google News.” This will add it to your section list on the Google News sidebar.

Search Within a Single Website

Many websites don’t offer their own built-in search box, and those that do don’t usually provide results as good as those you get from Google. Luckily, you can search a single site from Google’s search box using the site:example.com operator. For example, to search maximumpc.com for the word Google, search for site:maximumpc.com Google.

Profile Enhancement: Finally, for the Eternally Anonymous

When potential bosses, dates, clients, and old high school friends type your name into Google’s web search box, what do they get back? If you’ve got a common name or just don’t have the time to keep up an active web presence, you can still get listed in search results with Google Profiles. Head over to http://google.com/profiles to set up a personal page with your name, a head shot, a short bio, places you’ve lived, schools you’ve attended, and your websites. You can even include photos from Flickr, Picasa, or any online photo feed. (Hint: specify an album that contains pictures of you so that searchers can identify you!) Once you’ve added enough information to your Google Profile, a search for your name will include your profile (along with anyone else who has your name) at the bottom of the Google results page. The more information you add, the higher you’ll move up the rankings.

Chrome OS: Just a Lean Browser Wrapper?

Google Chrome OS is a yet-to-be-released, open-source operating system whose sole purpose is to quickly get you online. As such, only a single, installed application runs on it: the Google Chrome browser, which provides shortcuts to web applications like Google Calendar, Yahoo Mail, Hulu, Facebook, and Twitter.

Everything you do in Chrome OS happens in the browser, on the web. Speed is the highest priority in Chrome OS development, and early builds running on netbooks boast promising boot speeds of four to seven seconds—which Google engineers say they will work to reduce! Currently, only source code for the open-source project—called Chromium OS—is available (find it at www.chromium.org/chromium-os). In the fall of 2010, Google and its hardware partners are slated to announce netbooks and other devices running this most lean of OSes. For more on Maximum PC’s unique take on Chrome OS, go here.

For more info on Gina Trapani and all her Google projects, go to http://ginatrapani.org.

Sourced from: Maximum PC Features RSS Feed

Trying to fix a badly infected PC without HijackThis is sort of like going into surgery without a scalpel; it’s the only tool for the job when all other measures fail. New spyware strains and increasingly complex viruses emerge every day, and your PC’s immune system (i.e, antivirus software) isn’t always able to keep up. And if you’re performing emergency surgery on someone else’s PC, you may find that they didn’t have any AV software installed to begin with.

No matter how bad the infection, HijackThis gives you the means to dig deep into Windows to root out whatever it is that’s wreaking havoc. It’s not a cure-all, however, or even a cure-little. In fact, HijackThis doesn’t cure anything on its own. What HijackThis does do is give you a snapshot of the system’s registry and file settings, putting particular emphasis on the browser. It doesn’t discern between safe and malicious settings, so it’s possible to unintentionally inflict real harm if you don’t know what you’re doing. Follow along as we show you how to properly wield HijackThis.

1. Download and Run HijackThis

Originally developed by Dutch programmer Merijn Bellekom, HijackThis has since been sold to Trend Micro, a security firm better equipped to maintain and update the program. But don’t worry, HijackThis is still free and you can download it at http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/ where you’ll find both a stable and beta version. We haven’t run into much trouble using the beta, but it’s currently only available as an installer. With the stable version, you have the option of downloading just the executable and plopping it on your USB thumb drive.

Once installed, fire up the program and choose ‘Do a system scan and save a logfile.’

After you do this, you should see a bunch of seemingly obscure settings in the program’s main window, (Image 2) which will also be listed out in a separate text file generated on the fly. If the text file that appears is empty, try using the stable release instead of the beta.

2. Understand the Results

Keep in mind what we said earlier, in that HijackThis doesn’t discern between safe and malicious entries. Even on a badly infected system, many, if not most, of the settings will be legit and altering them could affect the functionality of your PC.
If you consider yourself a savvy user, you can scroll through the settings on your own and look for any suspicious or harmful settings. In some cases, this will be obvious, but not always, so you want to be sure to Google (or Bing) any entries you’re unsure about before nuking them.

3. Hop Online for a Second Opinion

No matter what your level of expertise, it never hurts to get a second opinion. One way to do this by posting your log contents on your favorite PC tech support forum. Mash the AnalyzeThis button to see a list of forums to choose from, or just hop over to Maximum PC’s board.

If you strike out on a bulletin board or need instantaneous feedback, German Website www.hijackthis.de will oblige. Just copy your entire log contents to the clipboard (right-click>select all>copy), paste it into the site’s textbox, and press the Analyze button. Within a few moments, the site will spit out the results and alert you to any potential problem areas. Anything with a green checkmark is most likely safe, while the opposite holds true for any red Xs that are displayed. You may also see orange question marks, which are unknown files or entries that require further investigation.

Rather than toss all your eggs in one basket, double-check these results by heading over to http://hjt.networktechs.com. Just like before, you’ll paste your log file’s contents and press the Parse button. All the results are color coded so you can see any potential pitfalls at a glance. Hover your mouse cursor over these to learn why they’re being flagged and what the recommended course of action is.

4.Get Offline Help with HijackReader

The problem with relying on a Website to sift through your HijackThis log is that an infected PC doesn’t always let you have access to the Internet. In some cases, you may be able to hop online, but your Web browsing attempts either gets constantly rerouted, or pages load too slow to be of any help.

In this case, arm yourself with HijackReader , another free third-party app which works in conjunction with HijackThis. There’s no installation necessary – just unzip the archive to your hard drive or portable flash drive and run HijackReader.exe. Copy the HijackThis log file to your clipboard and mash ‘Paste log,’ followed by the ‘Check!’ button.

When HijackReader finishes, it will save the results as an HTML file and prompt you to give it a name. Open this file to see the results. HijackReader tends to know less about individual entries than the online sites do, but for the ones it does recognize, it tends to be a bit more informative. No matter which method you use (or combination thereof), it’s a good idea to double-check any iffy entries with Google before you go blasting away registry and system settings.

Sourced from: Maximum PC How-Tos RSS Feed