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

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.

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

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

Happy New Year! Well, almost. Before I can raise my glass and tip my columnist’s hat to the one-year birthday of the Freeware Files (and Murphy’s Law), it’s time we get down to the time-honored tech tradition at this time of year: the awards list.

Unlike my brethren at Maximum PC, who have put together a fine list of general freeware applications that you should check out regardless of the time, I’ve sat down and gone through the hundreds of apps and utilities that I’ve covered throughout this year. Some, you might know. Some, you might have forgotten about. And some apps and utilities that I’ve used, but not covered, still deserve special mention in this general roundup of the year’s best freeware.

So put on your party hat and get your downloading finger ready. For each winner, I’ll give a little mention of why said app is worth its salt, why it differs from what you’ll natively find in Windows, and whether it’s a must-download or a maybe-consider. After all, it would be crazy to download 20 apps in any given setting, no? You just want the best. This list, friends, represents the best… and in some places, the unknown!

Let’s begin.

Best Text Tool: Texter

Texter saves so much time for die-hard, hand-coding Web geeks, it’s not even funny. And, to be honest, it’s amazing just how simple this Lifehacker-borne utility is. Here’s how it works. Fire up Texter and you can create a string of text to serve as a replacement for whenever you type a specific element on your machine. For example, you could use Texter to replace every time you type <img> with the full <img src ="…"> reference, and start your cursor right where you should be typing the link to said picture. The possibilities are endless and the carpal tunnel bills are reduced. For that, Texter wins a Freeware Files Award.

Does Windows have a built-in alternative for this tool? No. Next program!

Download it here!

Best Disc Mounter: Virtual CloneDrive

Daemon Tools usually takes the cake for the best disc image mounting application. However, successive iterations of the application have made it damned near impossible to avoid installing some kind of adware or toolbar alongside the application. As that has the potential to greatly hack off a number of Maximum PC readers, out goes Daemon and in its place comes a worthy competitor, Virtual CloneDrive

What’s a disc image? What’s mounting? In short, there are plenty of programs out there that rip the contents of an optical disc (the legal contents, I hope) to a giant archive, otherwise known as an .ISO file. Mounting programs like the easy-to-use Virtual CloneDrive allow you to fool your computer into thinking that said archive is actually a living, breathing, spinning CD in your optical drive. Never scratch your discs again, ensure faster copies from your "disc" to your hard drive, and give yourself a handy backup for your critical data… then mount it with Virtual CloneDrive!

Does Windows have a built-in alternative? Not for ISO files it doesn’t!

Download it here!

Best Distraction Eliminator: Temptation Blocker

Temptation Blocker is downright cruel. But sometimes, love just has to be tough. When you launch this utility, you’re presented with a list of programs. Select a program that distracts you from staying on-task with your work, set a time, then hit the "Get Work Done!" button. If you try to access the application before the time expires, you’ll be presented with an annoying, 32-digit code to type in before said program unlocks. In theory–in theory–the annoyance of typing such a string will keep you from accessing your Firefox browser, which will keep you from typing in "cuteoverload.com" and hitting enter, which will keep you from losing your job… et cetera.

If Windows had a built-in alternative, you wouldn’t be looking at cute animal pictures right now!

Download it here!

Best RSS Aggregator: FeedDemon

For all its features, FeedDemon’s greatest attribute is that it takes the acts of subscribing to and reading a number of different syndicated feeds and makes it as plainly presented and as easy as can be. Those are a lot of words to swallow but, really, they speak to the core of the FeedDemon’s simple experience. That doesn’t mean that this program isn’t packed full of other useful features, however. Built-in synchronization allows you to keep the contents of your FeedDemon applications across multiple workspaces in check via Google Reader. A wealth of options for organizing, tagging, and marking your feeds helps you keep your growing syndication list as organized as possible. In short, FeedDemon simply rocks–shoot, it even supports tabbed browsing!

I suppose Windows has the built-in RSS display via the Windows Sidebar, but come on.

Download it here!

Best Offline Twitter App: TweetDeck

This one’s tough. TweetDeck shares a number of features with competing programs and, to be honest, has one of the least eye-catching interfaces of any of them–but there’s ugly, and there’s functional. The app’s huge, columnar interface does much to enhance the process of organize Twitter streams by raw feed, friend groupings, searches, lists… the list, as it were, goes on. Better still, the synchronization functionality built into TweetDeck allows you to share your settings across multiple versions of the application on your many PCs and mobile devices. It might not be pretty, but TweetDeck works–and works well. Now if only there was a way to save a history of previously downloaded tweets. That 200-tweet limit per column just doesn’t do it for a power user!

Windows? Twitter? Haha.

Download it here!

Best Windows Diagnostic / Disaster Avoidance Tool: Ultimate Boot CD

If you have a copy of Windows XP sitting around to create said Ultimate Boot CD, then you’re in for a treasure-trove of helpful utilities and diagnostics tools designed to save the day when your system starts going haywire. In fact, a number of the apps and utilities built into this live disc–including MemTest86+, Darik’s Boot and Nuke, HDClone, and CPU Burn-In–are programs that I would recommend anyway. The fact that these, and a whole lot more, are included on a single bootable package really speaks to the smorgasbord of protection and configuration options that Ultimate Boot CD can deliver for your system. If you don’t have a copy of this sitting around for troublesome times, you only have yourself to blame!

Simply put, this CD beats the pants off of Windows’ built-in Recover Console.

Download it here!

Best BitTorrent Client: uTorrent

Why is uTorrent one of the top-used applications by BitTorrent downloaders? Two reasons: functionality and foresight. On its face, uTorrent delivers a simple interface coupled with a number of helpful functions for the novice user. You can download BitTorrents with but a few clicks of a mouse, handpick the files you want to grab out of said BitTorrents, and shut down the program when the download is done. More advanced users can make use of the program’s extensive configuration options, including the ability to customize download speeds by time and access the program’s interface through an easy-to-operate Web UI.

Although they currently exist in a release candidate version of the app, uTorrent’s impressive future features include live streaming for video BitTorrents and a brand-new "access anywhere" Web UI, as well as support for BitTorrent’s free DNA content delivery service. And before you ask, no, Windows can’t download Torrent files by its lonesome.

Download it here!

Best CD/DVD/HD Burner: ImgBurn

For a no-nonsense image burning experience, whether you’re making a simple DVD or a ton of Blu-Ray discs in succession, look no further than ImgBurn. This application supports every Windows OS under the sun for both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. Better, it requires no updates for working with a laundry list of common optical drive models. Not only can you burn a huge range of image files and audio formats, but you can also build video discs for all three major formats based on their respective folder types: DVD (VIDEO_TS), HD-DVD (HVDVD_TS), and Blu-ray (BDAV / BDMV). New support for folder structure modifications joins a preexisting (and handy) shutdown mechanism for flipping off your system when a burn is complete. ImgBurn has truly etched its way into our hearts with a laser of love.

Windows might have its own CD burning functionality built into the operating system, but it’s nowhere near as comprehensive as ImgBurn! 

Download it here! 

Best Multi-System Takeover Utility: Input Director

Here’s the setup: You have more than one PC at your desk. Whether you’re rocking two laptops, a laptop and a desktop, or two beastly desktop machines, it can be a real pain to switch between the two. Prior to the birth of Input Director, you’d either need to have a separate mouse and keyboard for each machine (ew) or use a program like Synergy to control both using a the single input devices of a host machine. But all has not been perfect in Synergy land. The once-useful application has long since gotten fussy and a new king has taken its place on the throne of desktop control. Input Director offers a ton of additional configuration options for using one mouse and keyboard to control a whole arsenal of systems. It’s jam-packed with setup and encryption options, and its actual process of connecting multiple PCs together runs more smoothly than any similar application I’ve tested. And Input Director even supports shared clipboards flawlessly–a tricky task that will allow you to use the contents of any system’s clipboard on any other machine.

Remote desktop be damned, Windows: Input Director is the new hotness for multi-system control. 

Download it here! 

Best Desktop Organizer: Fences

Nothing is more painful than a messy desktop. And Windows sure doesn’t do much to sweep up your clutter. Aside from a Desktop Cleanup wizard and a few auto-arranging tools, you really don’t have much of an ability to organize or, dare I say it, group your icons under a collective theme. The most you can do is drag correlated icons to different parts of your screen and hope that your monitor is large enough to handle your sprawling shortcuts.

You could also try installing Fences. In fact, I strongly suggest you do so. This super-organizer allows you to lock off parts of your desktop–or, at least, create virtual walls for your desktop icons–which you can then use to pen similar icons into larger zones. Go ahead and make these pens, or fences, as large or as small as you want. If you have too many icons to fill the space, a handy little scroll bar allows you to run through more of your shortcuts without affecting the rest of your desktop’s aesthetics. And even if you’re fence-crazy, getting to the bottom of a clean desktop is but a few mouse clicks away. Integrated transparency and color customization options ensure that your desktop will still look as pretty as can be regardless of how you’ve organized your icon farm.

Download it here! 

Best Desktop Makeover: Rainmeter

if you want to totally revamp the look of your desktop without sacrificing a huge amount of system resources to do so, then Rainmeter is your ticket to a fresh new user interface. Not only can you build awesome backgrounds and elegant, transparent menus and sidebars into your desktop, but you can easily modify the look and feel of any theme you want without resorting to massive amounts of text editing or complicated configuration scripts. A new RainBrowser tool gives you an easy means for previewing new themes you’ve downloaded in a manner that’s quite similar to Firefox’s theme browser. Use Rainmeter to get easy and elegant access to your email, RSS feeds, the weather, iTunes feeds, wireless statuses… truly, anything you want. As the developers themselves say, "Every inch of a skin is completely customizable." And you can always download even more third-party themes and tools for making your desktop even that much cooler (and useful!)

Download it here!

Best Application Pack: Ninite

The half-Web-app, half-installer-package Ninite has almost singlehandedly ruined the very awards roundup you’re reading. Why’s that? Because it’s the perfect way to download and install a mass of amazing freeware and open-source applications and utilities in one, automated shot. Words almost fail me in regards to how much time Ninite has saved me during a typical Windows wipe and re-installation. Here’s why: When you hit up the Ninite Web site, you’re presented with a huge list of excellent, free programs to check off. You’re creating a customized installer package that, once you’re done, saves to your system in the form of a single executable. Run that, and the Ninite-created installation package will install every program you selected onto your machine using said program’s default settings. What used to take hours of finding, downloading, and installing now takes the better part of minutes.

If Windows had a built-in package manager, that would be pretty great, wouldn’t it?

Download it here! 

Best Security Tool (Overall): Sandboxie

The name of the security game is virtualization. After all, the best way to keep your computer safe from harm is to isolate the elements that could perform unwanted activities or open the door to external threats. Sandboxie is an excellent application that allows you to extend the power of virtualization to any program on your PC. It’s a must-have for applications that you’re a little unsure about–just launch said questionable program into its own virtualized environment, and no havoc it could possibly create will ever affect the underlying contents of your normal operating system. Like a little cloud in the sky, the application is forever removed from the rest of your system.

Sandboxie is extremely easy to operate. Loading new applications into separate virtual environments doesn’t require you to spend hours of poring over support forums, as the application itself is fairly straightforward to use. And that’s just the combination you want to see in an award-winning freeware application: simple use, superb functionality. Sandboxie is the ultimate protection tool for your PC.

Download it here! 

Best Security Tool (Antivirus): Microsoft Security Essentials

Step one: It’s free. Step two: It’s one of the highest-rated free antivirus and anti-malware apps out there. Step three: It’s unobtrusive and easy-to-use. Bonus step: Microsoft makes it, and they’ve managed to make a product that’s durable, comprehensive, and simple.

It’s funny how there was all this apprehension and skepticism about a Microsoft-based security program before its grand Security Essentials tool was released. And yet, here we are months after the fact, and MSE has catapulted itself to the top of the freeware list for its stellar virus and malware detection abilities. Who would have thought? Crazier still, AV-Comparatives.org just recently named MSE as its best-performing, freeware, anti-malware application of the whole bunch.

It’s almost too much to type, but there you have it. Microsoft Security Essentials is the freeware program to pick up if you’re at-all concerned about the general security and welfare of your system. MSE features real-time protection elements, daily updates for virus and spyware definitions, and easy scheduling for fuller scans… and that’s about it. The program isn’t laden with a ton of options but, in this case, maybe that’s a good thing considering just how well it performs with what little it needs you to input.

Download it here! 

Best Web Browser: Google Chrome

You made it this far, so I’ll unleash the biggie: Chrome has done a great job of picking up the pace with its development this year. The browser is fast–faster than Firefox when rendering multiple tabs and dealing with JavaScript apps. Chrome is also a more secure platform than Firefox, thanks to the browser’s built-in virtualization that splits each tab into an environment that’s kept isolated from the contents of your system as a whole. If a piece of malware or Web exploit affects Chrome, it’s not going to get past this iron wall to disturb your PC without some major help from a tangential attack.

The long-awaited launch of Chrome Extensions now puts Chrome on equal footing feature-wise with Mozilla Firefox. Although the browser still has some catching up to do to reach Firefox’s huge swath of available add-ons, it’s only a matter of time before cross-platform plugins become a matter of course for developers. And given that Google Chrome has in some way inspired the launch of Google’s mighty Chrome OS project–and will serve as Chrome OS’s flagship application–it’s hard to deny this browser an award for its bootstrapping, if nothing else.

Download it here! 

There are a lot of freeware apps I left off this list. There are a lot of freeware apps that I haven’t even begun to explore. And, for that matter, there are a lot of freeware apps that are simply lame. Keep tuning in to the Freeware Files as we head throughout 2010, and I’ll do my best to keep getting you all the interesting new apps and utilities that will turn your normal desktop into a tricked-out super-rig. For great justice, of course. Thanks for reading in 2009!

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

It’s been exactly a month since we last visited the topic of Google Chrome. With both Windows and OSX beta versions of the browser now supporting add-ons, and with nearly 1,500 possible extensions flooding the Chrome Extensions "marketplace" since December 8, 2009, it’s about time to take another look at the overflowing mass of Chrome add-ons. Why? To build the perfect browser, of course. Allow me a moment to monologue:

I’ve been a Mozilla Firefox user for a long, long time. Simply put, I love extensions. Being able to build new elements into my browsing experience, from Cloud-based bookmark synchronization to Sudoku puzzles, has been one of the more awesome elements of using this piece of software. If only it was that easy to enhance or extend the usefulness of any program one installed!

I’ve been hesitant to switch to Chrome for this very reason–without add-on support, I’m missing out on 50- to 75-percent of the awesomeness I’ve build into my admittedly slower and more memory-hogging browser, Firefox. But that’s an argument that’s slowly dying away. A number of Firefox’s best add-ons have made the conversion over to Google Chrome, and that’s exactly what I’ll be exploring in this Freeware Files roundup.

These extensions are the crème de la crème. The best. The add-ons you should rush to pack into any new installation of Google Chrome, period. But that’s not all–I’m also going to take a look at some apps that interact with Google Chrome or, in some cases, replace Google Chrome entirely… you’ll see what I mean when it comes to interesting alternatives!

Apps

Chrome Privacy Protector

When Google Chrome installs on your machine, it installs with a unique ID that, in theory, could make the browser traceable to you in some fashion. I’m not suggesting that Chrome has some huge security breach or that there exists a huge record of everybody’s installation / browsing / add-ons / whatever. However, the fact of the matter remains–there’s an identifying number tied to your installation. If you’re a privacy geek, that’s not cool. And if that’s not cool, then Chrome Privacy Protector is the app you’ll use to get rid of this variable.

Download it here!

Iron-Version or ChromePlus

These two browsers, variants of Google Chrome (technically, the open-source Chromium version of the browser), each offer a different set of customizations and built-in add-ons that might be just what you’re looking for if you find the standard version of Chrome to be a bit lacking.

Here’s the deal: Iron-Version focuses on building a more private browsing experience, in that it strips out a number of features that would be used to send Google information of any sort. No longer will your browser have a user ID associated with it, send any data to Google in any form, update itself from Google’s servers, or use any alternative error messages when your browsing experience goofs up.

ChromePlus, on the other hand, doesn’t concern itself with privacy as much–more usefulness. Although this Chrome variant still strips out parts of the whole "sending information to Google" routine, it also packs a lot of great functionality directly into the browser that you’d otherwise have to find via add-ons.

For example, this version of Chrome allows you to double-click in the area of any tab to close it–take that, tiny "x" button. You can quickly open up new tabs by dragging a link on a page to anywhere on that page, and you can also navigate back and forth through your Chrome browsing experience using built-in mouse gestures. Even better, you can load up the Internet Explorer rendering engine directly via Chrome for pages that don’t play well with Google’s browser.

Download Iron-Version here and ChromePlus here!

On page two: The Top 5 must-have Google Chrome Add-ons!

Add-ons

Google Mail Checker Plus

If you don’t use Gmail, I apologize in advance. However, this add-on is tremendously useful if you only use the Webmail version of the app, but still want to know as soon as new messages hit your inbox without having to keep a Gmail tab open all the time. Google Mail Checker Plus sticks a little icon next to your address bar and–unlike Google Mail Checker–gives you a host of configuration options, including the amount of time it should wait between checking for new mail and whether you want to always connect to Gmail via SSL, amongst other options.

Download it here!

Xmarks Bookmark Sync

If you haven’t heard about Xmarks Bookmark Sync, you’ve been living under a rock. Google Chrome can synchronize its bookmarks via your Google account–a great solution for keeping the list of your favorite sites up-to-date regardless of what machine you’re using Chrome on. However, if you use multiple browsers throughout your day, the built-in synchronization for Chrome will never catch the tabs in your other favorite apps. Xmarks can and will. This add-on does an excellent job of keeping a consistent database of your bookmarks regardless of the browser you’re surfing with.

Download it here!

LastPass

Read the description of Xmarks above. Now remove the part about Google Chrome synchronizing anything and replace all instances of the word "bookmarks" with "passwords." In short, LassPass is an awesome way to securely keep track of all your major passwords across one or many browsing apps. Instead of having to remember a ton of different passwords for all your sites, LastPass does this all for you. Once it recognizes that you’re on a site with a saved password, it’ll send an encrypted version of your login to the site automatically–a keylogger won’t work to steal your information as you won’t actually be typing in your credentials to access a site after the first time! Of course, there’s more to LastPass than just this feature, but it’s certainly one of the add-on’s bigger selling points.

Download it here!

Session Manager

If you’re like me, you keep a ton of tabs open for research, archiving, and "I’ll get to it later" excuses. And when your browser crashes or otherwise screws up, the built-in auto-restore might not work to speed–on Firefox, for example, an errant pop-up window can suddenly become the "last saved session" the browser remembers. If that happens, you can kiss the 40+ tabs you were saving goodbye. Session Manager allows you to save and restore browsing states as if it was nothing. This add-on is the perfect tool for preventing unexpected browser tab loss forevermore.

Download it here!

Adblock or Adthwart

You asked for ‘em and here they are! If Web advertising hacks you off–and I’m talking about obtrusive, in-your-face, or offensive Web advertising–then you’ll want to grab theAdblock or Adthwart add-ons to nuke these unpleasant additions to your favorite Web sites. I’m not actually sure which add-on I like better, to be honest. Your success with either will depend on your own personal preference. Both do a great job of using predefined lists to accelerate your blocking experience. However, in doing so, you might be stripping the monthly food budget of a lot of hardworking Web folk so, uh, tread… carefully?

Download Adblock here and Adthwart here!

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The “U” in USB stands for “Universal”, and no other I/O port does so much for so many computer users as USB. From providing a home for keyboards and mice to driving printers, scanners, all-in-one units, and providing access to terabytes of storage and the Internet, USB ports do it all. That also means that USB-related problems can cripple your PC, leaving it unable to access storage, input, and output devices.

Tracking down the causes of USB-related woes can be difficult, but in this article, we show you the common and uncommon causes for USB problems – and their solutions.

USB Troubleshooting 101

Recent operating systems include drivers for common USB devices, such as keyboards, mice, and storage devices. If one of these devices is not recognized when you plug it into a USB port, try another USB port on the computer itself (we’ll discuss troubleshooting ports built into hubs later), preferably a USB port built into the port cluster on the rear of a desktop PC.

If the device works in some USB ports, but not others, note the ports that are not working. This information will be used to help determine if the cause is the hardware setup at the BIOS level or at the Windows driver or Device Manager level.

If the device works on another PC, but not on yours, the problem lies with your PC. However, if the device doesn’t work on any PC, it’s time to replace the cable, or the device itself.

Even if you never have a USB device that doesn’t work at all, you might see one of the following messages when you plug a USB device into your computer or into an external hub:

“This device can perform faster”

To solve this problem, we need to see how USB ports are configured in the system BIOS – and find out what type of USB hub is in use.

“Hub power exceeded”

This problem, on the other hand, requires a trip to the Windows Device Manager.

Diagnosing USB Port Problems in BIOS Setup

BIOS setup is the place to check if you have any of the following USB problems:

- Your system doesn’t recognize a mainstream USB device, such as a printer, mouse, or storage device, in any USB port.

- You get a “This device can perform faster” error message when you plug a Hi-Speed USB (aka USB 2.0) device into any port on a recent computer.

- You can use a USB drive for storage, but you can’t boot from it, and you’ve verified the drive is a bootable device.

- You can use a USB keyboard in Windows, but not for accessing the BIOS at system startup.

To check BIOS settings, restart your computer and press the appropriate key to open the BIOS setup menu.

Tip: If you are unable to access the BIOS setup menu with a USB keyboard, plug in a PS/2 (6-pin DIN) keyboard (if your system has a PS/2 keyboard port). It’s worthwhile keeping an old PS/2 keyboard around for troubleshooting. Some USB keyboards can also be adapted to PS/2.

Checking for “Missing” USB Ports in BIOS Setup

Once you have the BIOS settings menu open, what’s next? Typically, you will find USB port settings in the Integrated Ports or Integrated Peripherals menu:

If the USB controller or host controller is disabled, no USB ports will be recognized by Windows, and consequently no USB devices will be recognized either.

What if some USB ports are usable, but others are not? Some systems enable you to specify the number of USB ports in BIOS setup.

To solve problems with “missing” USB ports, make sure the following settings are enabled:

USB controller

USB 2.0 controller (aka USB EHCI controller)

USB legacy support

Save changes, exit BIOS setup, and your system will restart, providing access to USB ports.

Tip: If you are unable to use a USB keyboard in BIOS setup, but it works after Windows boots, there’s a problem with USB keyboard or legacy support. Change the setting, or contact your system or motherboard vendor for a BIOS update.

Missing USB 2.0 Support

USB 2.0 support has been included in virtually all systems built in the last five years or so. However, it’s possible to configure a system so USB 2.0 support is disabled.

On most systems that include USB port options in the system BIOS, you can specify whether to run USB ports in 1.1 or 2.0 (Hi-Speed USB) modes. Depending upon the system, you might see separate entries for USB controller and USB 2.0 controller in BIOS setup, or BIOS setup might have a single entry for USB controller with the option to enable 1.1 support only or 1.1/2.0 support.

Make sure USB 2.0 support is enabled, save changes, exit BIOS setup, and your system will restart, providing USB 2.0 support.

Note: If you have an old system that was never updated to Windows XP SP1 or later, its USB 2.0 ports will run only in USB 1.1 mode, regardless of the BIOS setting, until SP1 or later is installed (SP1 added USB 2.0 support). So, if you’re reinstalling Windows XP original edition, make sure you install SP3 immediately, if not sooner (see our article on using the free nLite utility to do this).

Diagnosing USB Power Management Problems

Some systems cannot wake up a system from S3 (deep sleep) power management mode unless this option is enabled in the system BIOS. If you are unable to wake up your system by tapping on a USB keyboard or moving the mouse, make sure this option is enabled in the system BIOS.

Diagnosing USB Problems with Device Manager

If you’re still having problems with some USB ports after making sure that the BIOS settings are correct, the next stop for Windows users is Device Manager.

In Device Manager, USB 2.0 controllers are listed as Enhanced, while USB 1.1 are listed as OpenHCD. Note that a single USB 2.0 controller can manage all USB ports built into the motherboard, while each root hub requires its own OpenHCD controller.

Note: If your system does not have USB 2.0 support enabled in the BIOS, an Enhanced controller entry will not appear in Device Manager.

Root Hubs and Generic Hubs

You won’t find USB ports listed by that name in Device Manager. Instead, Device Manager lists USB ports by host device:

- Root hub

- Generic hub

Root hubs host USB ports connected to the computer’s motherboard or add-on USB host adapter card. A root hub typically hosts two USB ports in 1.1 mode, and the root hub on a system with USB 2.0 support hosts all of the USB ports built into the system. To determine the number of ports a root hub hosts, open a root hub’s properties sheet in Device Manager and click the Power tab.

If a root hub is disabled in Device Manager, devices connected to the hub cannot be used and are no longer displayed in Device Manager.

To enable a disabled root hub, right-click the hub and select Enable from the right-click menu. Follow any prompts displayed to complete the process.

Generic hubs are external devices that host USB ports. A generic hub plugs into a USB port, enabling the port to service multiple devices. By daisy-chaining generic hubs to a root hub, a single USB port can support up to 127 devices.

Generic hubs are available in a variety of forms, from standalone devices that include four or more USB ports to keyboards and monitors that include USB ports. Because some generic hubs are self-powered, and some are bus-powered, generic hubs can cause power problems for some USB devices.

Hubs and USB Power Problems

One of the most poorly understood causes of USB problems is the difference between self-powered and bus-powered hubs. Self-powered hubs include root hubs (which draw current from the computer’s power supply) and generic hubs that are connected to AC power. These hubs provide 500mA of current to each USB port.

Generic hubs that do not have an AC power source are bus-powered, and provide only 100mA of current to each USB port.

Bus-powered hubs are suitable hosts for USB devices that use little power, such as keyboards, most mice, printers, and external hard disks that use AC power. However, device power requirements vary widely, and other types of popular devices, such as portable hard disks, flash memory drives and card readers, and game controllers with force feedback often cannot operate when plugged into a bus-powered hub.

To determine the power requirements for any USB device, open the Power tab for the root or generic hub the device is plugged into.

The devices shown in this example must be plugged into a self-powered USB hub, as they require more than 100mA of current.

However, the devices shown in this example can be plugged into either a bus-powered or self-powered hub, as they require less than 100mA of current.

Dangers of Exceeding Available Hub Power

If you plug a device that requires more power than the hub can provide, what happens?

If you plug a device that requires more than 100mA of current into a bus-powered hub, you will see a “Hub Power Exceeded” message.

Click the message to see a listing of other ports that you can use.

While the listing isn’t specific, keep in mind that any built-in USB port is connected to a root hub, and will therefore provide 500mA of power – enough for almost all devices.

What happens if you plug a device that requires more than 100mA of power into a self-powered hub that becomes disconnected from its AC power supply? At that point, the hub becomes a bus-powered hub, the voltage per port drops to 100mA, and, if you have a flash drive plugged into the port, you might destroy it.

To avoid disaster, consider this advice:

-    Think twice before using a bus-powered hub.

-    If you use a bus-powered hub, make sure you know the current requirements for all USB devices you plan to use with the hub. Any device that requires more than 100mA of current will not work with a bus-powered hub.

-    If you’re worried about forgetting to check current requirements before you plug in a new device, use a self-powered hub.

-    If you already have a bus-powered hub and are frustrated because some devices will not work with it, replace it or connect the hub to a compatible AC adapter.

Hubs and USB Performance Problems

Most, but not all, USB generic hubs sold today support USB 2.0 speeds – but there are innumerable USB 1.1-only hubs still in use. If you plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 1.1 hub, you will see the same “This device can perform faster” error message you would see if you had plugged the device into a USB 1.1 port on the computer.

How can you tell how fast a USB hub will run? There are two methods I use:

-    Check for markings on the hub

-    Check the properties sheet for the hub

Most USB 2.0 hubs are labeled as such. However, an unlabeled hub might also support USB 2.0 speeds.

To determine the speeds supported by a USB hub, follow this procedure:

1. Plug a USB 2.0 device, such as a storage device or wireless adapter, into one of the ports on the hub.

2. Open Device Manager.

3. Expand the Universal Serial Bus Controllers category.

4. Open the properties sheet for the hub.

5. Open the Power tab and look for the device you connected in Step 1.

6. Repeat steps 4-5 until you find the correct hub.

7. Open the Advanced tab and note the hub’s performance level. A hub that supports USB 2.0 speeds will run at high-speed. A hub that supports only USB 1.1 speeds will run at full-speed.

Note that some desktops with front-mounted USB ports run these ports in USB 1.1 mode only.

USB Hub and Device Power Management Problems and Solutions

By default, USB root and generic hubs are configured to enable the PC to turn off the device automatically to save power. However, USB devices are configured by default to enable the device to wake up the system.

If your system cannot be awakened from standby, check these settings, as well as the power management settings in the system BIOS.

Cables and USB Device Compatibility

USB cables not made for high-power (over 100mA) devices can cause those devices to fail. Typically, thicker cables (such as the white cable shown below) use 28AWG cable, which is capable of carrying full power to any USB device, while thinner cables (such as the gray one shown below) use thinner cable of unspecified gauge. Smaller-gauge cable prevents full power transmission to the device.

While using an underperforming USB cable won’t cause the device to be damaged, it can be frustrating to need an extension or other cable doesn’t work with some devices.

The second factor is the rise of alternative device cable connections. At one time, virtually all USB devices, with the exception of digital cameras, used the standard B cable connector. With most current devices, except for printers, the standard B connector has been replaced by the five-pin mini-B cable. And, some devices use four-pin mini-B cables or Mini-A cables. To be prepared for any eventuality, consider keeping a universal USB 2.0 cable handy (like the one in the photo below).

The third factor is the need to exceed 500mA at startup with some portable USB hard disk drives. Some onboard USB ports are capable of proving more current to spin up these drives, while others are not. Keep in mind that self-powered generic hubs typically cannot provide additional power for these drives.

If you cannot use a single USB cable to provide sufficient power with some systems, use a double-headed cable. One connector provides power and data services from a single USB port, while the other provides additional power from a second USB port. Some portable hard disk vendors supply this type of cable, while others make it an extra-cost option.

USB Driver Problems and Solutions

Because recent versions of Windows recognize standard USB devices such as mice, keyboards, and storage devices without the need to install drivers, it’s easy to forget that a plug-and-play installation is possible only when the computer has the appropriate driver already installed.

If you plug a USB device into a computer that does not already have the appropriate drivers installed, you will be prompted to run the Found New Hardware Wizard.

Continue only if the installation instructions for the device recommend doing so. In most cases, however, you need to run the device installation program provided on the device’s driver CD before Windows can install the device. In such cases, click Cancel, disconnect the device, and install the driver for the device first.

Once the device is installed, you might be able to update the drivers with the device’s Driver tab on the properties sheet in Device Manager.

Conclusion

Want to avoid having USB problems at all? Here are some best practices that you should follow to get your ports in order.

-    Make sure your computer is configured to run USB ports in USB 2.0 mode

-    Upgrade systems running original Windows XP to SP1 or greater

-    Avoid using bus-powered USB hubs with most bus-powered peripherals other than mice, keyboards, and some types of game controllers

-    Avoid using USB 1.1-compatible hubs with USB 2.0 devices such as storage, printer, scanner, and multifunction devices

-    Use the Device Manager properties sheets for USB ports and devices to solve problems

-    Make sure you install driver software for new USB devices before you connect them to your system

-    Replace USB cables not designed for high-powered devices with thicker USB 2.0-compliant cables

-    Check power management settings in BIOS and Device Manager for USB ports and devices

Mark Edward Soper is the co-author of the new book CompTIA A+ 220-701 220-702 Cert Guide, with Scott Mueller and David L. Prowse (Pearson).

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Every week, we’re going to spotlight a popular program or service and show you how to grab hold of the reigns and get the most out of what you’re doing. We already kicked off the series with guides to tweaking Outlook and Firefox, and today we turn our attention to BitTorrent.

BitTorrent, as you’re probably already aware, is a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing protocol ideal for transferring large files (and if you didn’t know that, don’t worry, we also include some lightweight tips to get you started). In a nutshell, the way it works is when you’re downloading a massive file — like a Linux distribution, for example –bits and pieces of the file will be uploaded at the same time. Typically BitTorrent allows for a more efficient and faster transfer method than traditional, Direct Connect P2P software.

To get started, you need a desktop client. We recommend using uTorrent, or uT for short. We prefer uTorrent based on its combination of advanced features, performance, and small footprint — in other words, it has all the makings of a power user program.

On the following pages, we’ll not only show you how to get the most out of uTorrent, but out of BitTorrent in general. We’ll cover both basic and advanced tips, and then toss in some of our favorite third-party add-ons for good measure. Whether you’re new to BitTorrent or a seasoned vet, there’s something in this guide for you.

Know the Lingo

Before diving head first into the world of BitTorrent, take some time to familiarize yourself with the protocol’s language. For example, do you know the difference between a tracker and a leecher? Why are leechers frowned upon, and how can you avoid becoming one? These are just some of the terms you’ll need to know as you traverse the BitTorrent universe. Here’s your handy cheat sheet:

Image Credit: lili.org

Torrent: Lazy linguists sometimes substitute Torrent in place of BitTorrent, but it actually has a definition all its own. A torrent is a small metadata file usually just a few kilobytes in size. It contains information about the file(s) you’re trying to download, such as file names, file sizes, where to download, and so forth. The torrent file (.torrent) is not the actual data you’re trying to retrieve.

Peer: Any other computer on the Internet which is both downloading and uploading portions of a file at the same time.

Leech(er): There are two meanings for this one. The most common definition of a leech is someone who disconnects and stops sharing a file as soon as they’ve obtained a complete copy. The fewer people there are sharing a file, the longer it takes to download, and for this reason, leeching is highly discouraged.

Peers who haven’t finished downloading a file are also referred to as leechers, but not necessarily in a derogatory way.

Seed(er): It’s good etiquette to continue sharing a file even after you’ve finished downloading the entire torrent, if only for a short while. This practice is known as seeding.

Reseed: When no more seeds exist for a particular file, then anyone who was actively trying to download it will be unable to finish. A reseeder is someone who has the completed torrent, reconnects to the swarm, and saves the day.

Swarm: Any group of users connected to each other for downloading and/or sharing a particular file.This includes peers, seeds, and leeches.

Tracker: A central server which stores the torrents, coordinates the action of all the seeders, peers, and leechers, and manages the connections. The Pirate Bay (TPB) is the largest tracker on the Internet and often the center of media attention due to ongoing legal issues. Not all trackers are public; there are several private trackers which require a membership.

Share Rating / Ratio: This refers to the ratio of uploaded data divided by downloaded data and is applicable only for the current session. A share rating of 1.0 means you’ve uploaded the same amount of data as you’ve downloaded.

Where to Find Torrents

Let’s address the 900lb gorilla right off the bat. Not everyone uses BitTorrent for, ahem, legitimate reasons, and for them, there are plenty of less scrupulous tracking sites littered all over the Web. You know the ones, because they’re usually tangled in high-profile legal proceedings. Let us be clear: We don’t condone software piracy, even if we don’t’ always agree with the DRM measures paying customers have to put up with.

So where you can find legal torrents? As it turns out, there are a handful of resources serving up free and unrestricted content. These include:

•    www.legaltorrents.com – specializes in “high quality open-licensed (Creative Commons) digital media and art.”  Several membership tiers are available, including one that’s free and comes with unlimited access to all content and custom feeds by email and RSS.

•    www.legittorrents.info – a no fuss tracking site serving up a variety of free and legal torrents ranging from Podcasts to Release Candidate software.

•    http://linuxtracker.org – just like it sounds, this is the go-to tracker for all things Linux.

•    www.publicdomaintorrents.com – deals entirely with films that are no longer copyrighted, many of which come optimized for mobile devices.

•    http://bt.etree.org – an awesome resource for music lovers, bt.etree includes a ton of live concert recordings from trade friendly artists.

In addition to dedicated torrent sites, many software publishers — especially in the Linux community – include torrents in their downloads section. In many cases, you’ll find it’s much faster to download a Linux distro or mammoth game demo by downloading via BitTorrent instead of HTTP.

Manage Torrents Remotely

One way to access uTorrent from a remote location is to install a desktop login client like LogMeIn, which gives you access to your PC through a Web interface. But if you’re only interested in controlling uTorrent while away from home and not your desktop, there’s a way you can do that. After installing and configuring uTorrent’s WebUI, you’ll have access to all of your BT downloads along with the ability to add or remove torrents. Here’s how to set it up.

Download the latest version of WebUI from here (see here if the download link is broken). Bear in mind that this is a beta release, meaning instability could rear its ugly head, although we never ran into any problems. Rename the downloaded file to webui.zip.

We need to place the webui.zip file in the same location as uTorrent’s settings.dat file. In Windows 7, navigate to C:Users [USERNAME]AppDataRoaminguTorrent. In earlier versions of Windows, the correct path should be C:Documents and Settings[USERNAME]Application DatauTorrent. If you can’t find it, or the directory doesn’t exist, perform a search for settings.dat.

If you’re running a portable version of uTorrent (and we’ll show you how do that later), you’ll find the settings.dat file in the uTorrent.exe folder.

The next step is to enable WebUI in the uTorrent client. Go to Options>Preferences and you should now see a WebUI entry. Click on it, then put a check in the Enable WebUI checkbox. Enter in a username and password and check Enable Guest account with username. Hit Apply, but don’t exit out just yet.

If you don’t remember the port number you used to configure port forwarding earlier, go back into the Connection tab and make note of it once again. We’re going to need this in the next step.

Let’s test out if you followed the steps correctly. Open up your browser and type http://localhost:PORT/gui/ and substitute the port number from above where it says PORT. Once you enter in your username and password, you should be in the WebU’s interface.

Of course, the whole point of this is to manage your BT downloads from a remote location and not from the same PC you installed uTorrent on. You’ll need to know your IP address, which you can retrieve from sites like WhatIsMyIP.com and myIPaddress.com. Use your IP address to login remotely, substituting it in place of localhost. So for example if your IP address is 12.34.56.789 and the port you recorded earlier was 12121, you would type in http://12.34.56.789:12121/gui/.

Note that this isn’t likely to work by trying to access your client PC from within your home network. Instead, you’ll need the IP address assigned by your router. For example, http:192.168.1.133:12121/gui/. You can find your PC’s internal IP by opening up the Command Prompt (Start>Run>CMD) and typing ipconfig. Make note of the IPv4 Address.

Make Your Own Torrents

Wondering how you’re going to send that HD video you took of your vacation to family and friends? Or what about all those pictures you snapped at the LAN party last week? For these and other situations where you’re dealing with large files, or a large collection of files, BitTorrent can be the best way to distribute them to others, provided you’re dealing with an at least a semi computer-savvy bunch (in other words, you may want to just burn and send Aunt Mabel and Uncle Fred a DVD).

Creating a torrent isn’t at all complicated and is probably much easier than you think. If you’re using uTorrent — and we recommend you do — go to File>Create new Torrent, or mash CTRL+N.

In the pop-up window that appears, click the Add File button if you’re dealing with a single file, or Add Directory if you have a folder full of files you want to share. Next you need to pick out an active tracker. A website called the Beehive maintains a list of active trackers that have been checked every 24 hours, and you can reference that list here. Once you have a tracker picked out, copy and past the URL into the Trackers box. Next, click the Start seeding checkbox, and press the “Create and save as…” button.

Before you can share your torrent with anyone, you first need to upload it to whatever torrent tracking site you picked out earlier. Most tracking sites require that you register with them before you’re allowed to upload. Once you’ve done that, navigate to the site’s upload section and add your torrent.

Now all that’s left is to share your torrent with your friends and family. You can use the link provided by the tracking site, or just email the ultra-small torrent file, which should only be between 10KB to 20KB. Don’t forget to seed!

Hire Others to do Your Heavy Lifting

BT downloads put a heavy strain on your Internet connection and can saturate both your upstream and downstream bandwidth. But there’s an alternative to using BitTorrent the traditionally way.

There are several sites wiling do the dirty work for you and download the torrent data right to their servers, at which point you can access it just like any other HTTP download. Furk.net is one such example and offers free access to several already-hosted torrents. For a fee, Furk.net will let you upload torrent, download multiple files at the same time, uncap your download speed, and some other perks. If a BitTorrent client isn’t an option, this is the next best thing.

Prioritize BitTorrent Traffic

With BitTorrent downloads and uploads barreling through your Internet connection at full bore, you may find that your speedy broadband connection has been saturated, reminding you of what it was like surfing the Web on a 56K modem. Ideally, BT traffic would run blazing fast when nothing else is going on, but yield to everything else. That’s where your router’s QoS (Quality of Service) settings come in.

Image Credit: techimo.com

Open up your browser and type 192.168.1.1 in the address bar. Enter your username and password when prompted (consult your router’s manual if you don’t know what this is). Once inside your router’s GUI, click on Applications & Gaming>QOS. Click the Enable radio button , and then scroll down to the first blank box titled Application Name. Type uTorrent, Azureus, or whatever BT client you’re running. Set the Priority to Low or Lowest and enter in the port number as configured in your BT client. HIt save and exit.

Some routers offer more fine grain QoS control than others, and certain third party firmware — like Tomato — offers a plethora of tweaking options. Getting into the intricacies of QoS settings goes beyond the scope of this guide, but if the options are there to play with, try experimenting with different settings.

Kickstart Downloads that Stall at 99 Percent Finished

Remember that scene in Happy Gilmore where Adam Sandler yells at his golf ball, “Why don’ you just go home? That’s your home! Are you too good for your home?,” right after narrowly missing a putt? That’s the same frustration you’ll feel after investing an afternoon to downloading a mega-sized torrent, only to have it hang at 99 percent complete. So close, and so maddening!

Image Credit: D-Link

There are a few reasons why this might happen. If you own a router with a Game Mode, it could be scrambling the packets so that your torrent fails the hash check. It’s a bit more technical than that, and it’s pretty rare for this to happen, but it does occur. Try disabling your router’s Game Mode and see if the download is able to finish.

The person who created the torrent may have inadvertently included a hidden system file — thumbs.db, for example –which can prevent your download from reaching 100 percent. In other cases, the stubborn file could be corrupt, and it may be something you can do without, such as a readme.txt file. To see which file is causing all the commotion, click on the Files tab on bottom portion of uTorrent. Right-click the problematic file and select Don’t Download.

Some hard-to-finish downloads are simply the result of not enough seeds or peers. In this case, your only options are to wait in hopes that a seeder will sign on, or find a more popular torrent and start over. Your torrent could also be corrupt, in which case you’ll also need to find an alternative source.

Is that uTorrent in Your Pocket, or Are You…Oh, it is uTorrent!

There’s an easy way to add uTorrent to your repertoire of portable apps so you can lug the client around on your USB key or any number of portable devices (like your iPod). The first thing you need to do is download the latest client (here) and copy it to your USB thumb drive or other storage device.

Next, create a new notepad file and save it as settings.dat. If you’re unable to change the file extension from .txt to .dat, open up My Computer, press ALT+T, and select Folder Options. Click the View tab and uncheck ‘Hide empty drives in the Computer folder.’ Copy the settings.dat file over to the same directory on your USB drive as uTorrent and you’re good to go!

Open Up Access Through Your Router and Firewall

Don’t despair if you can’t seem to connect to any seeders or peers, or if your downloads always trudge along at a snail’s pace even when there are a ton of seeders. You probably just need to configure port forwarding for your uTorrent client, or whatever BitTorrent client you’re using.

In a nutshell, port forwarding is a way for your router to forward IP addresses from an external location — in this case, seeders and peers — to an internal address, which is your PC. To find out which port uTorrent is trying to use, click on Options>Preferences>Connection. Make sure that both the ‘Enable UPnP port mapping’ and ‘Enable NAT-PMP port mapping’ checkboxes are marked. While you’re in there, you can also check ‘Add Windows firewall exception,’ or we can do this manually later. Take note of the number next to the ‘Random Port’ button.

Now that you know the port number, it’s time to configure your router. Access your router’s administrative controls by firing up your Web browser and typing 192.167.1.1 into the address bar and hit enter.You’ll be prompted for your username and password, which will vary depending on your router make and model. Try typing admin in both fields, or leaving the password field blank. If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to consult your router’s manual or online support site for specific instructions.

You should now be in your router’s control panel. We’re using the customized Tomato firmware for our Linksys router, so yours will probably look different than our screen grab above. If you’re using a Linksys router, click on Applications & Gaming>Port Range Forward (once again, if you’re using a different router, consult your documentation on how to find the port forwarding section). Choose a blank row and type uTorrent in the Application field. Type the port number number you recorded earlier in both the Start and End fields. Change the protocol to Both (TCP and UDP), and be sure to check the Enable box. Save and exit.

Slow or non-existent connections could also mean your firewall is blocking access. To manually create an exception for uTorrent, click on the Start menu and type in Firewall. Click on Action and select New Rule, which will bring up the New Rule Wizard. Select Program as the Rule Type and hit Next, then click the Browse button to find and enter the path to your uTorrent client (C:Program Files (x86)uTorrent uTorrent.exe by default). Keep the default settings as you click through the Wizard.

Set Bandwidth Limits and Maintain a Reasonable Ratio

Left unchecked, uTorrent and every other BitTorrent client will consume all the bandwidth it can and bog down your Internet connection in the process. That’s okay if you’re heading off to bed, but during the day, you’ll feel as though you traveled back in time to the days of dial-up.To prevent this happening, we need to set bandwidth limits.

Select Preferences from the Options menu, or press CTRL+P, and then click on Bandwidth. Everything is laid out pretty logically, so it’s just a matter of filling in the blanks. Uploads and downloads are measured in kilobytes per second (kB/s), and if you want to leave these at unlimited, choose 0. Otherwise, set limits that work for your Internet connection.

To help take into account overhead, we recommend measuring your real-world broadband speed at SpeedTest.net. Use your SpeedTest results to help determine how much bandwidth you want to fork over to BitTorrent.

You may be tempted to allocate very little upload bandwidth to BitTorrent, but this isn’t necessarily a good idea. Remember how your mother always told you it’s better to give than it is to receive? The same concept applies to BitTorrent, at least in part. The whole concept of BitTorrent is built around the idea that everyone shares and you should strive to upload as much as you download.

Rather than constantly keep an eye on your share ratio, you can configure uTorrent to automatically adjust the amount of bandwidth to allocate to a file once a set ratio has been met. To do this, go back into Preferences and click on Queuing. In the Seed While section, set whatever ratio you’re comfortable with. Check the ‘Limit the upload rate to’ box and choose 0 if you want to stop seeding once you’ve reached your goal.

Use RSS Feeds with BitTorrent

Several BT clients now come with integrated RSS support. That’s great news, because BitTorrent and RSS makes keeping up with your favorite TV shows or Podcasts super easy. Once again, we’re going to assume you’re using uTorrent.

First, you need to figure out which RSS feed(s) you want to subscribe to. There are a lot of resources out there, including ezRSS.it and LegalTorrents.com. Once you’ve picked out a (legal) feed, open up uTorrent and right-click the RSS icon next to All Feeds in the left-hand column. Select ‘Add RSS Feed…’ and enter in the feed’s URL. Under Subscription, you can choose whether or not to automatically download all items published in the feed. We’re going to leave this unchecked.

Depending on the feed you subscribed to, you may have signed up to much more than you bargained for. We’re not interested in all of these, and luckily, there’s a way to fix this and cut back the cruft. Right-click an episode you are interested in watching and select Add to Favorites.

Click on Options>RSS Downloader, or press CTRL+R. Under the Favorites tab, click on your RSS feed. This brings up the RSS Downloader window. Click on the RSS feed under the Favorites tab. In the Quality drop-down menu, select whichever formats you’re interested in, keeping in mind that you can choose more than one. Click the Smart ep. filter checkbox to make sure you don’t end up downloading duplicate copies, and if applicable, check the Episode Number box to define which seasons and episodes you’re interested in.

Any new episodes in your feed should now start downloading automatically.

Circumvent ISP Throttling with SSH

Do you suspect your ISP is putting the brakes on Bittorrent traffic? You can avoid this practice by making an end-run around your ISP and connecting with a Secure Shell (SSH) connection. Be warned that this most likely isn’t a permanent solution, which we’ll get to in a just a moment.

You’re going to need an SSH account to start things off, and that’s going to be the trickiest part. There are a lot of free shell providers out there, but most of them place strict restrictions on what you can do with them. You’re going to have to do some digging to find one that won’t frown on tunneling BitTorrent traffic, they may require a donation, and you could end up waiting several days for your account to be approved. You can start your search here.

Once you have an SSH account, download and install Putty, and then run the app. Make sure the SSH radio button is selected. Type in your SSH account information (Host name or IP addy and port).

Next, expand the Connection tree and select SSH>Tunnels. Enter in any available port number. Mash the Open button and enter in the username and password given to your by your SSH provider.

Open up uTorrent and navigate to Options>Preferences>Connection. Under Proxy Server, select Socks4 from the pull-down menu. Type localhost in the Proxy field and enter in your port number from above. Click Apply and then restart uTorrent.

Transfer Torrents to another Location

Maybe you’re running out of space on your hard drive, or perhaps you’re wanting to do some spring cleaning and organize your data. Whatever the reason might be, transferring your torrents from one spot to another is pretty quick and painless, once you know how.

Stop any downloads that are in progress by right-clicking and selecting Stop, or hitting the big red Stop button in uTorrent’s menu bar. Next, right-click the torrent(s) and select Advanced>Set Download Location… Navigate to the new download spot and click Save, but don’t change the file name.

See how easy that was? All that’s left is to highlight the torrent(s) and mash the green Play button. uTorrent will check the files to see how much is left to be downloaded, so just be patient whie it does its thing.

Transfer Torrents to uTorrent

So you decided to take our advice and ditch your current BT client for uTorrent. The only problem is, you’ve already invested a ton of time into downloading a bunch of large Linux distros, and the last thing you want to do is start from scratch. You’re in luck, because you can have your cake and eat it too (what else would you do with it?).

In this example, we’re going to show you how to migrate one or more partial BT downloads from Vuze (formerly Azureus) to uTorrent. The first thing you need to do is figure out where Vuze is storing the downloaded data. By default, this will be C:UsersUSERNAMEDocuments Azureus Downloads. If that directory doesn’t exist, go to Tools>Options>Files to find out where Vuze is hiding your data.

Stop any downloads that are currently in progress and close out Vuze. Open up uTorrent and select Options>Preferences>Directories and follow these steps:

1. Check the ‘Put new downloads in’ checkbox and create or select a folder to store downloads in progress (we created a directed called ‘Downloads’ on our Desktop).
2. Check the ‘Move completed downloads to’ checkbox and create or select a folder to store your finished downloads (we created a folder called ‘Completed’ inside the Downloads folder).
3. Check the ‘Automatically load .torrents from’ checkbox and create or select a folder to store your torrent files (we created a folder called ‘Autoload’ on our Desktop).
4. Click Apply and close out uTorrent.

Next, navigate to C:UsersUSERNAMEDocumentsAzureus Downloads or wherever it is Vuze was storing your partial downloads. Move (don’t copy) the data to the directory you specified in Step 1 above. Note that some clients, including Vuze, will sometimes add an extension to unfinished downloads. If that’s the case, you’ll need to remove it or else it could trip up uTorrent.

If you still have the original .torrent file that was used to initiate the download, move it (don’t copy) to the Autoload folder you created in Step 3 above. If you don’t have it, you’ll need tor re- download the original .torrent and put it in the Autoload folder. Once the .torrent file is in place, fire up uTorrent, and after a few seconds, your download(s) will initialize and pick up where they left off in Vuze.

Setup an Automated Throttling Schedule

We’re not too keen on having our ISP choke our BitTorrent bandwidth, but that doesn’t mean we’re entirely opposed to throttling. We just want it to occur on our own terms, not someone else’s. Fortunately for us, uTorrent’s built-in Scheduler makes this super easy. With the Scheduler, we can configure uTorrent to automatically kick on at night when we’re fast asleep. That way, we’ll have all the bandwidth we need during the day, and still wake up to a finished download in the morning.

To set up a schedule, go to Options>Preferences>Scheduler. Click the ‘Enable Scheduler’ checkbox, which will light up the grid in green. There’s a handy legend right below the grid that tells you what the colors mean, but to reiterate, dark green boxes tell uTorrent to download and upload at full speed, light green boxes tell uTorrent to only use a set amount of bandwidth (which you can configure), the white box is used to indicate when you want uTorrent to remain idle, and the light gray box tells uTorrent to seed (upload) only.

Because we work during the day and do a ton of Web surfing to research awesome stories and features for our homepage, we want to uTorrent to go into a state of comatose during working hours. We also like to unwind and frag our friends after a full day of work, and that can sometimes last until late at night. So to play it safe, we’re giving uTorrent the green light (literally) to do its thing from 1AM until 8AM, but not during any other hours.

As you highlight a square, it will tell you what 1-hour time slot it is for. To save time, you can click and drag multiple squares rather than clicking each one individually. Once you’re finished, you should have something that resembles the above.

Add One-Click BitTorrent Downloads to Firefox’s Reportoire

Don’t feel like fussing with BitTorrent clients every time you want to download a BT file? You don’t have to! One of the coolest extensions for Firefox is FireTorrent.

With FireTorrent installed, just click on a .torrent file and Firefox will download the related data files just like a normal download and even show you the progress in the Download Manger. And if you’d rather let a third-party handle a particular .torrent, just right-click and select Save Link As.

FireTorrent isn’t nearly as robust as most third-party BT clients, but you are afforded some basic options, including which port to use, download and upload bandwidth allocation, the ability to encrypt BT connections, and a few other light-weight customizations. It’s barebones, but it gets the job done!

Update uTorrent Remotely with a Single Click

The BitTorrent WebUI add-on for Firefox combines the one-click sex appeal of FireTorrent with the WebUI capabilities we set up earlier. Once configured, all you need to do is click on a torrent and this add-on will update your BT client at a remote location, provided you’re using either uTorrent or Vuze.

Follow our instructions earlier on how to setup uTorrent with WebUI. Next, install the BitTorrent WebUI add-on available here and configure it with the same settings you used to setup uTorrent’s WebUI.

Now all you need to do is find some torrents and start clicking!

Block Malicious IPs

Tinfoil hats tend to chaffe our head and freak out our co-workers, which are pretty big trade-offs for a little bit of peace of mind. But there’s a better way to protect our privacy from prying IPs. PeerGuardian 2 is an IP blocker for Windows that integrates support for mulitple lists, automatic updates, and blocks a bunch of protocols. It keeps a constantly updated list of blacklisted IPs known to track your P2P activity.

If you’re a real conspiracy theorist, PG 2 gives you plenty of options to keep the establishment from building a database about your online activity. Checking the P2P box should be enough for most users, but if you’re convinced you’re the center of the BT universe, go ahead and mash your mouse button on every checkbox.

You can also configure an update schedule for PG 2 to make sure you’re always one step ahead of the man. And for more than you ever wanted to know about this program, reference the extensive Wiki here.

Supercharge Windows XP for Faster Uploads

If you decided to stick with XP for a little while longer, you’re not just missing out on what Windows 7 has to offer, but you could be hamstringing your download speeds. That’s because Windows XP limits the number of TCP connections to no more than 10, which could prevent you from hooking up with a larger number of peers. So should you upgrade to Windows 7? Yes, but not because of the TCP limit.

A German programmer developed a nifty little patch that removes the 10 TCP limitation so you can set it at whatever number you want. Download the patch here, then fire up uTorrent and navigate to Options>Preferences>Advanced and look for net.max_halfopen.

Trick Out uTorrent with Skins

For all of its functionality, uTorrent isn’t much to look. And maybe that’s right up your alley, but if not, there’s a wealth of skins to experiment with until you find one that look that’s just right. And you can skin different parts of uTorrent individually, inculding toolbars, status icons, tab icons, and program icons.

Download your skin(s) from here and place them in C:Users[USERNAME]AppDataRoaminguTorrent. Restart uTorrent and enjoy your new look!

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