January 2011 archive

Visually Track Hard Drive Space with WinDirStat

WinDirStat - Folder Summary Screen (Completed)

Here’s a quick tip for this evening. If there is one thing that Windows has lacked all of these years it is a way to quickly assess from a macro level which folders are taking up the most space without having to take a “divide and conquer” approach by right clicking each folder, going to …

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Panasonic Viera TH-P50VT20A Plasma 3DTV Review

If you have been following the blog you will know that I won a Panasonic Viera TH-P50VT20A plasma television with 3D capability and took receipt of it early in December. As promised, I have put together a review after having a suitable review period to give the television a thorough use as well as cater …

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Boydo’s Tech Talk – The First Year

Perhaps hard to believe but the blog has been up and running for a full year and many things have happened over the course of the last twelve months. At times, it has been a bit of a challenge to do a daily entry particularly with the demands of full time work as well as …

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Emulating a Classic Controller on a Touchscreen – Why Bother?

No doubt the avid gamers amongst us have been all over the news of the Sony NGP (Next Generation Portable) AKA PlayStation Portable 2 plus the announcement that Android phones and tablets will be able to download PlayStation games from the PlayStation Store and play them using an emulator. Sony is planning to put some …

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Don’t Need It? Don’t Install It!

These days with gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of hard drive space inside our computers it can be all too easy to give in and install anything and everything without much regard for the impact upon the performance of your system. Furthermore, it is still fairly common to receive new laptops and desktop machines full …

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The 2TB Barrier – What Does it Mean for You?

Throughout last year I made a couple of mentions of the 2TB (two terabyte) barrier for physical storage in modern computers but didn’t take the opportunity to flesh out exactly what it means for the regular consumer out there. In this article I am going to explain why this is important and what you need …

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Change Your Windows 7 Logon Screen Wallpaper

Another short and sweet tip for today. While some of us tend to leave many of the presentation features in Windows at their defaults some of us like to customise things to suit our taste. One such element of customisation is the wallpaper at the logon screen. Unfortunately, this has always been something fiddly to configure all …

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Adjust and Mute Volume for Individual Windows Applications

Windows 7 Volume Mixer (Sound Device Selection)

Sometimes, you might have one or a few applications that will make noise on your computer for whatever reason on a regular basis or the cause of the sound is outside of your control (i.e. receiving instant messages, e-mail, etc). This can be particularly annoying if you are trying to concentrate on other things such …

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Remove the Need for a KVM with Synergy

This has been one of my favourite tools to use when I have had multiple computers with their own displays setup at my desk and faced the issue of cluttering my desk with numerous keyboards and mice. For those who have never heard or come across a KVM before the acronym itself stands for “Keyboard, …

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Web Browser Tab Management Tips

Here’s a quick tip for tonight. The latest versions of Google Chrome, Internet Explorer (IE9 currently in beta), and Firefox (Firefox 4 also in beta) support a couple of neat features when it comes to tab management. The first feature allows you to shift the order of the tabs around simply by dragging them left …

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