Loss of Start Screen Tiles and Desktop Icons After Installing Bitdefender

Given that Microsoft Security Essentials has copped a bit of a pasting in the press lately I thought I would review both the current offerings and my stance on antivirus products. Of course, free is a good price for many plus it is an easy way for antivirus vendors to upsell you to other bundled …

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Say Goodbye to Flash Under Firefox 27

Here’s a quick tip. If you’re using the nightly release of Firefox then you’ll be up to Firefox 27 but you may not have realised that a new feature has slipped into the build. Mozilla has managed to build something called Shumway that renders SWF files in HTML5 removing the need for Flash to be …

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Enabling the Large Player Size in YouTube

After a recent change you may have noticed the ability to toggle between the standard and large player sizes in YouTube has seemingly disappeared. You could be forgiven for thinking so but it has actually been moved into a menu. Just click the little cog icon in the bottom right of the video player window …

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Perhaps the Simplest Way to Download YouTube Audio and Videos

It goes without saying that the legality of this service would be questionable unless you are dealing with creative commons content but it’d save you from downloading any software to perform the process. If you want to download video or audio from YouTube then all you need to do is add pwn to the front …

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Poor Fitbit Battery Life

Unfortunately for me, my Fitbit One started having a bout of rather poor battery life lasting two or three days per charge rather than the seven to ten days that had been norm since first power up. There could have been a whole stack of reasons as to why this was the case but I …

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Register for the Steam Hardware Beta

Here’s a quickie. If you don’t know, Valve are looking to kick off a Steam Hardware Beta and you’ve got a chance to participate by registering your interest, answering some questions and unlocking a couple of basic achievements. You can head on over here to find out how to get your name on the list …

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Slumming a Gaming Experience on an Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU

Whilst interstate on annual leave I have taken my Panasonic AX2 convertible ultrabook to be my main computing device. Normally, at home I would use my desktop computer with its twin GTX 295 video cards (which are getting a little long in the tooth now for some recent games at 1600p) but I don’t typically …

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Electronic Communications Versus Face to Face Meetings

It’s just amazing these days how electronic communications has shrunk the world. Many of use have mobile phones allowing us to call or text virtually anyone else. We also have a variety of social networks to help us keep up to date with random goings on with family and friends including photos and videos. Meanwhile, …

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Get the Most Out of USB 3.0 Flash Drives

This may seem obvious to technically minded people but given the similar look of standard USB ports you could forgive unsuspecting users for thinking that there is no difference between them all. However, if you look closely you can quickly work out which devices you should connect to which USB ports. If you see in …

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How to Set the Cisco DPQ3925 to Bridge Mode

I am visiting my folks at the moment and there are a few IT things lined up that needed addressing. One of those items was the removal of their Wi-Fi router when the cable modem was replaced due to suspected fault. The new Cisco DPQ3925 modem is also a Wi-Fi router but its performance when …

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