Tag: Windows

Phone Disk – Use Your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch as a Portable Drive

Phone Disk - Device Root Folder

Ever since the original iPhone came out, people have complained about Apple’s decision to prevent its use as a portable drive. Apple’s original iPods (excluding the iPod Touch) all supported the use of the device as an external drive which would show up in Windows or MacOS as another disk drive. There have been a …

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Turn Your USB Drive into a Bootable Windows Medium

If you have a netbook or a more sizeable notebook that does not come with an optical drive you may find yourself in a quandary when attempting to reinstall Windows from scratch. When I bought my netbook it came with Windows XP which made me feel like crying until I worked out how to put Windows 7 …

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Basic Screenshot Tips & Tricks for Windows

Snipping Tool

Every now and then, I need to capture screenshots to share with colleagues via e-mail or to embed into a PowerPoint presentation or a document. Sometimes, it can be a pain having to crop your screenshots to get a particular window or a particular object on screen. Here are a few tips to make your …

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Skype 5 Officially Released

Another quick one for tonight (running the university assignment gauntlet again). Skype 5 has been officially released today and still retains the group video call feature. It is still worth nothing that the feature itself is still in testing despite the software now being out of testing. A new feature has also been incorporated called …

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Audit Your Computer Security with Secunia Personal Software Inspector

With software exploits coming out of the woodwork all the time it’s probably a safe bet that most people would find it difficult to keep track of what software is out of date and what is vulnerable on their computers. Windows does a fairly good job of looking after itself but other pieces of software …

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Whilst Upgrades Are Convenient Clean Installs Are Better

A quick one for this evening before I fly out to Hong Kong tomorrow morning. For many years, there have been the concept of “upgrade versions” of software (i.e. a mechanism to move up a version usually with the prerequisite of a prior, eligible version) and “full versions” of software (which has no such prerequisite). …

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Get a More Robust Notepad with Notepad++

Just a quick one tonight. For a long time, I used the built-in notepad application in Windows to jot notes and other temporary information as it was quick to load and didn’t burden you with formatting overheads. However, one significant drawback is that as the size of a text file increases, the slower Notepad becomes. …

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Free Up Space by Moving Your iPhone and iPad Backups

Yesterday, I was attempting to update the firmware on my iPhone and iPad but was running into an error, specifically: “iTunes could not back up the iPhone “Boyd’s iPhone” because the backup could not be saved on the computer.” This was due to the C: in my computer reaching its capacity. Using a 128GB solid …

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Firefox 4 Beta 1 – First Look

Firefox 4 (New Toolbar)

Firefox 4.0 has been a long time and for those who might not have been following its development could probably be forgiven for thinking that things have gone into a bit of a holding pattern recently. Thankfully, a beta release has emerged from Mozilla and I’ve taken a quick look at it. What you will …

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No Static IP? Use DynDNS!

Some of us aren’t blessed (or perhaps cursed depending how you look at it) with a static IP address. For me, it’s a blessing that I do have one because I can run a whole bunch of servers (for VoIP, web servers, TF2 and VPN for instance) without having to keep updating an IP address. …

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