If you’ve never created a personalized homepage, or custom start-up page for your browser, there are a lot to choose from. My personal favorite is iGoogle but Pageflakes looks interesting too. A custom homepages is a place to gather all the news, feeds, email, gadgets, widgets and apps that are important to you, to give you a single place to start your web sessions from. For a closer look at fourteen different homepage services, read Mashable.
When visitors to my home office see the two large monitors on my desktop, and see the mouse travel seamlessly from one to the other, they are usually amazed to learn that support for multiple monitors is built into Windows. All you need is multiple outputs from your video card, or multiple video cards. To learn more, read Ask Leo’s How Do I Set up a System with More than One Screen?.
Have a Microsoft Word problem that is “tying you (and your stomach) in knots?” Allen Wyatt’s Word Tips delivers relief with an archive of tips and answers that cover many different versions of Word for the PC, including: Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2003, and Word 2007. Tips are organized into topic categories, or can be found via the search function.
There are many Internet speed tests that will measure your download and upload speeds. Speedtest.net, CNET Bandwidth Meter Speed Test and PC Pitstop are a few. But before using them, you need to understand terms such as “k”, “m”, “bits” and “bytes.” For that, I recommend reading Ask-Leo.
As handy as USB thumb drives can be, their small size makes them easy to lose. Tim Fehlman, of Daily Cup of Tech, has worried about the possibility and come up with a clever solution. He explains how to install an auto-executing program that will automatically pop open a “Send Me Home” message if your lost drive is plugged into a computer. He even suggests offering the finders a brand new thumb drive that is twice the capacity of the found one.
USB thumb drives certainly are handy for moving files between computers, but if that’s all you use them for, you are missing the boat. PortableApps, for example, are full-featured applications stored on a flash drive that can be used on any Windows computer without leaving a trace of personal data behind. Applications include versions of the Firefox browser, Open Office word processing and spreadsheet, Pidgin instant messaging, and Thunderbird email. For more creative thumb drive ideas, read PC World’s “23 Things To Do With a Thumb Drive“.
As the use of fast broadband connections has increased, so has the use of online backup services to safeguard important computer files. A handful of online backup services even offer free plans, among them Mozy, Xdrive and MediaMax. For more on online backup, read Ask Bob Rankin.
In the old days, TV and Internet were two separate technologies. But today they are merging, and many TV networks now offer their most popular shows online, on demand. Seabreeze Computers has put together a list of where you can watch your favorite American TV shows online, and World Wide Internet Television lists over 2300 international broadcasts in dozens of languages.
Because the slower USB 1.x and faster USB 2.0 ports look identical, it is difficult to tell them apart. Your Windows configuration, however, will know if you have a USB 2.0 port, and here’s how you can find out. Click Right-Click My Computer, Click Properties, Hardware, Device Manager, and scroll down to Universal Serial Bus Controllers. Click to expand the description. If any of the ports are described as “Enhanced” then those are 2.0. For more details, read Ask Leo!.
Techies and gadget lovers who didn’t make to the 2007 Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES) in Las Vegas, can catch up online with excellent video coverage from CES CNET and CES Engadget. CES is the world’s largest annual consumer technology tradeshow, and thousands of new products are announced there every year.
