How to Add a Hard Drive to Your Com­puter in 7 Steps

1: Research your machine

PCs, like the one above, are a gen­eral pur­pose tool with many parts.

Before we start the process of adding a drive, we need to do a small amount of research inside your

Eleven Tips to Keep your Com­puter Run­ning Smoothly

Here is the Tips:

1. Never, never, turn your com­puter off with the power switch until Win­dows has shut down. The one excep­tion to this rule is when your coumputer locks up and your hard drive is not

Tips for Speed­ing Up Your PC

Few things are as frus­trat­ing as deal­ing with a slow, slug­gish com­puter. When a com­puter is brand new, it works won­der­fully well. Over time, though, its per­for­mance can slowly begin to worsen. This 

hap­pens for a num­ber of rea­sons, but the biggest cul­prits are things like spy­ware, adware and other com­puter threats that are unwit­tingly down­loaded along with other con­tent while online. You don’t have to down­load thou­sands of MP3s, movies or other items to expe­ri­ence these prob­lems, either – nobody is immune to them. Instead of accept­ing the sit­u­a­tion, there are plenty of tech­niques and strate­gies that you can use to make it bet­ter – a few of the best ones are out­lined below.

How To Trou­bleshoot a Com­puter That Won’t Turn On / NO POST / NO BOOT

It’s a dread­ful way to start a day – you press the power but­ton on your com­puter and noth­ing hap­pens. Few com­puter prob­lems are more frus­trat­ing than when your com­puter

Safety Pre­cau­tions before per­form­ing any instal­la­tion, dis­as­sem­bly or reassembly

Observe the fol­low­ing safety pre­cau­tions before per­form­ing any instal­la­tion or break/fix pro­ce­dures involv­ing dis­as­sem­bly or reassembly:

How to Fix a Stuck Pixel on an LCD Monitor

Try a solid state solu­tion like Pix­el­Tuneup (see Sources and Cita­tions). These devices pro­duce spe­cially tuned video sig­nals that elim­i­nate stuck pix­els while enhanc­ing pic­ture qual­ity, color, and con­

Build­ing your PC 101 for Newbies

Build­ing Your Own PC 101 – A Guide For Newbies

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|| — Intro­duc­tion — ||

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Build My Rig” thread but most of the posts there are build sug­ges­tions and parts pric­ing. Even with a rec­om­mended build, I noticed that new­bies still have lots of ques­tions for every par­tic­u­lar com­po­nent of the PC. My goal is to teach new­bies the basics in build­ing their own first PC. Of course, for in-depth infor­ma­tion for each com­po­nent the PC will be not dis­cussed here as there are already threads here for that. This guide is for new­bies so don’t crit­i­cize it for being too sim­ple and straightforward.

How to Dis­able Startup Pro­grams in Windows

The more soft­ware you install on your com­puter, the longer it may seem to take to start up Win­dows. Many pro­grams add them­selves to the list of pro­grams started when you boot your com­puter, and that list can get long.

Editor’s Note: Obvi­ously our more geeky read­ers already know how to do this, but this arti­cle is meant for every­body else. Feel free to share it with your non-techie friends!

Cus­tomize and Tweak Your Sys­tem Tray Icons in Win­dows 7

In Win­dows 7, the Sys­tem Tray has become the Noti­fi­ca­tion Area and it allows for more cus­tomiza­tion than was avail­able in Win­dows XP. You can choose which icons in the Noti­fi­ca­tion Area are vis­i­ble and which are hidden.

This arti­cle shows you how to show and hide icons by drag­ging and drop­ping them and how to man­u­ally tweak the Noti­fi­ca­tion Area icons, includ­ing show­ing and hid­ing pro­gram and sys­tem icons using the Noti­fi­ca­tion Area Icons panel.

Win­dows 7 Printer Instal­la­tion Tips

Get­ting your cur­rent printer to work in Win­dows 7 may turn out to be a piece of cake or all but impos­si­ble. For some key infor­ma­tion you should have in hand before you start, take a look at the com­pan­ion arti­cle Is Your Printer Ready for Win­dows 7? If you’re ready to install, how­ever, here’s how.

How To Block Sites On Com­puter With­out Using Software

In this tuto­r­ial, you will learn how to block sites on com­puter. There are thou­sands of soft­wares are avail­able on inter­net to block sites but, in this tuto­r­ial, you are gonna learn how to block sites on com­puter with­out using any soft­ware.

Win­dows Starts In Safe Mode Everytime

Solu­tion for Win­dows starts in safe mode every­time:
Prob­lem:
“My com­puter starts in safe mode only, how to make it boot into nor­mal mode“.

Root Cause of the prob­lem:
This type of behav­iour can occur, if you install Nor­ton Antivirus 2001 on your win­dows XP computer.

Let’s now see how to get rid of this Safemode Problem:

In order to solve this issue, dis­able the auto-protect fea­ture of Nor­ton AntiVirus 2001.
Fol­low these steps after dis­abling auto protect:

Cre­at­ing A User Locked Folder In Win­dows 7

Whether it is pos­si­ble to cre­ate a folder that will con­tain user’s per­sonal doc­u­ments that can only be opened by the user and all other users of the Win­dows 7 on the same PC can not access it anyway?

Yes it is possible.

I will show you, how to cre­ate a folder with a lock sign on it, that can only be accessed the orig­i­nal user or author, no other user can access it, even it is not in My Doc­u­ments folder.

For exam­ple, I have cre­ated a folder named The Cus­tomize Win­dows in E par­ti­tion of my Win­dows 7 PC:

Open­ing port for pro­gram or game in Win­dows Firewall

Ques­tion

Open­ing port for pro­gram or game in Win­dows Firewall.

Answer

When a pro­gram or game requires access to the Inter­net or another com­puter on a net­work it must have access to send infor­ma­tion over a net­work port. To help pro­tect a com­puter from unau­tho­rized access, a Fire­wall blocks all unnec­es­sary net­work ports, which pre­vents a net­work pro­gram from com­mu­ni­cat­ing with another com­puter. Fol­low the below steps to open ports in your Win­dows Firewall.

Top 10 key­board short­cuts every­one should know

Using key­board short­cuts can greatly increase your pro­duc­tiv­ity, reduce repet­i­tive strain, and help keep you focused. For exam­ple, high­light­ing text with the key­board and press­ing Ctrl + C is much faster than tak­ing your hand from the key­board, high­light­ing the text using the mouse, click­ing copy from the file menu, and then putting your hand back in place on the key­board. Below are our top 10 key­board short­cuts we rec­om­mend every­one mem­o­rize and use.
Ctrl + C or Ctrl + Insert
Copy the high­lighted text or selected item.
Ctrl + V or Shift + Insert
Paste the text or object that’s in the clip­board.
Ctrl + Z and Ctrl + Y
Undo any change. For exam­ple, if you cut text, press­ing this will undo it. This can also often be pressed mul­ti­ple times to undo mul­ti­ple changes. Press­ing Ctrl + Y would redo the undo.
Ctrl + F
Open the Find in any pro­gram. This includes your Inter­net browser to find text on the cur­rent page.

How to change the default loca­tion of pro­gram installation?

You might want to change the loca­tion of your sys­tem default folder (C:\Program Files) from C drive to another sys­tem dri­ves (D or E drive). By default soft­ware setup will attempt to install pro­gram in C:\Program Files direc­tory. It is good prac­tice to make the backup of the installed pro­grams, if you installed all your pro­grams in other than C drive. If you have lit­tle knowl­edge about edit­ing win­dows reg­istry then you can con­fig­ure your com­puter for this purpose.

Fol­low the given steps to con­fig­ure win­dows registry:

First click on Start but­ton then type Regedit in Run option.

Here locate the loca­tion to:

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

Here in right side panel, dou­ble click on Pro­gram­FileDir and here its default value is

C:\Program Files.

Now mod­ify the value to any other drive (for exam­ple D:\Program Files).

Now close the reg­istry edi­tor and restart your com­puter after any changes to go into effect.

How to Enable Log­ging to solve win­dows startup issue?

You can trou­bleshoot many of com­puter startup prob­lems using win­dows boot log­ging. When you start you com­puter with enable boot log­ging fea­ture, a log file will be cre­ated to iden­tify the dri­vers and ser­vices that is cre­at­ing the prob­lem dur­ing startup.  The name of this file is ntbootlog.txt and located in root direc­tory (%SYSTEMROOT%, nor­mally in C drive). You can search this file with the name “ntbootlog.txt” in C drive. Fol­low the exam­ple of ntbootlog.txt in win­dows XP.

Secu­rity Tips: How to Pro­tect Your Com­puter From Viruses

With mil­lions of com­puter users brows­ing the web at any given time, there are plenty of tar­gets for mali­cious coders. While com­puter experts don’t always know why coders choose to build harm­ful com­puter pro­grams, the fact is that it hap­pens all the time. Com­puter viruses can steal per­sonal infor­ma­tion, inter­fere with nor­mal oper­a­tions, attract spam and even shut down your computer’s hard drive. Pro­tect­ing your com­puter is crit­i­cal for brows­ing success.

How to Write-Protect Your USB Flash Drive

Many a time, it becomes necessary for us to write protect our USB flash drive so as to protect it from viruses and other malware programs. Because flash drives are so popular and most widely used to move data between computers, they are the prime target for attackers as a means to get infections spread around the computer world. Also, since USB drive is not a Read-Only Memory (ROM), the data inside it can easily be modified or deleted by malware programs.

But unfortunately, most of the new flash drives do not come with a write-protect feature as the manufacturers wish to cut down the cost of production. Hence, the only way to write-protect your USB flash drives is to enable this feature on your own computer.

Secret Tip How I Make Free Calls from Com­puter to Mobile Phone Any­where in the world with yahoo mes­sen­ger or Skype

You can now make free calls from your pc to any mobile in the world. All you need is a mic with ear phones, a decent inter­net con­nec­tion and Yahoo Mes­sen­ger or Skype Installed.I’m now using this free call  method and the great thing is that, this trick can be used to make unlim­ited call to mobiles all over the world and not lim­ited to United states. It even works to make free local mobile calls in India.

So how do we make a call from pc to mobile phone for free?

Install Yahoo mes­sen­ger or Skype. In case you don’t have it Google it and down­load the lat­est version.

Sign into your yahoo mes­sen­ger or Skype using your yahoo id and pass­word. Con­fig­ure your micro­phone and head­set if you have installed a fresh yahoo or skype soft­ware
Inside your Yahoo mes­sen­ger dial +18003733411 and press enter.

Now a small win­dow pops up.

An oper­a­tor greets you with a recorded wel­come mes­sage along with an adver­tise­ment and asks you to select one of the Free411 ser­vice. Just hear the ser­vices options until they say the last one as “Free Call”. When you hear this, don’t press any num­ber on your key­board and instead SAY “Free call” loudly on your micro­phone con­nected to your PC.
After this voice mes­sage is detected by their sys­tem, they will run a short adver­tise­ment of their spon­sor and make sure you don’t press any num­ber at this time.
WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR A BEEP SOUND after the fol­low­ing mes­sage “Please dial the phone num­ber coun­try code first, don’t for­get to dial 1 for north Amer­ica”
After you hear this mes­sage ‚imme­di­ately dial the des­ti­na­tion num­ber of your choice along with the coun­try code.(e.g. for north Amer­ica it’s 1 and for India it’s 91)

Your call will get con­nected and you can talk for 7 min­utes con­tin­u­ous for free. When it gets dis­con­nected, repeat the same pro­ce­dure again. You can make mul­ti­ple and unlim­ited calls with this ser­vice.
It was never easy to make a free inter­na­tional call like this before.
So what’s the catch?
FREE411 ser­vice toll-free num­ber is based in USA. This com­pany gets paid for the adver­tise­ments from spon­sors.
Are there any lim­its on the num­ber of call which we can make?
No. There is no limit on the num­ber of free calls which can be made through this sys­tem.
So enjoy this trick to make free inter­na­tional and local calls and make sure you don’t abuse the system.

Begin­ners Guide To Brows­ing Blocked Websites

You are prob­a­bly won­der­ing how to browse blocked web­sitesin school or work.

I can relate to why you want to do this. There are times when I feel like get­ting on YouTube at school and watch­ing some videos to kill time. You might want to get on Face­book to see people’s new sta­tuses or pho­tos and to com­ment and or chat with friends.

No mat­ter what the rea­son is hav­ing the abil­ity to browse blocked web­sites is quite amazing.

This post will cover and explain all the ways you can do so that I know of. Please note not all of them will work, so you have to test and see if they work for you. Also, as a short dis­claimer I am not respon­si­ble if you get caught on blocked sites.

How To Stop Your Com­puter from Freezing

Has your com­puter ever frozen on you when you were in the mid­dle of some­thing? This issue has hap­pened to me count­less times in the past, either when I was in the mid­dle of either down­load­ing a pro­gram or using my Inter­net browser. Can you relate?

My mom actu­ally brought this issue to me after com­plain­ing that her com­puter kept lag­ging on her every time she used  Inter­net Explorer. My first rec­om­men­da­tion was to switch browsers because sorry to tell you guys, Inter­net Explorer just plainly sucks.

5 Lit­tle Known Secrets To Not Get­ting A Virus

Viruses are eas­ier and eas­ier to get now a days. Once you get a virus those suck­ers are annoy­ing to get rid of. They slow down your com­puter, steal your per­sonal info, delete fold­ers and more.

As you can see, viruses aren’t very pretty.

Now, there are sim­ple steps you can take to pro­tect your­self against a virus. If you fol­low my steps you should be safe from any virus infection.

Com­puter Buy­ing Tips

Decid­ing whether to buy a Mac or a PC should be based on two main points: your bud­get and whether the com­puter is pri­mar­ily for busi­ness or plea­sure. Both types of com­put­ers are excel­lent for spe­cific tasks, although if you are plan­ning to go to work and bring your com­puter with you, you may need to con­sider what types of com­put­ers your cowork­ers will have to make it eas­ier to swap files or com­pare notes. Here a few basic tips on how to choose the right com­puter for you.

Bud­get

There’s no debate—Macs are far more expen­sive than PCs. If money is a big issue for you, you’ll want to buy a PC. How­ever, Macs aren’t over­priced. Unlike PCs, each com­puter is designed for max­i­mum effi­ciency in both pro­cess­ing speed and ease of use. While PCs fre­quently crash and are vul­ner­a­ble to spy­ware and viruses, Macs resist most viral attacks and oper­ate at a con­sis­tently high stan­dard with vir­tu­ally no tech­ni­cal issues. If you can afford it, a Mac is an excel­lent invest­ment which will work for you for years.

Top 4 Things to Remem­ber when Cre­at­ing Your Own Computer

Cre­at­ing your own com­puter has become a pop­u­lar choice for many peo­ple dur­ing the cur­rent eco­nomic down­turn, but can you just pick any parts and begin build­ing? Many com­puter parts aren’t com­pat­i­ble with each other and there are some key things to keep in mind before you begin build­ing your com­puter. With this in mind, it’s appar­ent that you can’t just pick what­ever parts seem appeal­ing and start build­ing. So what do you do? This arti­cle will out­line 5 tips that will help you in your build process.

Connect your home computer from Remote location

Using the Remote Desktop feature, you can connect your home computer (host) from any other remote computer (client) and can access all computer resources (installed programs, data and any network resources). You can run any computer application on the remote computer as you were running actually sitting in front of home computer.

Follow the given steps to configure your computer to connect remote computer:

To use this feature, you will need to be logged into your computer with administrative rights.

Protect Your Web Server From Hackers

Creating your own website is not simply about putting some pages and information online. Ensuring the security of your website is a bigger and highly crucial task. Most websites these days have a dedicated web server that gives them the leverage to grow and develop further. Basically the websites with a high volume of web traffic, a heavy database and complex application specifications require an exclusive web server. It is extremely important to hack proof your web server in order to protect your website and business.

Burn ISO Image to CD or DVD

Ok, I have an ISO file, now what? I can’t see the files or fold­ers inside although I copied it to a CD/DVD… Well, an ISO file is an image of a CD or DVD, sim­ply copy it to a CD or DVD as a data file won’t be enough. You can think of an ISO image as a “com­pressed” file. For a CD/DVD ISO, you’ll need to burn it out to a blank disc, but with the “image burn­ing” option. Most cur­rent burn­ing appli­ca­tions come with this option, and they’ll all do the same thing: Extract the files to a tem­po­rary loca­tion then burn them to CD/DVD.

E-Speaking: Con­trol Your PC Through Your Voice

An easy soft­ware solu­tion to enable you to con­trol your com­puter, dic­tate emails and let­ters, and have the com­puter read doc­u­ments back to you. e-Speaking – Voice Recog­ni­tion soft­ware using your voice to com­mand and con­trol your com­puter. Reduce or elim­i­nate mouse clicks or key­board input. Use it to enhance your com­put­ing expe­ri­ence by pro­vid­ing an addi­tional input to the computer.

10 Rea­sons for Try­ing e-Speaking’s Software

1. Free Down­load of soft­ware

2. Over 100 com­mands built-in

3. Abil­ity to add more com­mands

4. Runs in Windows2000 and Win­dows XP