Microsoft Ramps Up Cloud Battle

Microsoft’s newest Office product, Office 365, is set to be more in the cloud than ever before.  The next stage in their battle with Google has arrived, as they are set to launch their next generation cloud-based product in a very short space of time.  Microsoft clearly dominates the office computing market; they still have a 94% market share, but clearly any encroachment from Google was unwelcome and Microsoft is seizing their opportunity to provide their services on a level with Google’s constant availability to everyone.

Rather than purchasing software and installing it to your computer, Microsoft will host the software and deliver services from its own servers.  In short, you don’t have to worry about storage or hosting costs, simply your payment to Microsoft to keep your license running, which you’re probably already paying.  It’s called Microsoft 365 to emphasize the fact that customers will be receiving attention from Microsoft every single day year-round with the cloud service.

While most larger businesses will still prefer to control their own day to day operations, 365 is aimed at the small to medium business which can’t necessarily afford the same complement of employees and hardware that the larger businesses can.  Microsoft takes away much of the need to host your own servers and deal with your own maintenance, making it a good choice for the small business looking to appear professional but without an immense budget to match their aspirations.

As necessarily the case with cloud services, the software will be sold on a subscription based service.  Their costs for business customers range from $2 to $20 US per user per month and may even include phone support depending on the package chosen by the business’s owner.  This is quite a change for Microsoft, who normally only get paid during upgrade cycles, with some services requiring longer term costs.  Now those who adopt the service will be paying Microsoft each month, potentially providing them a more regular source of income (not that Microsoft is necessarily suffering!).

The most exciting part of Microsoft’s cloud services is undoubtedly the fact that they will now be available on all different devices and accessible globally.  Smartphones, tablets, and normal PCs and laptops will be able to access and possibly even edit such documents.

Office 365 is not available for purchase just yet; it’s in the beta stage in 13 different countries.  It’s set to go on sale next year.  The question is, will you be buying?

Browser Tips: Firefox

If you use the same browser every day, you tend to get stuck in certain patterns.  Just like any other aspect of your life, you’ll find you often do things the same way without really thinking about whether you could do them better.  You’ll often find, however, that there are a few time saving and efficient tips that could help you tighten up your use of various browsers.  Today we’re focusing on Firefox and a few relatively little known features that can make it easier for you to use the popular browser.

1. Mouse Gestures.  You’ll have to install a plugin for this one, but mouse gestures allow you to do a variety of tasks without ever clicking your mouse again or digging through menus.  You’ll need to hold down a chosen button for the gesture, most likely the right mouse button.  For example, if you drag your mouse left, you’ll go back; right, forward.  If you want to close a tab, simply drag your mouse down and right.  To open a new tab, drag the mouse up, and to open a new window, drag it down.  If you want to open up a sequence of links in different tabs, drag the mouse across the links to the right and end up with an up and left.  It sounds a bit tricky, but once you start using them you’ll be amazed that you ever did without.
2. Use extensions.  If you don’t know they’re there, you can’t possibly make use of the many awesome features Firefox can have.  There are extensions to block ads, take screenshots, avoid malicious scripts, view and edit the code of any webpage, sync settings and tabs in any instance of Firefox, and even easily download YouTube videos to your PC.  You can also install social media extensions or listen to music in your browser window; you’ll never have to switch between programs again.  They’ll open up a whole new world of productivity and convenience.
3. Take advantage of the handy search in the toolbar.  You can not only access Google, but a huge range of search engines of your choice.  Save yourself the trouble of typing the sites in by simply choosing the one you like the most and making it your default.  You’ll be surprised that you ever went to the sites to start!
4. Edit the toolbar to suit your own convenience.  Despite how simple this is, many still use the standard Firefox toolbar.  Just go to View -> Toolbars -> Customise, and then drag the options you’d like to the place you want them to go.  Personally I always add the new tab button to the toolbar; that was where it was when I started  using Firefox and it’s just easier for me to remember.  You can move buttons for your extensions and bookmarks there, as well as standard buttons like cut and paste.
5. My final tip is to use the bookmarks toolbar wisely.  Organise your bookmarks into folders so they take up less space but are still easily accessible.  Make use of bookmarklets, which allow you to instantly update content on other sites; you can use one to gather links for blog posts, submit sites to social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, or add links to your social media profiles.  These can really help you visiting different websites and going through copy and pasting over and over again; it’s much easier just to click once and be done!

We hope these tips will help you use Firefox more effectively; stay tuned for the following weeks when we can cover Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

How to Use Your Computer’s Downtime for Good

Many of us leave our computers on when we’re not looking at them.  Quite a few modern computers take more than just a couple of minutes to start up and shut down, so if we’re going to go back and forth, it generally makes more sense to leave everything running throughout the day and sometimes through the night.  In a sense, though, you’re wasting much of the computer’s power as it’s sat there doing nothing but playing your screensaver over and over again.  A whole host of organisations have sprung up asking computer owners to donate their downtime to good causes.  Instead of wasting energy, you could be helping to further human knowledge.

One of the most interesting programs, which has just made a discovery using spare computers whose owners donated their downtime, is attempting to prove Einstein’s theory that celestial events, like exploding stars or black hole collisions, create waves which then alter space and time.  These computers didn’t quite prove that, but they did discover a rare celestial object.

This project is run by the University of California Berkeley, is called BOINC, and you can participate in many other programs as well.  As long as you own your PC, the software is free to download here, and you can contribute to a vast number of science projects.  You might use your computer’s downtime to help cure cancer, detect earthquakes, or look out for aliens.

The search for aliens was the initial project for the BOINC program and has been going for almost eleven years.  The project, called Seti@Home, uses spare computers to more quickly analyse data from radio telescopes looking for signals of alien life.  They’re searching primarily for narrow-bandwidth radio signals, which as far as we know do not occur in nature, and as such would imply that there is some life out there.

You’re only permitted to use the program on computers you own, however, so while you might choose to install the software on your home computer, ask permission from your IT support before placing it on your work or school PC.

How to Back Up Your PC

It’s always a good idea to back up the information on your PC.  If not, you run the risk of losing valuable information, whether it’s in the form of personal pictures or important work documents.  Frequent backups can significantly reduce the stress of routine hard drive failure or a malware attack, but they’re often lengthy and a bit confusing.  It can be a hassle to do it regularly even though it’s essential for so many reasons.  Here are a few easy ways to back up your hard drive.

1. Back up to an external location.  The best way is to buy either a second hard drive or an external hard drive.  If you keep duplicate copies of every important document, even if one fails you’ll still have the other one to recover from.  You can do this manually, which is probably the most reliable way as then you can firmly ensure you have each and every file that is important to you.  It’s also quite simple.  Open up two windows, one for each hard drive, and simply copy over the files that you want to keep so you have two versions of each file.  Just remember to update them both whenever you make important changes.
2. Burn your important files to a DVD or CD.  Rewriteable DVDs are the best choice because you can fix any problems that arise in the initial copying.  You can also then reuse the DVDs if your old files become irrelevant, unnecessary, or are stored more securely somewhere else.  DVD storage is perhaps the least effective of any type of backup, as the DVDs require physical storage space and overall hold quite a small amount of data in comparison to hard drives, but they can be reassuring for the person who likes physical evidence of his/her files and cost effective for the individual who doesn’t have much that needs saving.
3. You can also use Window’s built in backup and restore feature.  Each version of Windows from XP on has this feature, though it has been improved regularly over the years, with Windows 7 currently boasting the best incarnation.  The feature is very easy to use and is accessible from the control panel.  You can choose whichever folders, libraries, or drives you’d like to back up.  Ordinary Windows 7 users can back up to another drive or a DVD, just like the first two choices I’ve provided.  Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate have the ability to back data up to another computer on the network, central server, or network attached storage; for most people, however, the first two will be just fine and will certainly solve the problem. Windows 7 also provides easy ways for you to recover those backed up documents in case of accidental deletion or individual file corruption.

If you’ve failed to backup your machine, it is sometimes possible to restore it to an earlier condition.  This can be done using the System Restore option in Windows.  It’s not particularly reliable for restoring documents, though, just for massive system changes, so it is always a good idea to back up everything you think is important or might be important in the future.

How to Add Professional Photo Effects in Microsoft Office 2010

If you’re a computer novice, it can be difficult to train yourself or call upon your IT support to train you to use another program to edit and customise your images, and it’s very likely that you’ve wished for one place where you can prepare all aspects of a document, spreadsheet, or presentation.  Microsoft Office has never really provided that functionality beyond the basics – and sometimes not even those.  In Office 2010, however, Microsoft have changed their game and added in some image editing choices and effects to help users make professional and customised images without heading to another program first.  This post will focus solely on the addition of effects to Office documents.

For minor tweaks, Office now offers the ability to sharpen or blur images.  Their new layout is incredibly convenient if you’re pressed for time or not really that fussed with perfection.  When you choose the option to edit your photo from the pop-up toolbar, only accessible once you’ve actually imported the image, you’re presented with a range of thumbnails with your image sharpened or blurred to varying degrees.  You can preview these to find the right one or choose to go in a little bit deeper and adjust a variety of sliders yourself to achieve precisely the correct level of effect.

Office also newly includes a variety of artistic and picture effects.  You can apply surprisingly good looking sketch effects to your photos, for example, with a simple click of the mouse.  Again, Office will pop up a range of choices, allowing you to choose which thumbnail suits you best, or allows you to fine tune the details yourself either from the original picture or the slightly edited version.  You can also look at all the effects at once, deciding at a glance which best fits your document.

You’re even able to correct picture colouring or just play with the saturation and tone.  If you’ve taken a picture of a particular shade of flower, you can use the recolouring tool to change it to another one.  You can then go even further by using the background removal tool to get rid of the now improperly coloured background and import your new image back onto your old one – changing the colour of the flowers without disturbing any grass or sky that might surround it.

Office’s new photo editing features clearly enhance their bid to get everyone using Office – and Office only.  These in no way surpass the capabilities of Adobe’s Photoshop, which has a price tag to match what it can do, but if these abilities prove popular, Microsoft could easily drive out lower cost software with less functionality.  After all, most people have Microsoft Office somewhere, whether it be at work or home or both, and these features make it much easier to perform tasks frequently done elsewhere in the past.

Have you used Office 2010’s photo editing features?  What did you think?  Let us know in the comments.

A Few More Tips to Speed Up Your PC

Anyone with a Windows PC knows that the operating system tends to slow down over time.  Windows isn’t optimised for speed; most computers will continue working just fine until replaced with an upgrade, but they will gradually slow down to a snail’s pace that is almost unbelievably different from their initial behaviour.  This has many Windows users wondering how to speed up their PCs beyond deleting useless programs and occasionally defragmenting their hard drive.  These are both very important tasks, but there are a few more things you can do to rescue your PC from eternal sleep.

First of all, it’s entirely likely that some processes are starting up with your computer, slowing it down from the minute you turn it on to the minute you turn it off, without producing any real benefit to you.  For example, if you have an iPod or iPhone, using iTunes will add to startup a little program called “iTunesHelper.exe”.  If you ditch the hardware or software, this file will still exist and run on startup, slowing your computer down significantly.

To find superfluous programs, open up Windows Task Manager and select Processes.  This will show you all the programs that are currently running on your PC.  If you click on memory, you’ll be able to see which programs are hogging up your physical memory and CPU usage.  If you don’t recognise a program (and you won’t recognise most of them) but the description doesn’t help, simply do a Google search on it.  You will almost always find a definition and that will help you decide whether or not you need it.

To stop a process from running, simply right click on its name and choose end process.  Be careful not to stop programs that are essential to your system, like taskmgr.exe.  You may discover an unpleasant surprise when your taskbar disappears or your graphics card stops working.  The good thing is that if you stop a process in the task manager, it will be restored if you restart your computer, but it’s best to avoid that circumstance.

You can also improve startup speed by preventing some of those unnecessary, bloating programs from starting in the first place.  To find your list of startup programs, type “msconfig” into your search bar on Vista and 7 and into the “run” box on XP.  Then choose the startup tab, where you’ll see all the programs that start with your PC.  Be a little more selective with this list as a restart won’t cure any problems you create for yourself.  For example, don’t uncheck the Windows operating system, or you may cause more problems than you solve!  But if you don’t need any instant messengers starting with your computer, for example, uncheck them and don’t look back.

Let us know if these tips help you speed up your computer!

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Domain Checkup Tools

This is a selection of tools that can be used for checking various aspects of your domain such as loading times, server status and Whois information.

	Alexa Traffic Rank View and compare Alexa Ranking graphs.
	Broken Link Checker Use this tool to check for Broken Links on a website.
	Domain Availability Check for available domain names.
	Domain Look-up Retrieve a range of information about a domain.
	Domain Whois Retrieve a domain whois information.
	Instant Domain Checker Check the availability of domains instantly.
	IP Location Locate the country of an IP Address.
	Link Price Calculator Estimate how much to pay for a link.
	Ping Test Check the presence of an active connection.
	Reciprocal Link Checker Check your reciprocal links to see if link partners are still linking back to your site.
	Reverse IP/Look-up Searches for domain names hosted on your IP address..
	Server Status Check if a website is online or offline.
	Website Speed Test Find out how fast a specific webpage loads.

Search Engine Tools

Here is a list of tools from iwebtool.com. We came across this site the other day and there are loads of nifty gadgets to make your life easier so being the conscientious site that we are we thought we’d post them up to make your lives easier. We’re nice like that you know

For some of these tools you get limited to 5 requests an hour unless you buy a pro account but 5 should be plenty, right ?

	Backlink Checker Find a list of backlinks linking to a specific website.
	Cloaking Checker Cloaking Checker
	Google Banned Checker Discover whether a website is banned on Google.
	Google Datacentre Search Search keywords/phrase through different Google data centres.
	Google PageRank Prediction Predict your future Google PageRank.
	Index Checker Check for the total number of pages of a specific website which are present on search engines.
	Keyword Density Checker Analyze a websites to view the optimum keyword distribution.
	Keyword Suggestion Find related keywords matching your search.
	Link Popularity Retrieve a number of backlinks of a specific website from search engines.
	Multi-Rank Checker View multiple Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking in bulk.
	PageRank Checker View Google PageRank on different Google servers.
	Rank Checker Get an overview of a website’s ranking.
	Search Engine Position Check your search engine positions on Google Search Engine.
	Search Listings Preview Preview your website on Google, MSN and Yahoo! Search.
	Spider View This tool enables you to view a perpective from a search engine spider.
	URL Redirect Checker Check whether a redirect link is Search Engine Friendly.
	Visual PageRank View the PageRank of links visually rather than in text.