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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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Alexa Traffic Rank View and compare Alexa Ranking graphs. |
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Broken Link Checker Use this tool to check for Broken Links on a website. |
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Domain Availability Check for available domain names. |
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Domain Look-up Retrieve a range of information about a domain. |
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Domain Whois Retrieve a domain whois information. |
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Instant Domain Checker Check the availability of domains instantly. |
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IP Location Locate the country of an IP Address. |
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Link Price Calculator Estimate how much to pay for a link. |
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Ping Test Check the presence of an active connection. |
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Reciprocal Link Checker Check your reciprocal links to see if link partners are still linking back to your site. |
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Reverse IP/Look-up Searches for domain names hosted on your IP address.. |
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Server Status Check if a website is online or offline. |
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Website Speed Test Find out how fast a specific webpage loads. |
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 
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Backlink Checker Find a list of backlinks linking to a specific website. |
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Cloaking Checker Cloaking Checker |
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Google Banned Checker Discover whether a website is banned on Google. |
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Google Datacentre Search Search keywords/phrase through different Google data centres. |
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Google PageRank Prediction Predict your future Google PageRank. |
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Index Checker Check for the total number of pages of a specific website which are present on search engines. |
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Keyword Density Checker Analyze a websites to view the optimum keyword distribution. |
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Keyword Suggestion Find related keywords matching your search. |
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Link Popularity Retrieve a number of backlinks of a specific website from search engines. |
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Multi-Rank Checker View multiple Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking in bulk. |
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PageRank Checker View Google PageRank on different Google servers. |
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Rank Checker Get an overview of a website’s ranking. |
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Search Engine Position Check your search engine positions on Google Search Engine. |
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Search Listings Preview Preview your website on Google, MSN and Yahoo! Search. |
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Spider View This tool enables you to view a perpective from a search engine spider. |
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URL Redirect Checker Check whether a redirect link is Search Engine Friendly. |
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Visual PageRank View the PageRank of links visually rather than in text. |