Do It Yourself

Has it ever annoyed you to have to open lots of separate windows for Device Manager, Services, Event Viewer, and other system administration tools? Here’s how to pull them all together into your own custom admin panel.

Two Finger Salute

One of the things I loved about my Mac laptop was the multitouch features; the ability to use two fingers on the trackpad for many functions. Few people know that you can do this with any Windows laptop that uses a Synaptics touchpad. Here's how.

Securely There

Microsoft has pushed an update to Security Essentials 2, which is currently in beta testing. While there aren't a vast number of forward-facing changes, there is one important one: the re-introduction of context menu scanning. Once again, you can right-click any file on your system to quickly check it for infection with MSE.

When Security Essentials 2 is finally released, it will include heuristic abilities, which will allow it to detect malware that has not yet been added to its definition files. Security Essentials 2 will be adding both behavior checking and tighter Web browser integration to its already strong defense system. MSE2 will also continue to be free, despite adding those new features.

Intrepid types can download the Security Essentials 2 beta from Microsoft Connect -- you'll need a Live account to get in, of course.

RAMming Speed

If you're old enough, you probably remember what a RAM disk is. Back in the olden days, to squeeze every last bit of juice out of your computer (usually for the purpose of playing Doom), you could load a program into a RAM disk -- a virtual drive made out of spare RAM. As I'm sure you know, RAM is a lot faster than your hard drive

Fast forward to today, and most computers have a lot of spare RAM. Unless you're editing large multimedia files, you're probably using only a fraction of your RAM. Why don't we use a little bit of it to speed up our surfing of the Web?

Browsers save a lot of data to the hard drive. Every image, so that you don't have to download it every time you visit a page, is saved to the hard drive. That's when you experience the 'grind' of loading (or reloading) a tab that you haven't looked at recently -- the browser is loading data from the hard drive.

With a RAM disk, you can make the browser always load from memory. This speeds up the entire browsing experience by a significant margin. The browser starts in a flash, switching between tabs feels faster, and page load times can be reduced by 20% or more!

To get started, you need Dataram's excellent RAMDisk software. It's free, unless you want to create RAM disks over 4GB in size (which you really don't need to do).

You can read the rest right here.

Four- Play

Firefox 4, with the release of Beta 7, is as good as finished. From now until its release in early 2011, no new features will be added, no significant changes will be made -- Beta 7 is, for all intents and purposes, Firefox 4.

Unlike Firefox 3.5 (private browsing) and 3.6 (personas!!), version 4 has a significant number of new in-your-face features -- features that will take a little getting used to... like tabs-on-top! There are tons of neat little additions that improve your surfing experience, too. Many of these will exist in the background, under the hood, but it still helps to know exactly what your new browser is capable of; did you know that Firefox 4 is as fast as Chrome, for example?

This guide will fully prepare you for Firefox 4. It will teach you how to work with the big-hitters Panorama and Sync, and also introduce some other features you might not have heard about. If you're already using the Beta, this guide might teach you some new tricks. If you're holding off until the official launch in 2011, that's fine too -- bookmark this page and check back later!

No Key Needed

Whether you've forgotten your password or you have a more malicious intent, it's actually extremely easy to break into a Windows computer without knowing the password. Here's how to do it, and how to prevent others from doing the same to you.

Not for Kids

If you've been to any of my lectures or webinars the past few years, then you know I'm a fan of Twitter. Your kids are probably users, but maybe it's time for you to jump in too. Here's Twitter for Adults, a how-to for those of us who have, you know, jobs.

War of the Worlds

TV ain't what it used to be. If you've been following the news, then you probably have heard about the new Google TV. of course, Apple TV is no slouch either. Here's a good comparison of both devices.

Smart and Sassy

Conserving the power your computer uses will conserve the computer as well. You can use SmartPower to force your computer go to sleep every day at 2AM and wake up right before you're due back from work. Combined with Windows' auto-logon feature, it would seem to you as if your computer is constantly on. In reality, though, you would be saving quite a bit of power -- as well as wear and tear on its hard drives and fans.

SmartPower also lets you set other conditions. For example, you can have your computer go to sleep at 2AM unless it is currently downloading something, or if a program is running, or if there's a specific host on the network (for example, your laptop is on, and you're streaming media from your home server).

All in all, this is a clever application. It does something that I wish had been built into Windows in the first place.

Lock It Down

One of he best things you can do to protect your data is to encrypt it. Here are The Five Best Encryption Tools.

Ahead of the Curve

Curve Dental Developing Patient Check-in and Questionnaire App for the iPad

Downloadable app allows Curve Dental customers to create forms their patients can complete using an iPad

OREM, UT—Curve Dental, creators of Web-based dental software, announced their development of an iPad app that will modernize the way in which patient information is gathered and digitized in the dental practice. Using the new app, called Curve Questionnaire, the dental practice can create check-in, medical history and other types of forms for their patients to complete using an iPad. Data entered by the patient is written directly to Curve Dental’s Web-based dental software when the patient submits the questionnaire.

“We recognize that the iPad can change the way information is gathered in the dental practice,” said Matt Dorey, founder and managing director of Curve Dental. “The iPad represents an enhancement to a practice’s professional appearance. How much more innovative and capable will a practice appear to the patient when they are handed an iPad to complete a medical history questionnaire rather than a clipboard and a stack of papers? And how much more efficient is the process of gathering and digitizing this information when it’s collected using an iPad? Once the patient has completed the questionnaire their information is immediately written to the practice’s patient data. The Curve Questionnaire saves a great deal of time since the dental team doesn’t have to re-enter the patient’s information like they would with paper forms.”
Using the app, the dental practice can create any number of different forms or questionnaires depending upon their needs. The practice can determine what questions to ask and how each question can be answered, whether with a yes or no response, multiple choice, or open-ended. The Curve Questionnaire app will be available to all Curve Dental customers without charge. The app will also complement Curve Dental’s Web-based dental software.

“Curve Questionnaire is our first app developed specifically for the iPad,” said Dorey. “It benefits the practice in a number of different ways, from reducing paper costs to the time required to manage paperwork. Just as we leverage the many advantages of the Web and the cloud as a platform for our software, we will continue to leverage the unique capabilities the iPad delivers to the dental practice by developing new apps that will benefit our customers. More and more doctors are looking to the Web as a way to simplify the dental software experience. Doctors are tired of installation hassles, upgrade worries, hardware compatibility issues, and backup concerns generally attributable to client-server software. The Web experience, on the other hand, is much more simple.”

About Curve Dental, Inc.

Founded in 2005, Curve Dental provides web-based dental software and related services to dental practices within the United States and Canada. The company is privately-held, headquartered in Orem, Utah with offices in Calgary, Canada and Dunedin, New Zealand. The company strives to make dental software less about computers and more about the user experience. Their creative thinking can be seen in the design of their software, that’s easy to use and Web-based. Dentists can call 888-910-4376 or visit www.curvedental.com for more information.

Mac Attack

There was a time when Mac users enjoyed "security by obscurity." Because of the much smaller number of Mac users in the world, malware authors didn't bother targeting Apple desktops and laptops. Those days are long gone, however, and new threats which put Mac users at risk are appearing all the time.

Fortunately, there are now plenty of good antivirus options for Mac users to combat the rising number of threats. The most recent addition to the mix is Sophos, which has just released the totally free Sophos Antivirus Home Edition. All the features you'd expect from a good antivirus app are there -- like realtime protection, heuristics (the ability to detect new threats for which Sophos does not have definitions), autorun defense, and quarantining.

Sophos has been a respected name in the security business for quite some time, and you certainly can't complain about the price.

Prey on Others

Looking for an inexpensive -- or better yet, free -- way to track your laptop or Android smartphone in the event it gets stolen? Check out Prey, an open source project that offers multi-OS tracking, reporting -- and countermeasures!

Just download the Prey client software, install, and register an account -- you'll need one in order to be able to access the service's Web-based control panel. Prey can collect a ton of valuable information from your device should it go missing.

Mr. Clean

When it comes to system cleanup programs, CCleaner is pretty much my favorite. It's been a trusted tool for years, and the newly-released CCleaner 3 is better than ever.

What's new in v3? To start, there's now a native 64-bit version in both the installer and portable CCleaner. Windows 7 users also get the benefit of a handy jump list, which offers quick access to the cleaner, registry scanner, tools, and options pages. There's also a new disk wiping tool included which supports DOD, NSA, and Gutmann standards.

CCleaner 3 has improved support for Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, and Silverlight. Perhaps the app's best new feature is support for HTML5 localStorage objects -- which many websites are now using to store persistent user data.

Hot and Heavy

"System-wide" hotkeys, also known as "global hotkeys," are keyboard shortcuts that work on every program -- such as Alt+F4 for closing the active window. They can be quite handy, especially once you become accustomed to using them.

If you want to add some global hotkeys to your system, the usual thing would be to learn how to use AutoHotkey. But AutoHotkey is a programming language, and not everyone is so keen on learning to code.

So if you just want to add some hotkeys without writing a single line of code, HotKeyMan is one possible solution. This freeware application provides a simple graphical interface for binding keys to operations, such as opening files, running applications, capturing the screen or active window, minimizing and maximizing windows, and more.

Air Apparent

A few weeks ago, Apple released their newest versions of the MacBook Air. As you can see from this early review, it seems to be one of their best laptops ever. Of course, my 9 month old MacBook Pro seems outdated all of a sudden!

Everlasting

Evernote, a popular app for capturing and editing notes, just hit version 4 of its Windows client. Evernote 4 features a completely redesigned user interface and a much faster experience built on native code. It reportedly starts 5 times faster than Evernote 3.5, and only uses half the memory. The Evernote team admitted to having issues with blurry type in version 3.5, so they've fixed that, too. As if that weren't enough to be excited about, Evernote 4 adds brand new features that make clipping and editing easier.

You can now create a new clip from within IE, Outlook or Firefox without leaving your current app, and clipping emails in Outlook has been vastly improved. If you've had problems with Evernote losing your text styling when clipping from web pages and email messages in the past, those problems fixed in Evernote 4. Editing clips has also been improved with more text formatting options -- tables and bullets now work within clips.

If you're a Windows 7 user, Evernote has also added some features just for you. It works with Windows 7's Jump Lists, so you can pin it to your task bar and perform some Evernote actions without even having the app running. It also uses Windows 7's location features to automatically geotag notes, if that's something you find useful.

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

The last couple of days have seen the launch and explosive proliferation of a Firefox add-on called Firesheep. It's an incredibly simple program that snoops unsecured Wi-Fi packets to grant you one-click masquerading of other users: if you log into Facebook at the local coffee shop, someone can use Firesheep to become you. Seriously, you can go along to any location with an unsecured Wi-Fi network and steal other users' accounts. ouch!

Here's how to prevent it.

All Togther Now

After taking several dozen large, multi-megapixel photos, the last thing I want to do before uploading is manually shrink them. Rather than deal with long upload times, freeware application XnView comes to the rescue, batching resizes in a few easy steps.

Kill or Be Killed

Have you ever had dozens of application windows open and wanted to just close them all? There’s a bunch of freeware apps that will close them all for you, but you don’t need extra software—and here’s how to do it.

More Than Meets the Eye

Having the ability to connect to the internet anywhere we go is undoubtedly awesome, but it isn't the only gift Wi-Fi technology has given us. Here are the 10 favorite uses for Wi-Fi that go beyond accessing to the web.

Red Rover Red Rover

Do you want to be able to play your iTunes songs in all of your ops but can't figure out an easy way to do that?

MediaRover is a free app that syncs iTunes libraries across up to eight Windows or Mac machines. That means songs you add to one machine's library will be available on your other machines, and any changes you make to iTunes playlists or metadata (like song names or track numbers) will be synced, too.

If you've got a NAS or a streaming music device, like a Sonos, Squeezebox, or Blu-ray player, MediaRover will work with that, too.

Setup requires you to download an app (for Windows or Mac), sign up for a (free) account, and then copy all of your music to a shared folder on the network. Other computers on your network can piggyback on the first computer's settings, too, saving you a bit of time. All in all, it's a pretty quick and simple solution for cloudifying your tunes.

Foiled Again!

I've got a bunch of old laptopa. A few are workhorses, and I take good care of them. But as a laptop ages, one thing invariably happens: Battery life grows shorter and shorter. It's a matter of chemistry, and no amount of prudency seems to keep it from happening.

So as your laptop ages, intelligent power management becomes increasingly important. The question is "how do I keep this thing from hogging so much battery when it's not connected?"

Sure, Windows has built-in power profiles; but for some reason, right-clicking the battery icon only shows two profiles (out of the three default ones), and somehow that list never includes the particular profile you need.

Aerofoil is a free application that strives to make the power-saving process painless. It's one of those things that should have been built into Windows in the first place: As soon as your laptop switches to battery power, Aerofoil switches the power profile to Power Saver. Plug the laptop back in, and Aerofoil switches you back to High Performance (or whatever you've got configured).

But wait, there's more! (Cue cheesy infomercial music) Aerofoil also switches off Windows' Aero Glass interface whenever it switches to Power Saver mode. It can also automatically mute the sound when you switch to battery mode!

One note: When you first run Aerofoil, your computer may pop up an error message about msvcp100.dll. In that case, you need the MS Visual C++ redistributable, which you can grab from Microsoft for free – both for x64 and for x86 systems. Enjoy!

Fraggle Rock

It's taken a while to get there, but Defraggler 2.0 is finally ready for download.

The new version is more efficient and faster than ever, and Defraggler can now perform boot-time scans. Using the expanded configuration options in Defraggler 2, you can choose to run a one-time defrag, or you can set it to run each time you reboot your system. Defraggler's Drive Map has also gotten a visual update, and it even allows you to set customized colors and block sizes.

As with older versions of Defraggler, you're still able to exclude certain file types and folders and schedule defrag operations.

Home Sweet Home

Many of you struggle to get a good wireless network running in your homes. Here's How to Go Completely Wireless in Your Home...most of this applies perfectly to dental offices as well.

Free for All

FreeApps is a software catalog with a twist. It has a ton of quality, freeware/open source offerings that are sorted by category. You browse the catalog, and then you tick the box next to every application that you'd like to install.

You then hit Get Installer and download a small file (about 0.5MB). Run the file, and it downloads all of the applications that you've marked and sets them all up, silently. It's a pretty magical experience; just hit "install" and watch the tool save you hours of browsing and installation. I tried it, and it was a really great experience.

This is exactly what Ninite has been offering for a while. FreeApps' catalog seems to offer a wider selection, though.

Burn, Baby Burn

With electric handpieces all the rage, many dentists are unaware that these devices can actually be responsible for some pretty server burns...all the way up to third-degree. You can read the FDA warning here.

DIY

I've talked about the great benefits of a sync service like Dropbox in the past. The problem is that if you have more than 2 GB of data, you have to pay for it. With some free software and a touch of programming know-how, you can easily do this yourself. Here's How to Build Your Own Dropbox clone.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Not matter ow careful we are, bad things can sometimes happen. Having your laptop stolen, for example, can be a very bad thing, especially if you didn't encrypt your sensitive data. As long as you can learn from your mistakes, you're ahead of the game. Here's one blogger's Lessons Learned When His Laptop was Stolen.

Five Fingered Discount

Skype for Windows has officially reached version 5. The most important feature addition is, as expected, Facebook integration. Group video calls, a feature that has been available in Skype 5 betas, has also made the jump to the stable version. Some work to clean up the UI has also been done.

The new Facebook tab brings your News Feed into Skype and lets you post messages, comment, and like updates as you would in any other Facebook client. The Facebook Phonebook in Skype now makes calling or texting your Facebook friends easier than ever; it's always just a few clicks away.

Group video calls are now in open beta for all users of Skype 5. This features a dynamic view that automatically shifts the focus to the person who is speaking, which makes it easier to follow video chats with large groups of people.

Automatic call recovery auto-redials a call whenever it's dropped. The call quality manager is also improved. It provides real time information on video or voice call quality as well as tips for solving any problems that occur.

The new dashboard, called Skype Home, is basically a feed of your contacts' mood messages, which sounds strangely Twitter-ish, but it's also the way to access tutorials about everything that Skype does.

Skype 5 is a free download for Windows and is available right now.