Category: Ask DLS

There are many ways to keep a diary or journal. You can use pen and paper like people have been doing for centuries. Or you can open a Word or TXT document and just start writing. But sometimes it's nice to have an application that's actually designed for the task, and which will separate your journal entries by date, let you search your diary for specific keywords, and offer some form of ...

We received a question from one of our readers the other day asking about an easy way to resize his 500GB data drive to make room for a Windows 7 install. This got me thinking about two tools that I've been using a lot lately: Easeus Partition Manager and Macrium Reflect. If you play with a lot of operating systems, keeping a good set of images (or a stockpile of extra hard drives) around is a ...

A lot of you read yesterday's post about the school teacher who cautioned us that spreading the "misconception of free software" is harmful. Today we're going to put a positive spin on things. Free software does exist. Every retail customer that I've built a computer for in the past six years has at least three pieces of free or Open Source software on his or her system. It's everywhere, and ...

While most people probably don't care what Microsoft does to patch or improve Windows Vista any more, Service Pack 2 is now available to Technet and MSDN subscribers and is slated for public release on December 4th. Could SP2 actually take care of some of the irritations that have plagued other Vista users? Perhaps more importantly, does anyone really care? Vista has been taking such a beating in ...

DS Reader Jamie wrote recently looking for some assistance, saying: I'm not the most disorganized of individuals: my music is in my music folder, etc. etc., but i have a fatal flaw. I put random stuff on my desktop, then it gets cluttered. My solution has been, in a word, poor. I put all the random stuff into a folder that usually goes by the name of misc or sort this out later. I was wondering ...

On Sunday, Business Week published an article stating "It's the end of instant messaging as we know it." In columnist Douglas MacMillan's mind, integrated chat features on sites like Facebook and GMail have signed the death warrant. Oh really? That's kind of interesting, because there's a lot of evidence that IM is alive and kicking. Taking a quick look at some stats on Download.com, I notice ...

Steve, a loyal DS reader, left this comment on my listing of five apps to clone hard drives: "Some idiot (my friend) partitioned my 1TB drive @ 10gb just to start me off and I can't do anything. I have partitioned/formatted the rest of my drive and cloned onto the new partition but I can't get rid of my C drive to use my new partition as my main drive. Any suggestions? Please help." Ah, yes. The ...

Remember when your less than cool cousin started blogging and used black text on a background covered in multi-colored flames? And you shortly developed a headache, not only from the content but from squinting and tilting your head to the side just so you could sort of read the text. If you are color blind your every day web browsing might be a bit like this as well. DLS reader, Eric, sent us a ...

Before we go any further, we need to establish the following: the uncensored version of this game is rated AO in the United States, meaning that you should only follow this guide if you are 18 or older! Now that we got that out of the way, Man Hunt 2 is a highly immersive game by Rockstar, the creators of of Grand Theft Auto. It was met with a great deal of controversy, and as a result, the ESRB ...

digg_url = "http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/02/03/introduction-to-psp-homebrew/"; The Playstation Portable is a jack of all trades. It plays music, videos, browses the Internet, and plays games. However, for an increasing number of people, this still isn't enough. With its powerful dual-processor configuration and Memory Stick Pro Duo slot, the PSP is a pocket powerhouse, capable of much ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/software/Recover_photos_from_a_corrupted_flash_card'; Digital cameras are great, you can store the equivalent of a dozen rolls of film at a time, delete bad shots immediately and download the photos to multiple devices. But like everything else, there can be a dark side (no pun intended) to digital photography: flash card corruption. Many of us have experienced that ...

You love us. We love you. Aww. It's this unspoken thing we have. So why aren't you pimping your Download Squad commenter account by adding an avatar? Recently, Download Squad received the same spiffy threaded comment system enjoyed by Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. Then we added a slick default avatar, just to make it official. We've noticed however, that many of you haven't added a custom ...

OS X has its dock, Windows Vista has an enhanced start menu, and Windows XP has, well, a bunch of menus to click through to launch programs. But thanks to independent developers, there are a ton of great program launchers out there that make it easy to bring an OS X-style dock to Windows, or keyboard program launchers to pretty much any operating system. Over the years we've tried out a ton of ...

We get a lot of questions at Download Squad. Where are the cookies? What did you do with the cookies? Why did you eat the cookies? And, so forth. Often we find questions have few simple answers, this one however was a cinch. It's also a good tip as Download Squad readers head off into the loving arms of family this holiday, no doubt to be bombarded with computer questions. Dmitry T. writes, "I ...

A friend of the Squad, (we're not naming names here Ben), recently had a little mishap with his data backup plan. He was doing a fresh install of Leopard on his Mac, and so he backed all of his data up to a external hard drive, installed OS X 10.5, and then found out that the drive was corrupt. No problem, he logged into Mozy, his online backup service to access his 60GB of offsite data. But he ...