Tag: ASKDLS

I've seen some teases in my day, but this one ranks right up there with the best of them. In just a few days, Opera is going to unveil something they claim will reinvent the Web!!! The image above is pretty much all the information that Opera has provided. Oh, yeah, it might be called Opera Freedom and there's one more cryptic clue buried in the page's source: We start our little story with the ...

I don't demand a heck of a lot from my browser anymore. I've weened myself from dependence on add-ons and plugins and moved to as many bookmarklets as possible so that I don't miss a beat when switching among the myriad of browsers installed on my system. While I've been using Firefox for ages, I've been playing with Chromium for quite some time and become used to its speed. I downloaded ...

I'd like to think Microsoft's new FixIt gadget is a good idea, but I'm just not sure yet. Here's why I'm having trouble reaching a decision one way or the other. First, it's difficult for me to imagine a home user wanting this on their sidebar. If you're having so many problems with Vista that you need FixIt always at the ready, you'd probably just dump it and roll back to XP anyway. Also, FixIt ...

Sophos Labs' Graham Clulely authored a blog post today asking users for the best Conficker headline they've read. Pretty much all the major antivirus providers have announced that 1) most users are safe because the required Windows patch has been available since October via Windows Update and 2) there's a good chance nothing at all will happen tomorrow. Since it's April 1st, though, let's have a ...

It's no secret that Internet Explorer has a history of thumbing its nose at web standards. IE8 is supposed to change all that, bringing improved (how could it not be?) compliance. An unfortunate side effect, however, is that some sites that have been designed to display properly in IE7 (or older) don't look so hot in the new version. I particularly like one excerpt from the IEBlog: Site owners ...

WinSuperSite was talking about an interesting feature in Windows 7 the other day. Apparently you can drag files to an application pinned to your taskbar to associate it with that program. At least, that's what some other users have said. I gave it a try, and met with no success. I tried with PNG and JPEG images, but dragging them to FastStone MaxView didn't do anything - the file just scooted to ...

I need some help with this one. I don't understand why people get so excited about sub-30 second boot times in Windows 7, or with Vista's apparently horrid slowness. See, I never shut my machine off. I close the lid, it goes to sleep. I open the lid, it resumes in a few short seconds. Windows 7 is especially quick, but Vista was fast, too. Unless I'm toying with an OS that can't pull off the ...

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 ...