Tag: HOWTOS

Don't get me wrong -- I really enjoy using Zune to listen to music on my desktop computer. When all I want to do is quickly drop a couple of songs or video clips onto my Windows Phone 7 device, however, it's a bit overkill. While my humble little Palm Pre has a USB mass storage mode which lets me copy files onto it like it was any other external hard drive, WP7 devices aren't quite as accessible. ...

The Bluefire e-reader for iPhone made a big splash last week because it's a free app that can read DRM-protected e-books, like the ones offered by many public libraries. We've reviewed Bluefire and shown you how to get borrowed e-books onto your iPhone, but there are two better and faster ways to accomplish this, without opening Adobe Digital Editions on your computer or syncing with iTunes. ...

With Google calling out Facebook last week for trapping your contacts, it seems like a perfect time to offer a solution for rescuing those Facebook contacts and their email addresses -- sorry, still no phone numbers -- and exporting them to Gmail or your other address book of choice. To do this, you'll need a Yahoo! account (Mozilla's Asa Dotzler says a Windows Live account works, too). It's ...

Recently on Twitter, an Internet Explorer 9 beta user asked how to have his most popular sites displayed whenever he launched the browser. By default, IE9 shows a localized version of MSN.com and you can switch to home page(s) you define. As it turns out, it's a very simple task to swap in your popular sites. Here's an easy way to do this: click the gear icon, then select Internet Options. ...

A few months ago, my Mac ran into a spot of trouble and suffered a kernel panic. Yes, Macs crash too, it does happen. After rebooting, I noticed that shades like #fafafa wouldn't display as anything other than flat white once I'd logged into the system. Now, I was lucky in realizing that it was only after login, because I have my login screen's background set to an image that uses lighter shades ...

Google Chrome's sync features can be incredibly handy for those of use who run the browser on multiple computers. Every now and then, however, you may run into a problem. In my case, I had certain bookmarks which kept popping back up even though I'd previously deleted them. Today I got an email from a reader, John, who was having a similar issue with his extensions. "Recently LastPass has ...

I jumped for joy when I saw a post at Lifehacker explaining how to read PDFs on your iPhone or iPad using Apple's new iBooks app. I figured someone would come up with a way to do it, and I should have known it would rely on the ultra-useful Dropbox. Dropbox is an amazing cloud storage app that works on several platforms, and one of them happens to be iOS, making it possible to transfer PDF files ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/17/how-to-block-ads-or-annoyances-tynt-any-browser-any-os/'; Now, we've previously covered extensions for both Chrome and Safari 5 that stop Tynt from ruining your copy/paste party, but if you've got administrative rights to whatever computer you're currently using, you can put a stop to more than that. You can block services like Tynt ...

I love Skype. I use it daily and consider it to be one of the best applications installed on my system. However, recent Skype versions started exhibiting a pretty annoying feature: they stick around on your Windows 7 Superbar (and possibly on the taskbar in earlier versions of Windows, but I haven't tested that). No matter how many times you click the X to close Skype's window, it still sits ...

Live SkyDrive is an awesome service. 25GB of web storage for free? Yeah, that sounds good to me. Sure, the 50MB per file limit is a little bit of a downside but it's still a great place to store documents, music, and photos. Heck, if you tell an app like 7zip to chunk big files up into 50MB pieces you can store whatever the heck you want. If only there was a way to access your SkyDrive storage ...

File this one under "why didn't I think of that." Blogger and software engineer Abhishek Bhatnagar has posted a simple, clever way to pin multiple folders to your Windows 7 taskbar (or Superbar). Yes, you can already pin as many as you want to the Explorer icon, but it's still nice to be able to have single-click access to your most-used folders. Or you could just switch on the quick launch ...

The improved taskbar -- or Superbar, as it's really called now -- in Windows 7 offers loads of features which make getting at the files and folders you use frequently easier and faster. The four options I'll cover here don't require any additional software. They're all possible using features built right in to your OS, you just might not have realized it yet! Pin 'em to your Explorer icon ...

Whether you're a novice user or you know your operating system inside-out, chances are good that you like being able to personalize things a little. Changing sound schemes, placing icons on your desktop, changing your wallpaper -- that sort of thing. Unfortunately, that last tweak isn't possible if you're running Windows 7 Starter on a netbook. At least, it's not possible without a little ...

Anyone that writes about iPhone applications that isn't based in the United States has it rough; iTunes promo codes only work for US App Store accounts. That can make it tough to review iPhone and iPod touch software if you're not based in the US. Creating an account for the US App Store when you're not based in the US is against Apple's terms and conditions, so I'm not recommending that you do ...

We often get comments from readers who would like to be able to subscribe to specific feeds here on Download Squad -- Windows, Google, Firefox -- you get the picture. As it happens, you've always been able to do that. Here's how! The easiest method is to check out our Feeds Page. You'll find direct links to dozens of specific RSS feeds for the categories we use. Whether you're an Open ...