Windows Tools, Help & Guides

By Christoph Laumann, President and Managing Partner, TuneUp

Mozilla recently pre-released Firefox 7, also known as Aurora, which promises massive performance enhancements for Javascript and significantly lower memory usage. Over the past few years, Mozilla had gained a reputation as a somewhat slow browser, but that’s about to change with Aurora. This version sits right between the stable beta release of Firefox 6.0 and the highly experimental nightly builds currently running at version 8.0.

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Ever watch a commercial and think “I would NEVER buy that product” or “what kind of people watch this show? Why would I want to use/buy xyz?”

To focus online ads, many advertising companies track your activity as you browse from website to website (where their ads are displayed) and will build a profile of you to present more useful ads according to your interests and assumed demographics. These companies don’t collect personal information like your name and address; thus, you may find this information gathering helpful as you find yourself being offered more customized advertisements.

Or, you may see it as a violation of your privacy.

Simply disabling cookies will not alter the fact that your public IP address is available to these companies and, if you’re the only person/family using that address, you’ll still be profiled. If you’d like to opt out of these types of ads, you can do so very easily.

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If you’ve downloaded a file and are not sure you can trust it before opening it, did you know you can use Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) to scan it for viruses without running a full virus scan?  MSE lets you do this and it can help give you peace of mind before opening an unknown file.

This feature can be particularly useful if you’re opening a file from removable media (CD, DVD, external HDD etc.) and MSE’s real-time virus checker has not had a chance to do a preliminary scan at the file yet. If you’ve turned off real-time virus scanning, this will also help you avoid virus infection.

Caution: Even if a virus checker doesn’t detect a virus, never open a file from an untrusted source.

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This is a neat little trick for those spy wannabes, or those of you who are paranoid wanting a secret user account on your system. Okay it may not be a totally secret account, as the user folder will be visible after login anyways… Jokes aside, if you have a public available computer, you may want to make sure users log on, using the proper account(s). This can be achieved with a little tweak of the registry. The hidden accounts are of course available for log in, when you know where to look. Read the rest of this entry »

I Love pranks. How about you?  I’ve surfed the web for some pranks that I could share with you. Some are new, and some are updated “good old ones.” Feel free to share your own computer pranks in the comments.

[Disclaimer] Neither Mintywhite Staff nor I shall be held responsible (or liable) for any consequences you might suffer for using these pranks.  You do this at your own risk, so keep it clean if you would like to keep your friends (and job) …

On to the pranks

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Every now and then you need to resize a photo for different reasons. Being an eager hobby photographer I like to be able to print some of my photos. Sometimes I want to make smaller prints and sometimes I want to make large ones. Storing different copies of my images would not be a space saver, so instead I use a different method: Scaling using DPI.

[disclaimer] This guide is written using Photoshop, but there are several other programs available with the same capabilities as described here (like Paint.net). This guide will not focus on how to create photos for use on the web where pictures need to be downsized and data removed.

To be able to resize a photo (making it larger or smaller) without removing data you need to know what a digital photo is and you will also need to know what DPI is and how it works.  So let’s start with that.

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