Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod touch couldn’t be easier thanks to geohot.  This jailbreak will work for iPhone 3G, 3GS, iPod Touch 1st 2nd & 3rd Gen.  If your SIM Card is not legit, (ie. unlocked) do not attempt this.

I’m using an iPhone 3G for this guide so the steps depicted herein will be iPhone 3G.

Why Jailbreak?

“Jailbreaking is a process that allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to run unofficial code on their devices bypassing Apple‘s official distribution mechanism, the App Store. Once jailbroken, iPhone users are able to download many applications previously unavailable through the App Store via unofficial installers such as Cydia, Rock App, Icy, and Installer. Cydia is popular with users whilst Rock App has a small catalog of mainly paid apps. Icy and Installer are officially unsupported by their developers and rarely used. Cydia founder Jay Freeman estimates that 8.5% of all iPods and iPhones are jailbroken.^[1] A jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch is still able touse and update apps downloaded and purchased from Apple’s official App Store.”

Wiki…

Basically put, Jailbreaking your device breaks the Apple shackles and opens a whole new world of apps, themes, sounds & much much more!

Read the rest of this entry »

RSVR85 and I got together about a month ago and put together the Windows 7 Media Center Customization Handbook. RSVR85 took his previous Windows 7 Media Center Guides, updated them, and made them even easier to follow. I just put everything together and now it’s online and ready for your reading pleasure.

I’d like to thank RSVR85 for his hard work. This book is fantastic and I can’t wait to update my Media Center PC to Windows 7 so I can put these hacks into effect. His original forum post on the topic helped me customize Windows Vista’s Media Center (and this handbook will work, mostly, for Windows Vista Media Center.)

Download the Windows 7 Media Center Customization Handbook.

Read the rest of this entry »

James, from LAlarm.com, offers the following tip:

Don’t throw your old USB flash drive away. Instead, you can use an old flash drive to prevent your laptop from being stolen. Here is how.

Read the rest of this entry »

Windows Guides reader, TheManRetired, offers two guides to help users who are new to Windows. The first guide covers installation of Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 Free. This second guide covers setting up your first backup to CD or DVD. If you’d like to provide help (simple, advanced etc., let me know.)

Hopefully you have the program installed but if you don’t I have written up an installation document that shows how to install it and where to get the program with a link to site that I know has it, so here we are going to start using the program. The screen shot here are made using the FastStone Capture program. With Burning Studio you can backup just about anything that is on your hard drive but I suggest only backing up what you have created as you can never get all the files and registry setting for programs and it is safer and better to reinstall the programs anyway so they set right and work and you don’t have to try and find out why they are not working like before. Here I am backing some music files that I ripped from my cd’s but the principles apply to all your files, you will just have to change the location of where you get the files to places on your hard drive and sorry this document will not go into all the places on your hard drive that the files are, most of them on a windows system will be in my documents(or just documents depending on your version) and most of them are located under your user account in either Documents and Settings or under Users depending on your version of windows, I am not going into any Linux or Mac systems as I don’t have them but if you want to give me one I would be happy to write up a document like this for those systems.

Read the rest of this entry »

• Download this 4-part series as a PDF (Parts 1-4 +Extras)
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

10.  Speed Up Media Browser Using USB Flash Drive

I have quite a large movie collection, and find that MB can take a while to load all of the DVD covers & backdrops for the entire library.

Using a USB Flash Drive should eliminate this problem as they’re generally a lot quicker than your hard drive, anything that’s good enough for ‘ReadyBoost’ should suffice for this.  You should see a big improvement immediately.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you like to write or if you are compelled to write by work, school etc, you know how distracting it can be to use your computer. If I am not focused, I can take hours writing a paper because I take time to check my email, browse websites, play with my computer etc. In this guide, you’ll learn about Write Monkey and I’ll run you over the best features.

Read the rest of this entry »