Windows Tools, Help & Guides

The addition of a TV Tuner card turns your PC into a full “DVR” – a Digital Video Recorder. For those familiar with it, your PC becomes just like a “TiVo” box providing high quality record and play-back options from broadcast TV.
This tuner card also brings in all the available FM Stations.
In the US there are a wealth of stations to tune into and each of them has an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) transmitted along with the picture and sound and picked up by Windows Media Center for presentation in WMC on-line TV Guide.
The EPG is an essential part of a recording system because it provides a schedule of up-coming programs and allows you to schedule the recording not just of the show itself, but every show in the series (like all the episodes of “Family Guy” ) – you can even instruct the guide to record episodes of the show even if they are seen on different channels and at different times.

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My last post was about looking for basic signs of malware infections: 6 Signs Of Malware Infections

That post was a little introduction, about how to know if a virus and other sort of malware is on your computer.

Now, we are going to use utilities to look for that creepy software.

I am sure that many of you are thinking, why I need to know all of this stuff if I have an antivirus?

The answer is pretty simple: many times these applications cannot remove the virus, so it is very useful to know other ways to get rid of infections.

We are going to use free utilities that exists in the operating system that can reveal if any undesired program is in your computer.

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Have you ever run into a situation where you need to have an urgent modification on your word documents or excel sheets but found your Microsoft Office just doesn’t work for you at that particular moment? Or the Microsoft Office trial version just expired and you are looking for some similar services at zero cost?

Introduction

With the release of Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft have started to offer a free Cloud-based Office Web Apps which consists of four main applications – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. With Office Web Apps, you can now create, view, edit, share and collaborate on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents in the cloud, and all these can be done from virtually anywhere with a supported browser (yes, even a smartphone browser.) You do not have to install any plugins of software to enjoy the service; Office Web Apps only requires you to have a Windows Live ID–that’s all. Not only that, with Office Web Apps, you can have your precious 25GB of free storage space provided by SkyDrive filled up with your documents or notes, edit and share them on the fly, isn’t that sweet? Read the rest of this entry »

Update: Here’s the list of Best Free Antivirus Software [2012 Edition]

We’ve reviewed a number of Anti-malware programs on Windows Guides over the years but it seems some programs soon become bloated, include stolen definitions from other products, or just get outshined by new (or improved) competition. In this guide, I share the top five free anti-malware programs for 2010.

This is the second part of our series on the Windows Media Center. Did you miss the first part?

In this section we’ll take a look at the ways Windows Media Center can organise and present your movie collection.

Media Browser:

The “bare-bones” WMC movie component is pretty good, but a bit stark.  Fortunately the clever developers out in the world have come up with software packages to add functionality, flexibility, and better looks.

There are several to choose from but my choice for an enhancement to the WMC movie component  is “Media Browser“.  It sits as a separate icon in your WMC start page and handles your music collection as well, but we’ll focus on the movie parts for now. The front page is below. It’s fairly straightforward, adds a lot of functionality, it looks good – and it’s free.

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If you are the one who always helps your friend to reformat/reinstall Microsoft Windows on their PC or laptop, most likely you will have their Windows equipped with at least a free anti-virus software (so they will not bug you anymore to do the reinstallation due to incurable viruses), and a couple of maintenance tools for some advanced users. However, since there are new threats and viruses appearing everyday, and the security software companies always have their product updated every week or so, you can’t really (unless you have too much free time) keep your downloaded security software installer updated. Not only that, I have actually quite a number of friends having different preferences on the anti-virus/anti-malware software, so again you can’t really satisfy them all (again, unless you have too much free time). Read the rest of this entry »