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Deus EX 3: Human Revolution. Are you Excited?

2011-08-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

Deus Ex: Human Revolution has been given a lot of hype recently and the review from PC Gamer is just out with a 94/100 amazing score. Although I wouldn't trust their review or those early reviews that are usually paid, I've been pretty excited when I first heard the news of a new Deus Ex game. I played only the first game way back then and it remained one of my favorite games of all time.

So how do I feel about the new Deus Ex 3? Well, not so good after watching some of the gameplay on youtube. I haven't download the leaked beta and I don't really feel the urge of downloading, maybe its because of the videos I have been watching recently. It's just not that great.

I don't like to use the word consolized, because I believe it's possible to make good games on both PC & console. It's just that the games have been getting ridiculously easy & simple which pissed me off because I love hard & challenging games like the good old days that you would keep trying until you beat the game. Today's games are just no brainer, you need objective marker, highlighted objects to hold your hand throughout the game. I know in Deus Ex 3 you can turn it off, but it just defeat the purpose of exploring.

Another thing about Deus Ex is the enemies AI which are pretty bad as I seen in the videos. Now the only hope that I have left for this game is an amazing story & atmosphere which are the best part of the original game.

Different between printable coupons & coupon codes?

2011-08-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

It might sound weird and it's pretty obvious to tell the different between the two, so why the title? Well, I just recently stumble across coupons site while searching for some printable coupons that I can use in-store, but end up finding lots of coupon codes of online use instead. I have been reading the comments left by some poster asking how can they print the coupons with a set of code. Of course you can't those are code for online use, there's no way you can print them out and use it in-store. It surprises me some time how ignorant people's can be. Or maybe they are just not techie enough to understand the difference between the two unlike me who are writing this useless post. Anyway it's a weird rant and I thought since I haven't post anything in such a long time, why not?

How to get rid of earwigs

2010-12-11T20:24:00.000-08:00

Whether its an urban legend or truth that earwigs crawl in humans ears and nest in our brain. Although earwigs are pretty harmless to humans, you still want to get rid of them in your house just to be safe. here's a picture of earwigs:

Find their hiding places. Earwigs love to hang around dark and moist area. Check all cracks, old newspaper and basement where they usually hide. Once you find out their hiding place, now it's time to eliminate them. The easiest way of course is to spray insecticides around the area. If you have kids, animal and would like to protect their health, you can use a more natural solution such as baiting and cleaning. Soak unwanted newspaper in water and place it near earwigs nesting area overnight. Come back and pick it up in the next morning, seal it and throw it in garbage bin.

Now vacuum the area and mop the floor with soapy water. Wait for a few days and check the area again to see if the earwigs are coming back.

The best PS2 emulator

2010-08-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

Building an ps2 emulator is definitely not a simple job, and much more complicated than emulating ps1 games as developer stated. It has come a long way, and I can finally say that there is one very playable ps2 emulator around and that's PCSX2. To download the emulator go to its official website pcsx2.net

Is PCSX2 the best ps2 emulator around? Yes it's.

Can it play homebrew games? Yes, it can.

How's the game compatibility? Pretty good.

Now I have answered some of the most popular question. But don't get too happy yet. The emulator is still not as perfect as ps1 emulator. Most games I tried either have minor graphical issues or sound bugs and it does not look as good. Nonetheless it's still very playable. And also you need a very powerful CPU to run ps2 games at decent speed. Currently I'm using an amd athlon x2 5000+ 2.6 ghz with 9600gt nvidia graphic card, most games I played fps still dropped to under 40 very frequently including persona 3 and shadow hearts 2 convenant. You need to maintain the fps above 50 to play smoothly, otherwise it'll be slow and sluggish. Anything below 20 fps is basically unplayable. Although you can do some tweaking and hacking, it's not going to work well. So my guessing is you need at least a dual core 3.0 ghz above cpu to play perfectly, preferably an intel cpu as the current best graphic plugin work best with intel and support better direct x version.

I'm sure a perfect ps2 emulator is not very far away from now and definitely not impossible. Be a little bit more patient. I'll try to update again when the near perfect ps2 emulator is out. In the mean time, for those who have powerful cpu you can download the emulator and try it yourself.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Review

2010-08-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

I've completed the single player campaign for a while now and I stand by what I've wrote in my previous post, I'm not impressed. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty are getting mostly positive review from other websites and gamers, and I don't totally agreed with them. It's not a bad game by all means, it just does not live up to the hype. I'm not going to write a long review covering all aspect of the game, its a classic real time strategy games stay true to its root. There's nothing revolutionary here or anything fancy to talk about here, graphic is good, sound is ok, storyline not bad (I'm quite interested to see how they are going to do with the zerg storyline), and CG cutscene is good as well. If you haven't heard about, the only new element they added is a rpg like area where you can interact with characters, research and other thing. Seriously, if they cut out this part of the game, the game will be extremely short. How short you ask? I think I completed the game under 20 hours, and I'm playing it very slowly. I think I spent 1/3 of the time in the base, and the rest on the actual mission. Yes, it's definitely much more shorter than previous installment. Most mission play very much like tutorial introducing new units in each mission, all you have to do is to keep building them and complete your objective. There's a wide variety of mission types, nothing too memorable I must say. I completed most of them in under 40 minutes (slowly). So even there's 26 mission in the game, it still feel extremely short. There's not too much challenge in the game beside the last mission which I reloaded 3 times to win.

So does it worth the extra 10 bucks? Hell no! Not counting the multiplayer of course. Bottom line, I'm sure all fans will be pleased, it does not disappoint. Although I do hope they will at least improve the gameplay a little like after seeing what Relic did in company of heroes. If you haven't play this game, you should totally try it. Its the best real time strategy games in recent memory, or maybe the best in all time. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty still provide fun and enjoyable experience to the player, I finished the whole game so it couldn't be that bad. After all, rts is not my favorite genre in gaming. I preferred slower games like rpg, turn-based strategy like xcom, jagged alliance, fallout 1&2...etc. Unfortunately, its the least favorite in gaming market and slowly dying. What I'm trying to say is I could be a little bias, for rts fans StarCraft 2 might be a gem from the sky.

Final score: 8.5/10 (single player experience only)

How to host multiple domains with godaddy that are registered elsewhere

2010-08-08T05:39:00.000-07:00

Another problem I faced recently, I'm trying to host my namecheap domains on my godaddy deluxe plan. This time godaddy support were helpful enough, and I get it working very soon after. But they should really change the help section which provide wrong information. It would save us and theirs time if they have post the right information in the first place.

So I assume you know how to add extra domains in godaddy account. If you don't, launch your hosting control panel, go to setting, domain and add it accordingly. It takes a while before it's setup, so wait patiently. If your domain is registered at godaddy, it'll configure properly without any work from your site. But if your domains are registered elsewhere, you need to change the dns information on your domain.

The problem here is how do you get the right dns information for each domain? The dns you found on your hosting control panel will not work as it's probably different. To check each of your domain dns, go to setting > dns management. Now click on the domain list, and you should see a list of domains you have added. Click on the one you want to setup and you should be able to find its dns.

Now that you have the right dns information for the domain. You need to modify the dns at your registrar. If you are using namecheap, go to manage domain, choose the domain you want to change and click on change nameserver. Enter the first and second field with the dns you found on godaddy and click change. Wait for a while and you should see your site is now up and running.

Starcraft 2 coming July 27th. Are you excited?

2010-07-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

Haven't post anything for a while, so I thought I'd just voice my opinion on largest and most expensive game ever made in history, Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. It's near the release date, just one more week away before we can get our hands on it. I never played the Beta, but I do watch some videos on youtube. Honestly, I wasn't really impressed for I saw. There's really nothing new on the table, unlike company of heroes which totally blew me off when I first played it. Beside updated graphics, new units of course, a new rpg non-linear story line and over 25 mission which is considered rare in these day's, hopefully each mission can be as long as the original. It might not be a bad thing after all, if it aint broken don't fix it. If its half decent with great storyline, I'm sure I can still enjoy it. Would I pre-order or buy it on the day of released, I don't think so. No matter who make it, I'll definitely waiting for a review before I made a decision. But most probably I'm going to end up buying it, hey it cost blizzard 100 million and 7 years to make the game, it couldn't be that bad right? Blizzard have good history on making some of the greatest game, though I'm not too fond of their newer games, notably Warcraft 3. Still 100 million, wow I sure can't miss this game. Will Starcraft 2 live up to its name and big budget? Only time will tell, and its not too far away. I'll try to write a review of it after I started playing it.

Redirect non www to www for all sites using .htaccess

2010-04-01T23:12:00.002-07:00

If you just have a few site its easy to modify .htaccess to redirect all URL to start with WWW, just type in the following in .htaccess (if you don't have one, you can create using notepad and save it as .htaccess then upload to your server root directory):

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursitenamehere.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursitenamehere.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

When peoples visit http://yoursitenamehere.com, it'll automatically redirect them to http://www.yoursitenamehere.com

Its an easy process that doesn't take lots of time to do it, but what if you build hundreds of site. Are you going to change them one by one? You could, but its a time consuming and tedious task. You can make it easier by using the following code in .htaccess

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.%1/$1" [L,R=301]

As you can see above, you are not require to put in your domain name. But it'll work the same as the first one, and have been tested by me. Let me know if you experience any trouble with it.

How to cancel paypal billing agreement with Godaddy

2010-03-31T03:44:00.000-07:00

Alright, its an annoying process for me every time I use paypal to pay for my hosting with godaddy, somebody might find such feature useful though, but just not me. I'm not comfortable with any companies to charge me automatically without me acknowledging the payment, I don't know why some companies just don't give you a choice of preference. When you paid godaddy via paypal, it'll redirect to paypal and ask for your billing agreements. Remember, once you agreed, godaddy will be able to charge you automatically when your payment is due. If you'd like to use such service, its important for you to keep track of your expiring date if you want to cancel certain plans with godaddy.

How do you cancel the agreement? Its quite easy actually. Log into your paypal account, go to profile > paylist. You should be able to see godaddy or other companies you've billing agreement with, click on the company name and choose to cancel it. Click on return to overview to make sure you have successfully cancel the agreement, godaddy should be removed by now.

Where to find free online games

2010-03-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

Flash has become a very popular standard for free web games as its an easy tools to make either simple or complicated games depends on maker's profession. Almost everyone can make some sort of games with flash with a little research & learning, or just take a summer class to learn something more sophisticated. Thus, the internet is booming with thousands of free flash games made by different people's or companies. They are totally free to play online, its really not hard to find one of these site offering them. Even facebook's are stuffed with flash games including multiplayer support. Still, there's a lot of nice games you can't find on facebook. If you are looking for free flash games, casual or hardcore, visit free cool games for a wide selection of different genre flash games. Some other nice site includes jayisgames.com, nitrome, armorgames...etc. Bored, don't know where to surf, try one of these sites and enjoy some casual fun.

Batman Arkham Asylum Grapple/Glide fix?

2010-03-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm sure those who find this post are using pirated PC copies of Batman Arkham Asylum. It's weird to see people's asking such question while thinking it's a bugs of the pc games, no it's not! This is an anti-piracy counter measures implemented by Eidos to break your game at some point. So you can get a taste of the game and buy the original copy of Batman Arkham Asylum. Its a win-win situation. In fact, it's one of the most clever DRM I've seen which a crack doesn't seem to fix the problem after several months. There's some patch/crack released claim to fix the gliding and randomly missing grappling point problems, but none seems to fix it completely. Is there a fully playable pirated copies of Batman Arkham Asylum on the internet, no one knows. But some pirated gamers do says they completed the game with fixes available on the net, some claim it doesn't help at all. In the end, if you think its a good game, buy it!

Mass Effect 2 mini review

2010-03-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

So I just recently finished Mass Effect 2 on the PC, want to write a short review earlier but thought I should complete the game first before being bias. My final review stay the same when I was half way through the game.

It has been consolized meaning that everything made simpler. Mass effect is a multiplatform game so I can't really say consolized, but I'm PC gamer myself. I'm sure mass effect could have been a better game's if it were designed around PC. Its not ported by any means, you still get controls that are unique to pc that you'll appreciate.

I never played the first mass effect before so I can't judge the different, but from what I heard the rpg elements in the game have been toned down. You can still talk to certain NPC (nothing interesting) and key characters with various choices. From time to time there's fast decision making requires you to either left or right clicking mouse button to perform action. Successfully triggered action will give you points on either paragon or renegade side. My character was more on the paragon side near the end of the game, though I don't see any different on which side you take, but it could have certain effect on Mass Effect 3 when importing your save. Yes, I keep seeing the word Mass Effect 3 on the loading screen and the ending cinematic apparently hints on sequel.

Other rpg elements including planet scanning for minerals which gets really boring and annoying after a while like others reviewer says. There's no secret place or items you can find on these planet beside hunting for minerals by shooting probe on it. Minerals are important, because it is use to upgrades your weapons, armor, powers, ship and even research for new technology.

Most missions are tedious and forgettable. Developers don't spend much time on mission design apparently. You have to recruit around 10? people's to join your mission in destroying the collectors, and each of your members have a personal request mission you can do. Beside that, there's some small side missions around the planets. The problem here is there's basically nothing interesting happened in the process of the missions, you just go from one point to another, cover and shoot until you reach your goal. Most are the same cover and shoot, reach the goal types of mission.

The gameplay itself is okay. Covering and shooting is nothing new in the fps genre, beside guns you can use your biotic powers to attack enemies. You can also give orders to your members by pressing shift button which will temporarily pause the game to give out order or change your weapons. Weapons can be changed by pressing shortcut keys number or switch by x key. You can carry up to 4 weapons at a time, 2 light and 2 heavy weapons. There's also 2 shortcut key q & e to order your team members to move to certain area. Otherwise, you can just focus on shooting and let the AI do the job itself. The biotic powers is a very good added feature for the rpg element, unfortunately it doesn't feel as satisfy & powerful as in star wars game which end up to be just another thing to shoot.

The world of mass effect is very star wars like, futuristic with lots of alien races. Though I found mass effect world to be less appealing, it could be the design issues. The scene just doesn't look just as good or breathtaking, it looks blur and feel far away from you. There's no place in mass effect 2 would make you want to stop and just look around, you'll focus more on running to destination and shooting. The graphic in game is no bad at all, but the design could need some improvement.

Despite of all the downside I point out, Mass effect 2 is still an enjoyable game with interesting enough story backing up. It wouldn't be so successful without a good reason even though I think its overly hyped. Its a decent game, just not as good as I would expected from a game that get such high review score. Honestly ,I enjoyed the old republic and other star wars games much more. Still, I would give this game a score of 8.5 out of 10.

How long was the game? The game feels long enough, I guess I finished it in around 25+ hours. I completed all recruiting & personal request mission, plus some side missions from npc, I think I left around 2 or 3 undone. I also do a lot of mining minerals, I upgraded a lot including most if not all ship upgrades which requires most of your minerals. In the end, I still left with many unused minerals with well over 30,000 zero element. You'll know what I'm saying if you've played the game.

How to make a wordpress post stick on homepage

2010-03-21T06:40:00.000-07:00

Haven't update this blog for a while. Here's some nice tip to make a post always stick on the homepage. This is very useful if you want to inform your reader important news without it getting push back every time you make a new post. Actually wordpress already have such function implemented when making a new post, but it was hidden with an edit button which why most people's missed it. When making a new post, on the right hand side "publish column" click on the edit link and the option "stick this post to the front page" will be visible. Remember to tick the option before you publish your post and you are done. If you need other tips on wordpress, just shoot me a comment and I'll try to find a solution for me. Hope you enjoy this! And also I'll try to update this blog more often in coming months, but no guarantee though.

How to delete double spacing in Microsoft Words

2010-01-17T05:08:00.000-08:00

This happens to me quite often when I open a word documents received or downloaded from other sources. I'm not quite sure if it was software compatibility issues or other reasons, every now and then I received word documents with double spacing right after the period. I was still using the old microsoft word 2005 and some of the words I received are in newer version, that might be the problems. Of course this is not the only reasons, if you are using custom or other software to exports data to MS Word, it could cause the same problems. It might be even worse, resulting in double space in every words or randomly. Are you deleting the extra spaces manually? Don't do that! There's a much easier way!

There's a function in word that let you replace anything with a single click of button.

1.) Go to Edit > Replace
2.) In Find What- insert: ^w
3.) In Replace with- insert: ^s
4.) Click replace all
5.) Done!

Easy right? You'd be punching in your face if you have been wasting time doing it manually. Next time search the net for solution especially when it involves in computer. Word smarter not harder :)

Best Web Traffic tracking tools

2010-01-15T14:02:00.000-08:00

If you owns a website, you'd be interested in how many visitors you're getting daily. But how do you track your web visitor's? Easy, by using free web counter or whatever it's called. There's a lot of such web counter available for free, and the best or most popular ones are Google Analytic, Site Meter & Extreme Tracking. So which do I think is the best? Ranking is in order, Google Analytic is my top choice in my opinion, hey it's made by Google! Not only it's made by Google, Analytic provides some of the most details information about your site visitors you'd ever seen including total unique, total pageviews, country, browser, operating system, entry page, referral...etc. Almost every details you would want to know. Compared to other web counter provider, there's only one feature that's in Site Meter that cannot be found in Google Analytic, and that's real time access report. It lets you see who is accessing your page at the moment. The only downside about Google Analytic I can think of is the Ajax intensive interface. It's not a bad thing and it looks really good, but if you have slow or unstable connection, then you'd have problem accessing it. Really, it's not a big problem, I'm only experiences a few time while using 3g connection. On the other hand, Site Meter and Extreme Tracking are using plain html page which loads a lot more faster. If you are on fast connection, then you wouldn't notice any differences.

So why there are still so many people's using site meter and extreme tracking? Well I'm not too familiar with other 2 tracker so I can't tell you much. Maybe it's easier to access because you don't have to login to see the statistic every time, but that also means you'll be sharing the information with the public. I've installed Site Meter on this blog, you can check it out at the very bottom of the page. Site Meter doesn't looks too bad, it track all important information about the visitors and its easy to access, so are you. The bad thing about site meter is that you can't track different website with the same account like google analytic, you need to sign up a new account for each site which could be troublesome. In google analytic, you can just toggle between site with a drop down list which is convenient when you have more than 2 sites. I haven't really test the accuracy of either web counter, but all three web counter are accurate in tracking visitors or so I heard.

How do you install web counter to your website? First choose your preferred tracker, then you need to sign up an account with the service provider. After you done that, just login to your account and follow the instruction to get the tracking code. Once you obtain the code, you need to put it in your site. If you are using blogger or wordpress, login to your account and find the option to modify your site code. For blogger, go to layout > Edit HTML, scroll to the very bottom and insert the code just before /body. It's the same for most open sources site. You can actually put the code anywhere you want, but it's highly recommended to put it at the very end as if something happen to the tracking code such as downtime, it won't affect your site loads. You can do the same in wordpress, just modify the footer.php in templates and save it.

Dragon Age Short Review

2010-01-13T14:48:00.000-08:00

Alright, I've just finished Dragon Age, successor of old-school classic role playing game Baldur's Gate, and I just want to share my opinion on the game. Before Dragon Age released, I was extremely excited as I love long rpgs that can keep me playing for months. To tell the truth, I wasn't really impress with the game when I first started it, maybe I was expecting too much? In a nutshell, it's the same old school rpg with better graphics and more angle of views. But when I go deeper into game, I got sucked into the world of magic and fantasy. It's such a well crafted world, kudos to bioware making such amazing game. I haven't really get addicted to a game for so long that I can't even remember. Believe me, play the game for at least 10 hours before you judge, if you still don't like, maybe something more fast paced such as FPS would appeal you more.

If you ask me what's the good thing in Dragon Age, I can't really pin point the pros. I guess it's the world, the atmosphere and how people's interact with each other. And you can tell spend a lot of time on dialogue and conversation. One of the reason I love the conversion so much, and I have to admit its because of the arrogant bitch Morrigan. Listen to her conversation with other characters were so fun and funny at time, and it also gave me a reason to go camping to talk with other characters. Though I just want to flirt with Morrigan and bed with her, lol. Alright I'm a pervert. If you played as a female character, you can also flirt with other male character, and some of the conversation between them are quite funny or so I heard.

I've already play through the game once, and reload some later save game to chose a different path and see the ending result. I don't think I would play it again, come to think of it I never replay any game in my life time. I'd really like to talk about the gameplay, but there's nothing really special or unique to talk about beside better graphics and possible spell combination. Bottom line if you like western rpgs, Dragon Age does not dissapoint.

Not much of a review I guess, but I just want to say its a great rpgs or best in my recent memories. Witcher and drakensang is good too and I'm waiting for the Witcher 2 coming out this year probably. You know, recent gaming industry is all about FPS, modern warfare or MMORPG...etc. Can't blame the developer though, it's much profitable and most people's likes that kind of game. All I can do is hope there's more game such as dragon age coming out in the future, guess the next rpgs/fps for me is Mass Effect 2.

Wordpress Themes Adsense

2010-01-13T14:30:00.000-08:00

If you'd like to build an adsense site with wordpress, chances are you'd have headaches implement the code. So why not use some themes that are built specially for adsense, of course it may not be the best looking wordpress themes out there, but it helps you to maximize your adsense earning. And that's the purpose of you building an adsense wordpress site, right? It's not impossible to implement to other wordpress themes, it's just more troublesome and require some knowledge in html and CSS code. Unless if you have the time and willing to learn, you might as well as use a pre-made one. Side note: Beside using an already monetized proven adsense themes, you can chose to use adsense plugins instead for your existing or new site.

Here's two I loved best and its both made by doshdosh.com, a very nice site talking about SEO and internet marketing. Anyway, one of the theme is call doshdosh? And another is call Prosense, both can be found at the site and free to download. I think they provide more than just 2 adsense wordpress themes, search their themes section and see which fits your site best.

SEO Plugins for Wordpress

2010-01-12T14:47:00.001-08:00

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an important process to get your website ranking high in search engine or shall I say Google. Seriously, when people talking about seo it's all about google as it normally brings more traffic for most webmaster than yahoo or bing (msn). There's onpage, offpage and others seo factors, and I'm talking about onpage seo right now. Title and keywords are the most important factor when considering onpage seo, optimizing for each pages can be very time consuming if you updates your site very frequently. If you are using wordpress for your site or blog, there some very good plugins out there to minimize your work and optimize your site to the fullest. Although many might not seem important at all, but there's never too many, every bit count! Even if it's just for yahoo or bing. Ranking first and second is whole lot of different.

So here's the list of plugins that I'll surely install along with every new wordpress site set up.

1.) All in one SEO - Even if you search for the most popular plugins on wordpress site, All in one SEO comes to the top. Basically, it allows you to modify how you want your title to be shown and customize your own description and keywords in Meta.

2.) Homepage Excerpts - Ever wonder how to set the total words for each post displayed on homepage. Homepage Excerpts do just that, setting the words displayed and total of full articles displayed on homepage.

3.) Wordpress page numbers - By default wordpress used next and previous for content pages. There's nothing bad about it until you have too many post and your old articles to pushes back to 5th or even 20th page. That would takes 20 clicks to reach the last page! And Google would deemed those page as unimportant so as the articles within it. With Wordpress page numbers plugin, it display in number instead, so you can jump through each pages easily and so are for Google crawlers. Maybe it's not the most important features, it's definitely better than next link for either your reader or Google.

4.) Cloud tags - Well only if you use tags for your site. I think there's already such funtion in wordpress but it's not set active by default. If you use tags, go to sidebar setting and drag all the widgets you want it to display on homepage to the right hand side. If there isn't a tags widget in wordpress or you need something more configurable, try searching for keyword tags on wordpress official site.

That's all I recommend above for wordpress SEO plugins. Of course, there might be a lot more cooler plugins that I'm not aware of. If you do have some to recommend, post a comment and let other readers know about it. You know, sharing is the way to success.

Dragon Age data error occurred fix

2010-01-08T11:35:00.000-08:00

If you found this post, I'm sure you are desperate to find a fix to Dragon Age data error occurred when installing. There's a lot of people's are having the same issues and discussing over both EA (electronic arts) & bioware forum, but none of the official forum provide a fix to the problem. Can you believe that? Both company are just pushing the blame to each other and left us scratching our head. I swear I'll never buy a products that have anything to do with EA in future. What a blood sucking company that do not care about their customers, they just screw everything up.

Alright here's the good news, thanks to those gamer's who are kind enough to share their knowledge in fixing the data error occurred problems, I'm sharing it here too that's what work for me and it should probably be working for you too. It seems like many people's are experiencing the data error on different parts of installation, I've tested it both on my netbook & desktop, netbook installation stop at the very end before the data error message pop up and my desktop installation stop much earlier at around the textures extraction. But with the same copy of dragon age, it's working on my brother Dell laptop running on Windows 7 ultimate 32 bit. So yeah it's weird, it could be hardware compatible issues. Staff at EA told us that they can't reproduce the problem on their machine too, thus unlucky for a small group of people like us or large? We have to fix it ourself. Of course EA support do provide some possible fix such as moving all files to hard drive and some method are just too complicated to follow. I have one that are easier or so I think.

To fix Dragon Age data error problem, you need an extraction software 7-zip which can be downloaded free at www.7-zip.org. Winrar does not work as it does not allowed extration of corrupted files, on the other hand 7zip force extract even part of the files are broken. I'm going to post the solution in steps format to make it easier for you to follow:

1.) Copy all files from your DVD to your hard drive.

2.) Open the "installmanifest_en.ini" in data/

3.) Delete everything and left only (also change the NumberOfFiles to 0)
[Response]
NumberOfFiles=0
NumberOfInis=0
AdditionalFileSize=500000
Build=9353
SKU=ENESRetail

This will prevent the installation from extracting files from data folder and install only important registry key and some other infos.

4.) Run setup.exe and install the game into any folder in your HDDs. It should take only a few seconds as there's no files being extract to the game folder, but it's an important process to make the game work.

5.) Go to /data folder. See all those .rar files? You have to use 7-zip and extract all of them to your game folder.

6.) For example in /dragon Age folder. After extracting all files, you should see /bin_ship, /data, /modules, /docs, /packages & DAOriginsLauncher.exe in the main folder.

7.) Go to /bin_ship/ and double click daorigins.exe to start the game. You can create a shortcut on the desktop for easy access in future.

This method works for me and playing it right now. But maybe because of the CRC broken files in some .rar file, some movies & sounds do not work. For example most of the time I can't hear anything when Morrigan is speaking which isn't a big deal for me as you can still turn on the subtitle and read. Most other voice acting and movies are working perfectly fine though. If you really want to fix this problem, you can swap the broken files with your friends or other nice users on the internet.

This fix to data error problem is very easy, just a little bit more troublesome. Some other method suggested by other gamers including changing DVD rom, copying to files HDD and updating your software. But if none of above method works for you, try this method as it work for many others.

Post a comment here if you have any question. Hope after reading this, you'll be able to play dragon age in no time! Happy adventuring!

Quality of R5 version Movies

2009-12-10T01:41:00.000-08:00

If you have been downloading free movies online, you should come across different version of released. The quality order from worst to best start from CAM, R5, DVD-rip, HD DVD and Blu-ray. As you can see R5 version released is better than cam but worst than DVD, so how is the quality? Well I'm not sure what r5 means, but the quality is good, clear wide screen with no shadow moving over the screen. The downside of r5 version is the sound quality, actually it's not that bad, it's clear enough and loud but there is buzzling sound in the background which might turn off some peoples.

Anything starting from DVD quality is the best you can get. R5 quality is acceptable if you can't wait for the DVD and not too picky over the quality of sound. As for CAM version, it's not worth the time downloading at all, the quality and sound is just too bad to enjoy. Watching movies is a form of entertainment, don't waste your time watching a cam version of movies, it'll just frustrate you more than enjoyment.

If you can afford a ticket in the movies theater, it's still the best way to watch & share a movies with a group of friends. The feeling of what you have paid for a good movie on big screen is still different from watching on a computer.

Coding Plays a Big Role in Site Speed

2009-12-09T13:39:00.000-08:00

Ok, one of my larger site which receives around 4000 unique visitors per day is having problems again recently, this time it's caused by Mysql database. My website have a large user base, it has around 150,000 members and it's increasing daily. In all honest, I have no idea if the slowness of my site was caused by the constant mysql connection or the VPS hosting I'm with is just slow. If you have been keeping track of my blog, you know I just moved from shared hosting to VPS a month ago. At first, the server was fast and I'm happy with it, but recently it's taking longer and longer to load. The average of the site speed was 13 seconds, and sometime it can be as long as 30 seconds plus! The recommend loading speed of a site should be less than 4 seconds on a 10mbps connection or visitors might just click back and go to other sites. It'll take longer to load if the visitors are on DSL or dial-up connection. So if you sites are slow, it's something you should be worried about.

Anyway I asked my hosting about the issues and I was told it was caused by high loads of Mysql database. Some of the processes are not dying off and it's eating up a lot of CPU resources. After numerous communication and fixing the database, it does seems to be improving but the average speed of the server still stay at around 8 seconds which is extremely slow for a VPS server. Hey I pay 4.99 per month on a shared hosting and it even run faster than my current Vps which I pay 49.90 per month. If there isn't any concurrent limitation on a shared hosting, I'd definitely considered going back. In the end, I still haven't figure it out what is really causing the slowness of the site, I attempt to close a few more function on the site to test the speed. Every time I send a new ticket to the support, they always come back with new excuses. Even picking on queries that don't run very often. I'm not a programmer or expert in these hosting thing, so I'm not sure if what they are telling is truth or not. Maybe it's possible that my site coding is causing the problem, but is it enough to make a VPS server this slow? I have already killed off a lot of unnecessary queries in the database, but it's not helping a lot. What baffled me was it run fine before and I haven't change anything, why so slow all of a sudden. I can understand If it was slow on peak hours, but the server seems to be slow all of the time. That just doesn't make sense.

I have thought about moving to another provider, if it wasn't for the huge files I have, I think I've already moved. As for now, all I can do is try to optimize my script and database and hope it'll get better soon. Worst come to worst I can just find another hosting and move, that's really the last resort I'd want to take. I'll let you know if I find the real causes of this slowness.

What I want you to know is that coding plays a major role when you have huge database and visitors. One bad line of code could affect the speed of your site. Remember to close Mysql process at the end of the code, and set a timeout to kill off processes running in the background.

Homepage showing apache page. How to fix?

2009-11-29T12:29:00.000-08:00

I'm having the same problem when setting up new site in my VPS hosting. That's the good thing about VPS, unlike shared hosting you can host as many sites as you want as long as you don't overused your server allocated resources. Anyways, I was trying to set up a new wordpress blog. After creating a new account for the site and uploaded all wordpress files, the homepage was still showing temporary apache page. Initially I thought I should just wait for a while for it to sort it out itself, but nothing is changing after an hour. So, I decided to contact my host servint for solution. As a side note, if you are looking for an VPS hosting, servint is one the best around. It's a little more expensive than other vps hosting but the speed and support is top notch.

Before the support could give me any solution, the site itself solved the problem itself again. The email support was fast though, I waited around only 15 minutes. While waiting for an answer, I haven done something to the account, and it could be the solution to the problem. If not I'm not sure what's causing it? As this is the only thing I've done to the account. If you happened to have the same problems, here's my solution.

You need to create an A host for your new site. If you are using WHM Cpnel, login to your account, find the option edit DNS under DNS zone. Scroll to the bottom and insert your server information for A host, example:

ns1 14400 A xxx.xxx.xxx.1
ns2 14400 A xxx.xxx.xxx.2

It doesn't seems to take effect immediately for my case. Wait for around 5-10 minutes and check your site again. If it's still showing apache page, I think you should contact your hosting and ask them to fix it for you.

What's Class C IP

2009-11-26T01:08:00.000-08:00

I've just recently searched for the same information and I thought some webmaster might be interested to know what are class C of IPs. If you are doing link building for your site, you should heard something like don't exchange link with the same C class of ips website as it's bad in the eyes of Googgle bot. Google discourages unnatural cross linking of your own sites using the same anchor keywords to achieve high ranking. No one know how true the information was, it's just a rumours how google search engine works to prevent site owner from buying lots of domain and cross linking among the sites to manipulate the rankings. Of course google se has other ways to prevent spamming such as the age of the domain & how trustable the site is. So if you want to make your link building campaign more naturally, it's advisable to get a link from different Class C of IPs than yours.

Let's see how does a normal IP looks like: aaa.bbb.CCC.xxx - I think now it's very clear to you even without further explanation. Did you see the C parts? That's the C class of IP. To determine if your sites are in the same C class of IPs, for example:

111.111.111.1 and 111.111.111.2 are in the "same" C Class
111.111.111.1 and 111.111.222.1 are in the "different" C Class

Some smaller hosting companies manage a single or very few C classes of IPs, thus it's hard to get multiple different C Class of IP with the same hosting company. Some larger hosting companies have wider range of C Classes Ips & even B Class but unless you request your sites to be on a different C Class of IP you might still end up on the same C Class of IPs.

This information was found on a forum, it might not be accurate. But it's an easy way to understand what's class c ip and give you an good idea on what you should look for in finding host for your sites.

Can I make money online without building my own website?

2009-11-18T10:31:00.000-08:00

From my experience, the best way to makes money online is through selling products or making your own website. Selling product isn't an easy task, you have to search and negotiate with local suppliers for a good price. Then you need capital to buy these products online and sell on the internet. It's a time consuming procedure and it doesn't guarantee that you would make any money from it. Of course you could do dropship, but the profit margin would be much lower than holding stock yourself. I'm not going deep into selling product online, instead I'm going to focus on building websites.

It's no surprise why most peoples prefer building website over selling online. Because it doesn't requires a lot of initial investment, you can even do it in the free way if you want. Once you launch your site, you just need to focus on writing contents for your site, there's very minimum maintenance needed. You don't have to answer customer question or deal with return orders. That's the best thing about building a website, if you do it right, the chances of making money online could be much more easier & profitable than selling online.

Don't ever think building a successful website is easy, I've seen a lot of success cases but a lot more failed to make any money online. It takes time & patience before you can see good money coming in, probably a year or two and of course it could be shorter or even longer.

I know it's hard for newcomer, I've been through this before. There's one way you can make money instantly if you are willing to invest good amount of money. I'm not talking about get rich quick scheme, MLM or buying eBooks. Trust me, those what called expert selling making money ebooks online are pretty much useless. Most of them are just a compilation of guides which you can easily find it online for free., there's no what they called secret in making money online. I've bought some and regret every time. So don't ever waste your money on these ebooks, you are just throwing away your hard earned money into the seller pockets.

Yes, the way to make money instantly is to buy an already money making website. You can find a lot of peoples selling it for a year of profit. But be very careful not to be scammed by the seller, make sure the information he gave is accurate and ask if you are confused. Never transfer money to the seller account before he transfer the site to you. You can request the seller to transfer the site first to be safe or use escrow service to do the transaction. It'd be safer for both party.

Be patient not to jump right into BIN (buy it now), do more research and make sure it's what it claims. If there isn't any good site for sell, check the selling forum everyday, some good one will definitely comes by. If you bought a stable source of income, you can easily make it back in a year and that's isn't long at all. After that, every cents you make is your money to keep and you can reinvest it back to different source of income. Another good thing about buying website is that you don't have to learn everything from ground up which takes a lot of time. Through the courses of maintaining a successful money making website will give you a lot of experiences. The website is your properties on the net and all the statistics are valuable information for your future venture.

Buying a website is probably the best way to make money online fast. The biggest profit site you buy the more you have to pay, if you can't afford to buy a large site, try something smaller that's well within your budget. For an established money making website to sell for just a year of profit, I think it's a good deal and investment. But if you sees something that are too good to be true, it's too good to be true.

Do I need a VPS hosting?

2009-11-17T08:31:00.000-08:00

Let's first understand hosting. You rent a server from a company and use their resources by paying monthly or yearly fees depends on which company you host with. Shared hosting means you share the same IP & resource (CPU, RAM) on one server with maybe hundreds of other users. While VPS gives you your own unique IP addresses & more control over the server such as root access, and also you share the resource with less users. Why do you need root access? Well, this is quite a difficult question for me, but one thing I do know is that you can freely install any third-party software in the server, there's more to root access beside that. If you are interested you can try wikipedia for more information. And dedicated means you are the only user of the server and you have full control over it. Some company even let you customize your own server such as more hard drive space or more RAM in case you need it.

When you are looking for a shared hosting, I recommend you to search for company that allows more concurrent connection or maximum user connection at a time. The more resonable one would be over 50, the more the better. Ask the hosting company if you can't find such information on their site, most if not all have concurent limitation on shared hosting. This is to make sure your site doesn't slow down other users on the same server and it's also one of the bad thing about shared hosting. Normally, if you just start out a new site with little traffic or less than a thousands visitors per day. You should be fine on a shared hosting. But that really depends on the nature of your site, for example if you provide large downloads for user, that'll result in many constant connection to your site, your shared server might not be able to handle even there's only 500 visitors per day. So it's your job to keep track of your own site and traffics, if you see constant downtime of your site or keep receiving 500 internal errors. It's about time to move to VPS. For your first hosting, I do somehow recommend godaddy. Their server is rather slow but the uptime is good. On top of that, they allows 100 - 200 concurrent connection on their shared hosting depends on the plan you decide to buy. I have to say it's quite a lot for a shared hosting, I've seen company offer 50 and even as low as 25 concurrent limitation. It's good for new site if the price is really cheap, but if your site grow fast you'll need a new server very soon.

What's Google Sandbox? And how long does it takes to come out?

2009-11-17T00:13:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that Google is the biggest search engine out there and you'll probably get the majority of traffics from google. You might get more from Yahoo or Bing in rare occasion if they favor your site. Anyways, either you want to know what's sandbox about or wondering why you still haven't get any traffics from google, it's because of the sandbox.

Sandbox effect is a word internet webmaster use to referred to the penalty Google search engine placed on new domains. This is to prevent search engine optimizers (SEO) from manipulating the search engine ranking by creating hundreds or thousands of incoming links in short period of time. Every new domains will be placed in the sandbox for 3-12 months depends on the competiveness of the market. Although there's a lot debating over whether the sandbox effect exist or not in webmaster community, there's indeed some sort of filtering and observation period for every new sites. Sandbox basically is just a part of google search engine architectual to determine a site ranking. So either you agree or not, sandbox or whatever you want to call it does exist to prevent spamming or low quality site. As for how long, it's hard to determine. I've created 3 new sites 3 months back with unique content updated daily. Although it's getting little traffic from google, the index rate is extremely slow. Even if my new content pages were indexed, it doesn't rank well at all for the very long exact keywords. In comparison, another site which I built long time ago, new pages were indexed in almost hours and rank well instantly even though the content is duplicated. You see the difference just because the age of the site? I still can't tell you exactly how long, but i'll let you know when the new site I created is out of sandbox.

Another issues webmaster like to debate over with is the competitiveness of target keywords. Yes, it's true that if the keyword you target doesn't have any or very little competition such as your domain name, you can rank on the first result immediately after google indexed your site. Unless there's any searches for the keyword, it's pointless anyway. Remember the most important parts of getting high traffic is through all your content/inner pages, all these little traffic adds up. If you are in google sandbox, you can't rank well for all these pages. That's the reason why I think the sandbox does exist. But that doesn't mean that targetting one top searches keyword is bad, it's not advisable if you don't want what you are doing. Try concentrating more on your inner pages and create unique articles everyday.

What you can do while you are in sandbox is to build more incoming links to your site, adding more contents. Another things I'd like to mention is that the effect of the link doesn't take effect immediately. You can say there's some kind of link sandbox too, you'll only see result after 3 months, the longer the better. So it's wise to start building in early age. But do not over build incoming link, let it flows naturally. Otherwise, google might put your site in sandbox for a longer period of time. Quality is over quantity. Look for high quality links instead of low quality links. Google have the top phycologist working for them, they know what you'll do to try manipulating the ranking. But they are pre scripted bots afterall, work smartly and you'll beat the sandbox effect.

Best Netbooks

2009-11-16T09:52:00.000-08:00

There is no deny that the netbooks is the current hottest portable computers on the market. What's a netbooks you ask? Basically it's the smaller & lighter version of laptops/notebooks, and the screen size are usually under 11 inches to be categorised as netbooks. So what's the big deal? Many people seems to wondering why the big fuss over netbboks, isn't it just a smaller laptops? Yes it's, and that's what people want today's. Netbooks are much lighter and featuring longer battery life up to 10 hours compared it to 3-4 hours laptops. And that fits the purposes of having a portable computer! Don't you agree?

I myself bought a netbook a few months back and loving it. I need a portable computers that are light to carry around and last long enough with a single charged, ntebooks serve the purpose well for me. You think 6 pounds and 3 pounds are not much of a different, believe me it does make the difference. I owned a 14 inch Dell laptop before and I gave it to my brother after I bought a netbook. It feels so much comfortable when using it on a bus/car because of the size and weight, and it doesn't take up too much space on a coffee table with friends. Hey, Starbucks we can sit there all day long and we doesn't need your plug!

Now to the main parts. What's the best netbooks out there? Before I bought my netbooks around 6 months back, I've done a lot of research on net and decided to buy the Asus eeepc 1000HE. Asus eeepc 1000HE is one of the most popular netbooks out there because of what it offers and price. It's not perfect, but it's a well rounded netbooks for its price. To tell the truth, I haven't found one that's perfect yet as there's always one bad thing or downside in all the netbooks I researched. Even the best netbooks, you can easily find a few bad reviews from users. The best netbook for you is all depends on the downside you can oversee, either to be the hardware or price. For example, the Asus eeepc 1000HE has great matte screen that's bright and crisp. There's very mininum flex on the keyboard and it got the top of the line specs in the netbook categories. But the mouse button is some of the worse on the market, it's stiff and very hard to press, and you can hear very loud clicking sound which is the main reasons why some peoples give up on this netbook. Do a search on amazon reviews and I guarantee that's the most complaint on Asus eeepc 1000HE. It's unbelievable that the manufacturer can't even make a decent mouse button, did they even try it themeselves? I can get over with this is because I'm used to using sensor pad, the multi gesture touch or whatever it is called is working very well dor me. When I'm at home, I'll just plugin a usb mouse.

My second candidate was the Toshiba NB200. The price was a little bit higher, but what you get is a stylish and very well desgin netbook that stands out of the crowd. It could be the best looking netbooks out there at the moment. I'm was tempted and seriously considered to buy. What kept me from choosing the toshiba nb200 is the higher price and most importantly the speaker sound. The sound volume when set at maximum is just around 30% of what you get on asus eeepc 1000he. Personally I don't like to use a earplug or headphone, but some people prefer to use headphone and they can get over with this. As for me, this is a break deal. Some times it's just personal preference.

After I bought my netbook, I haven't been reading or searching for the newest out there. There might be a better one that came out after I bought mine. If you ever come across the two model I mentioned above when researching, you know what's good and bad about them. Compare to the other ones and see which suit you best. I heard the Samsung nc100 is not a bad netbook either and I think it's even cheaper than asus eeepc 1000he with the same specs.

Why Build your Own Computers?

2009-11-15T02:11:00.000-08:00

I still remembered building my own very first computer and it takes me over an hour to double check everything before I pressed the power button. It was more than a decade ago where the manual instruction sucks and you have to cmos your computer? I'm not too sure what it's called, basically you have to tun on the power for 3 seconds and shut it off just to let the electricity run through the motherboard, then change the jumper back and turn it on. Luckily, you don't have to do all this shit nowadays and most manual are very well written. Manufacture even made their motherboards easy to work with by implementing some safety features that prevent you from plugging the wrong way.

I just recently built another new PC, it wasn't too difficult but unfortunately I got a defective board! So I have to drive all the way back to the shop and have it tested and changed. That's the downside of building your own computers when it's not working as it should. The very critical moment is when you turn on the power, if you sees something on the screen, cheers! You can start installing Windows or whatever in your computer. If you sees nothing, black screen but cpu is still running, you are most probably got a defective board. That's the reason why people don't want to build their own computer, instead buy a new one directly from companies.

Let's take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of building or buying computers. Why build your own computer when you can buy the whole set? Because it's cheaper and you got the choices over your hardware. If you are a gamer or you are very picky with the sound system, keyboard or other hardwares, you might want to consider building your own. With the same price, you can easily build a computer that's better than buying in a set. Maybe a better keyboard, better graphics card, more RAM or faster CPU. This is the scenario where you want better specs on a tighter budgets. The downsides of building your own computer is time consuming and got the higher chance of getting defective products.

If you have the money and willing to pay for your time, then buying computer might be a better choice. Buying computer in the past might not be as good as building your own, but companies have gotten cleverer in offering different computer targetting different gropu of users. If you are a gamer, they would include a more powerful graphics card, cpu or more RAM. If you just need a computer for internet and wording, then an integrated graphics is more than enough. And this should lower the cost for budget minded consumers. If you buy from HP or Dell, they already tested it and make sure the computer is working fine before you buy it. OS for your choice such as Windows is already installed and ready to use. All you need to do is plug in the power supply and you are ready to use. If there's any problems in the middle, just send the whole computer back within the warranties and they fix it for you. Computers from HP and Dell some times includes bloatware or unnecessary software in your PC. If you have the proper knowledge you can uninstalled it though.

If you want hassle free experience and don't care too much about the hardware as long as it works, buying a computer might be a better choice. I know some user doesn't care their keyboard sounds like a piano as long as they can surf the net and play some movies. If you are very picky person over quality of products, you might want consider building your own. It might takes long time in researching and building, but I think it'll save you more time in future. Once you have experience building a computers, whenever you meet a problems or hardware failure, you'll be able to fix it on your own. Sending back to manufacture could possibly left you with no computer for weeks or even months.

Building a computer might not as hard as you think, you just have try it once. The computer you build will last you years to come.

Proof for the Future

2009-11-12T09:22:00.000-08:00

Hey, by the time I was writing this, I'm sure there isn't a single visitors here yet. I didn't keep track of it, it has been 3 months since I started this blog to post my random things. It's still fairly new and I really didn't do much.

The reason why I'm posting this message is to let my future visitors know that I'm not earning any money from this blog at this moment, and hopefully I'll be able to earn decent income in future. I don't know when will the day come, but if it does, I'll post it again and refer back to this post.

I'm the kind of person who believe in working hard and I'll prove it to you through this blog.

Make Money Online

2009-11-11T22:49:00.001-08:00

How to make money online or work from home is some of the most popular searches on the web. Hey, who doesn't want to work comfortably at home and spend more time with family and friends or even travel? These are some of the priveliege working from home, no more boring day job. But it's possible to earn enough money to live a comfortable life? Yes, it's possible but not easy either. Internet is a free market, peoples comes in and out fast, once a market becomes over saturated it falls. If everyone can make money online so easily, then they'll be no more day job. It's about balance. Remember not to put all eggs in one basket, diverse it. A venture that' s making you a lot of money today does not mean it'll continually making you money in future, internet is a fast changing market. Once you have made enough money on the net, invest it in other areas or set up an offline business. Also those who live in 3rd world countries would be easier to live off with the same amount they earn in developed countries because their living cost in so much lower.

There's many ways you can earn online and it's hard for me to get in details with every one of them. I'll guide you to the few that you can actually earn money in long term and tell you which you shouldn't even try. I've been in this market for a while now but sadly I'm not making a lot of money. I can tell you my experience that takes me years of research, don't ever try to get into get rich quick scheme, MLM program, paid to surf, paid to read, paid to click or paid survey. It might earn you a little money, but think long-term and don't waste time on these program like I do before. Believe me and you'll save a lot of time.

So what's the working method of making money online. Here's a quick list: eBay, selling, affiliate, adsense, CPM or publising ads on your site.

eBay can earn you good money only if you have product to sell. I've done dropship before and it's earning me good money, but it also takes time to manage the business. What's dropshipping? Dropshipping means you don't keep stock, you work with the company and sell for them. You can get your order through eBay, your own site or other portal than forward your customer order details to your dropship company and they'll ship it for you. Normally, you set the price yourself, the dropship company will charge you at wholesale price and you sell it for your retail price. The price in between is the money that you'll earn. Actually, it might not sound as easy. First you need to find a dropship company who are willing to work with you, the best way is to visit them directly. Then, there's a lot of fees involve in the transaction such as shipping, ebay fees and other charges. If you can't markup the price high enough, you might not make decent enough money. So before you decide on dropship business, calculate all the fees invlove and make sure you can actually make enough money through this.

If you don't like the idea of droshipping, then affiliate might be the right one for you. Affiliate is where you refer peoples to purchase at the company you associate with, and they pay you commision for it. It's kind of hard to explain how you should do it, every affiliate marketers have their own way to promote a product either through free or paid ways. The idea of paid way is you create a selling page, then buy traffic through companies such as google adwords, Yahoo or Micorsoft adcenter. You pay these companies for each click they send you, we also called it PPC (pay per click). Get these peoples to click on your affiliate link and buy at the company site. To make PPC marketing works, you need to research and find the best niche that doesn't have too much competition and the affiliate commision is high enough to cover your cost and also earn you good money. It's not easy at all and it can takes a lot of time to research and trying to make it right.

The free way is what I'd would recommend, but you need to be patient. Building a site from ground up and start receiving traffic from search engine isn't an easy task either. If you are determine and willing to update your site daily, I'm sure you'll do very well after a year if not shorter. The trick is to get traffic to your site through the free way such as forum, search engine and social bookmarking site. There's a lot more to talk about such as how to do SEO and such thing. For your first time building a website, I don't really recommend you to go deep into that. SEO (search engine optimization) is a way to manipulate the search engine (mostly google) to rank high on search result. It's all about traffic we are talking about it here. If there's no traffic/reader on your site, that's mean no sell and no money. The good thing about building traffics through content is that you can either put advertisement such as google adsense, affiliate link or even sell link on your site (google doesn't recommend this). There's way for you to make money from your site as long as you got good traffics to your site. So what's considered as good traffic? Well.. it really depends which market you are in & where you want to earn money from (adsense or affiliate). If I have to explain everything clearly, I'd probably need to write another 2000 words.

The bottom line is don't think about making money first when you just start out making a website. Keep writing good content everyday and you'll eventually receive traffics from many sources. Then start out by using google adsense on your site and see how much it can make for you. After you gain more experineces through your course of building website and researching, you can easily start out another website with clear direction. If you want to learn how to build your own website, read our previous post. The keyword is Wordpress. Want the free way, use blogger like this site.

More Webhosting Company

2009-11-11T10:38:00.000-08:00

I lost track of some info while I was writing the basic of webhosting. I keep telling myself not to forget to include a list of popular web hosting, but I forgot. Guess my memory is going downhill. Back to the topics, while I was searching for web hosting on different sources I always came across some of the same company name. This list of web hosting companies might be the one you are looking for. Once you have come down to the final list, look up for reviews before you decide. Here's the list of webhosting companies that seems to be more popular: Hostgator, lunarpage & bluehost.

Hmm... I thought the list would be longer, I guess my memory is getting on me again. Anyways, if you are looking for VPS host, here's some good one: Servint, wiredtree, futurehosting & burstnet. As for dedicated server, sorry I'm still far from using a dedicated server and haven't had time to check it out.

Basic to Webhosting

2009-11-11T07:26:00.000-08:00

Since I'm providing guides to subdomain in my last article, I thought I'd write a little more about it for those who are interested in finding a good host. There's literally hundreds of provider on the market and the competition is fierce. It's good not to get tricked by all the false advertising. If you are not sure which to chose, it's always best to do some research on the internet and look for reviews. webhostingtalk.com is a good place to start your hosting searching and ask question. But before you ask, try to read the beginners guide and search the board topics first before you post a question as many new comer question has already been answered. Be careful when you are on some top web hosting reviews site, those comparison site could be made by some hosting company itself to promote their own products. Thus, the best way to find the web hosting company is through forum and community site.

I'm not going to promote any web hosting company here, so don't worry. Instead I'm going to tell you my own experience with some of the hosting company I use. Before I start talking about my own experience, I'll give you some tips in finding the right hosting company for the right price. If you don't have a Paypal account or credit card, you might find it a little hard to buy a webhost, in that case you might want to seach for your local hosting company that accept direct transfer as payment method. If you have paypal, then everything would be much easier and also you got a lot more choices. Through my research I still found US based hosting company provide the best speed and price, I could be wrong though.

We are talking about basic web hosting here so I assumed that you are new to this. For your information, there are 3 basic hosting on the market, shared hosting, VPS and dedicated. Since you are hosting a new site with little too no traffic, you might want something cheaper. I know it's always tempting to use hosting companies that offers unlimited bandwidth and that kind of shit even if you don't really need it, those are just their marketing ploy. No company can provide unlimited bandwidth out there, if they can they will be out of business long ago. They knew a new site isn't going to use even a tiny bid of those bandwidth, in fact they have ways to deal with even high traffic site on shared hosting. What you don't know is most shared hosting if not all have concurrent connection limit. What does that mean? That means if the shared hosting have 50 concurrent connection limit, it only allows 50 connection to the site at once. If there's more than that, other of your visitors will be prompted with errors page. Most hosting company should have this information stated on their site, somewhere deep and well hidden that not even 1% of chance you'll come across. Most people doesn't know that, and the company will just laugh at you at the back saying yes we can provide unlimited bandwidth only if you can use it.

Most shared hosting have all basic software and stuff that comes with your hosting. Some allows you to host more than one site and some offers better service. But it all comes down to price when you are on tight budget. And I'm one of those webmaster that are constantly looking for cheap web hosting. Currently, there's two I use namecheap and godaddy. Namecheap was relatively new to web hosting, and I found their server rather slow and their support basically can't help you at all. But they have the cheapest at just $2.99, the catch is you have to pay for the whole year. So if you are not satisfy with their service after few months, you can't get any refund. From my experience, I host my site with them because I know I wouldn't receive too much traffic in the first years but I'm looking for long term, so I don't mind paying them one year of hosting. I check my site very often, the speed and uptime wasn't too bad either, although I do have problem with one of my site that keeps going down and it frustrate me.

Most shared hosting with priced under $5 requires to pay one year in advance. Only godaddy I know of requires to pay just 3 months. Godaddy was much cheaper in the past at just $3.99 and they allows monthly pay which is great for testing. But that's the past. Now it cost $4.99 per month for shared hosting, and you have to pay 3 months in advance for the first time. Although I hate godaddy doing some sneaky thing to one of my larger site, they are not a bad hosting for smaller site. I can't complain as other host might just suspend my site. Both namecheap & godaddy are reputable companies and they are some of the biggest domain registrar out there. So you have one less worried about getting scam. I recommend them both for your first web hosting, chose between them based on your preference.

I'm just telling you my experince with the web hosting I've been with, there might be better and cheaper hosting companies I'm not aware of. And that's your job to find the best one out there for your needs. There's one thing I do realized is that you'd probably stick with your first web hosting company longer than you wanted even if you don't like it. So choose wisely. Good luck!

How to point Subdomain to another sever host?

2009-11-10T22:13:00.000-08:00

I've just recently done the same thing for one of my site. It's actually quite simple, but I don't know how I spent so much time in looking for guides on the net. It's frustrating.

Alright, here's my situation. I have a site mydomain.com and just recently I've created a sub.mydomain.com and wanted to point the subdomain to another sever host. Why? Because it's a huge traffic site and I don't want to add anymore strain to the main server, therefore I bought a new cheaper host for the subdomain.

Are you looking for imformation to do the same thing? You are lucky to find my blog as I'm going to tell you based on my experince and guide you through step by step. Peoples might have thought you are using 2 server, you must know hosting very well. No! I'm just a webmaster and my programmer do all the shit for me except the hosting thing of course. There's a lot of information on the internet actually, if you are willing to spend some time researching, you'll find a way to fix it. The problem is most information they provide are very brief, maybe they thought it was easy and you should be able to understand. I admit I'm not the brightest one, but I can at least understand and follow instructions. When I saw peoples posting something like NS, A record or Cname, I started to get headache. How the hell am I suppose to understand all of them without more explanation, I'm searching for guidance because I'm new to this so please expect everyone to be hosting junky.

Skip above part if you just want to know how to do it:
Please excuse for my whinning, I just have to let it out as it's taking me freaking long time to figure it out. Before you follow my instruction, there's one information you should know. After you edit anything on your server or domain register, it does not reflect on your site immediately. Most of the time you should see changes within minutes to an hour based on my experience. Patience is the key to success, so wait before you start scratching your head. It could be the delayed on your hoster side too, I'm not sure. Anyway, I made some changes yesterday and it doesn't work after waiting for like half an hour, so I just go to bed and guess what happens? Yes, everything is now working as how it should be!

I'm not going to assume you already done the domain part, so here's what you should modify in your domain registrar side. I'm using Namecheap:
1.) Go to manage domain
2.) Select the domain you want to modify
3.) If you already pointed the domain to a nameserver(NS), click transfer dns back to us. After you done that, you should now have the option to modify "All host record". Now click on All host record under the sub-domain settings, enter your subdomain name in the first field, your subdomain hoster namesever on the second field (example: ns22.domaincontrol.com) then chose A (address) from the drop down list. Continue the same with the next line, ususally you have two namesever with the hosting company.
4.) Click save.
5.) Trasnsfer back your main domain dns to your main host by clicking transfer DNS back to webhost. (your main server)

The second part is adding A record on your main domain server. Remember it's not the subdomain server, you don't want to do any editing on your subdomain server. It's going to be a little different depends which company and control panel you use. I've experience in both WHM Cpanel and Godaddy. I hate Godaddy, but their control panel is quite good. Anyways I'll teach you how to do it in both.

If you are using Godaddy hosting:
1.) Login to your account, open your hosing list. Click on manage account and it'll open another windows.
2.) There's bunch of options on top of the menu. If I remember correctly, hover settings or something else, find and select DNS manager. It should open a new window again.
3.) Now you should see your main server DNS information. At the very top, you should see the A record settings and this is where you should add your A record pointing it to sub.mydomain.com IP.
4.) Fill in the A record information. Enter your subdomain name and the IP of the second server, then save it.
5) You are done. Wait until it takes effect.

If you are using WHM Cpanel:
1.) Find the option Edit DNS Zone and click on it
2.) Select your domain and click edit. (I found out that it's not working in firefox, use IE if the same thing happen to you)
3.) Scroll down to the bottom and add a new entry. Eample: sub.mydomain.com. 14400 IN xx.xx.xx.xx A
4.) Click save and you are done. Just wait until it take effect on your site.

Here's some of the main point you should remember. You only edit information on 1) Your domain registrar & 2) Your main domain server hosting. You are not doing any editing on the new host you bought for your subdomain. Basically, all you need to do is add an A record on the main domain server and point the subdomain to second server IP. Tha's it, you are done. Simple!

How to Build your own Website

2009-11-09T02:53:00.000-08:00

Building a website is not rocket science, maybe it was difficult in the past where there isn't any tools to help you. You need to learn basic html coding to create a simple page, but updating and maintaining the site can be time consuming. Who have the time to do all the shit? The other reason why peoples don't build their own website is because the hosting is very expensive. Even if you get a free host like yahoo geocities, anyone still remember that? You get full of ads at the side bar, who like a site that stuff with annoying ads that pop right in your face? And just very recently, yahoo has finally closed their free web hosting geocities after such long time. Why? Simple, because there's other free service out there that are hundred times better and it's free of advertisement. On top of that, they even provide free tools to help you set up the site.

Web hosting is getting cheaper and cheaper in recent years thanks to the fierce competition in the market. Additionally, free open source website development tools such as wordpress, joomla make building a website much easier, as simple as this blog. If you are looking for a totally free and the fastest, simplest way to blog, blogger which you are looking right now is the best for you. You create you own account, if you already have an gmail account just sign in with the same user and pass. Blogger.com pretty much gives you every control over your site from simple choosing a list of existing blogger template and colors to practically change the whole look of your site if you know what you are doing. My blog which you are looking right now is the default template with no modification at all. There's a lot of free template for blogger made by other users on the net you can use, just follow the instruction and paste the code in and you are done. I'm too lazy to find my blog a nice template, I just want to post my random post as fast as I could. Anyways, just letting you know that there's choice for other template than this.

Alright, for those who are a little more tech/web savvy and have your own domain and hosting. You might want something a little more complicated and flexible. I'd recommend you to use wordpress. Wordpress is an free open sources website development tools, in a nutshell it's a ready built website that you can set up immediately. I don't want to go through the complicated process, I'll just make it simple. Assume that you already have a domain and hosting account. First you need to create a database, then upload all wordpress files in your hosting root directory. After it's been completed, visit your site and follow wordpress instruction to have your website set up. Once you are done with the configuratio, your site is basically ready to use. Wordpress is a very powerful open sources tool and it give you full right access to the code. That's mean you can modify however you liket if you have knowledge in PHP coding. If you don't, it's okay, you don't need it anyway. Wordpress have thousands of free template and plugins developed by the community for you to download. You can find literally all kind of add on script such as comment, rating, poll voting...etc. Adding all these plugins is simple too, log into admin backend, chose plugin installation, upload, activate it and you are done. Just read the developer instruction to learn how to properly install and use the plugins.

Beside Wordpress, there's other similar website building tools such as Joomla and others. Wordpress and Joomla are few of the most popular one out there. Both are free to use and features powerful CMS (Content management system). The cms is something similar to blogger where you can add new, edit and delete post. It manage every part of your site on the backend. I personally prefer Wordpress as it's the most popular blog tools out there with many developers supporting it. It's much easier to use and edit compared to Joomla. I've used Joomla before and it's very hard to do even simple modification unless you are an expert programmer. On the other hand, I found wordpress rather easy to understand and modify. I'm by no means a programmer, but I do have basic knowledge of PHP through my course of maintaining various site on the web.

Of course, if you are willing to learn there's nothing impossible. Since you are searching for how to build your own website, you must be new to website developement. I highly recommend you to use wordpress, I knew someone with no prior experience in building website successfully set up his own site. You just need a little patience and reading, that's it.

The best combination of Software to stay Virus free

2009-11-07T04:14:00.000-08:00

Ever since I lost over $100 in my account because of Trojan virus as I believe, I started to be very careful with my web activity & the security I chose to use. If you too have a Paypal or internet banking account associate with your personal information & credit card details, you'd want to be extra careful when using the internet. Viruses, spyware, adware, malware, trojan horses are everywhere and it's on an upward trend since the start of internet days. Maybe it's not as scary as it sounds, with the necessary antiviruses software and some other securit tool, you can keep your PCs free of viruses. Don't ever think... no my computer can't possible get infected with viruses as I just only check my email and login to my facebook account most of the time. I learnt my lesson and hopefully you are not the next victim.

I use 3 security software, avast, zonealarm and trojan hunter. I have all sort my banking account on the internet as I'm a web developer, it's necessary for me to check my account very often. I've been using the combination of these 3 software, and it kept me safe for more than 5 years since I lost my money. I'm pretty sure my PC isn't fully clean, some spyware or malware might still be hieen within my files, but it keeps the dangerous high security risk viruses and trojan away from my PC.

You might think that with 3 software installed in my PC it's going to cost me alot? No exactly the opposite, it doesn't cost me any money! And I don't mean I'm getting pirated software. There's a lot of good antivirus, firewall, trojan horse software out there for free. But don't expect to get the full protection out of a free software, but with 3 free security software, that's probably more than enough to keep your online account safe. Of course, that's my own opinion, if you have the money to spend, it's always recommended to buy the full version of the software. It never hurts with a little extra protection, don't you agree?

Before I changed to avast, I was using norton. Both are good in my opinion, avast and another great antivirus software are AVG. I changed because norton is working slow on my PC and eating up a lot of computer resources. To tell the truth, I never really use the antivirus a lot, well yes it's there active in my taskbar icon, but I never bother to do any scanning or it catches any viruses intruding either. In fact I started to update the virus definition database longer and longer in between. It's bad, but sometime I'm just too lazy. There's an auto update of course, but my internet connection was too slow and I turn it off and do manual update from time to time.

The security software I think it's a must is the firewall. Everytime there's suspicious connection trying to access your computer, it'll block them and ask for your permission. For example when I open my firefox browser, zonealarm will pop up with a message and ask for internet connection confirmation. It's a little more work, but it's not as bad as you'd have thought. On a side note, you can give absolute access to those software you trust so zonelalarm won't keep asking for permission everytime you open the program. You can get zonealarm free version at its official site. I highly recommed you to get the full version as it also includes spyware protectio. Zonealarm for me is the most important security software on my computer that I cannot live without. It's a great software and I've paid for it. For me, firewall got to be the best and other just average or a free version is enough.

And if you are like me have banking account on the internet and do a lot of transaction. I recommend you to use trojan hunter for some extra protection. Trojan hunter are specialized in catching and blocking trojan horses which is important for us as it trying to steals your password by placing backdoor script on your PC. It's recommended for you to update the virus definition very often.

Last but not least, these security software are necessary and it gives you extra protection against viruses, trojan horse, spyware and adware. But there's always precautious steps you can do to reduce the risk of getting infected. First, never click on a link on your email. Check who is the sender first and check the link location by hover over the link. Even it's from a friend, it's always save to double check before you click on it. If you accidently click on it and it brought you to some weird website, close the site and scan your computer with your antiviruses software before you access any account on the web. Second, avoid download an attachment from annoymous. Third, visit only autorized website. By taking these pre-cautious step, it'll definitely helps to reduce the risk.

Free Online Games

2009-10-23T16:01:00.000-07:00

Are you looking for free online games? If so, I'll tell you some of the sites I found which you can play games directly online. When you search for free online games on google, the result in the top few spots are pretty good and they are more or less the same. I particularly like to play my flash games on gamestertown.com. These games which I'm talking about right let users play flash games online for free right on the browser. If you are asking me this 5 years, I might have some doubt in the games quality. But now these flash games are as addicting and fun as a desktop game. I swear you can find better games on the internet instead of those comes free in Windows, specifally Windows 7 games. There isn't much new games in Windows 7 which are disappointing, I thought would have at least keep and enchance some of those old game like pinball. Well, it did enchanced most of the games bundled with Win 7, but the game I like most is not in the list. It has been removed totally from the game list! It's a huge disappointment for me, but if you like Chess, Solitaire, it's still there with better graphics.

If you are looking for more interesting online games than the one in Windows 7. Head over Gamestertown and you'll find thousands of free online games that you can play right away. No sign up, no bullshit, but you have to wait for the game to load. A side note, some games on the site are pretty old, not to say all of them are bad, but most of them are. Yuo could just try those games that are listed on the homepage. In the past, you don't see much big developers doing flash games, most of the makers are individual home developers. In recent years, there's more and more companies joined the casual gamers crowd and have made some very cool flash games. Some notable one are Mirrors Edge 2D & Alien Hominid. Go and search for them, they are free to play. Once you try it, you wouldn't believe it was made by flash software if you haven't really plat much flash games before. There are other big companies are also making flash games constantly, the most active one I can think of is Nitrome. Nitrome makes very unique pixel style flash games. All of thier production are in high qulity, some games might not to your liking, but you'll find some that you love. They produce wide variety of gameplay incliding arcade, classic, action, puzzle and shooting.

Since I'm talking about free flash games, there's another few series I'd like to recommend to point and click adventure fans. Mind you, the following games I'm going to recommend here are for hardcore puzzle fans. You could try it though and see if you like it since it's free anyway. These amazing adventure puzzle games are submachine and covert front series. These series has been out for a while and it's among the best in its genre. It's extremely hard though and might piss off some newcomers. If you are more into casual style of games, I definitely recommend you to try out Desktop Defense or Balloons Pop. I'm pretty sure you'll get addicted and keep playing for hours.

Beside the free online games I recommend above, there are some others that I recommend, but it's not for those who don't have to time to check everyday. Since free online games could means a lot such as the MMORPG. Here's a text based game that I really liked to play, it's called Utopia. If you haven't play it, you should try it totally, but beware of the addictiveness. I've been playing this games since I was in high school, that's 7 years ago! And the game is still as addicting as before, nothing has been changed much since then besides some balance tweek and a few gameplay changes. The game doesn't have any graphics like mmorpg beside some pictures. Everytime is text based, that's mean you'll be reading only text and inputing number to play. Also it's web based so you don't have to download anything to your pc, all you need is a free accout with them and you can start playing. Each game round last around 3-5 months and you'll be playing with a bunch of kingdom teamates. You can't decide which to join, it's all random. You can join the game anytime you want even the game round is about to reset. If you are first time player, it might seems a little hard at first, keep playing and learn how it works everyday. I'm sure you'll becomes better by the next round of game. It's very addictive, I warned you!

How is file hosting site better than torrent

2009-10-15T09:01:00.001-07:00

Torrent has been on the internet for a while so are file hosting sites. So why does file hosting getting such popularity in recent years? In the past, offering unlimited download isn't a feasible plan because the bandwidth cost is freaking expensive. Although it's getting cheaper and cheaper each year, it's still too expensive to offers unlimited download. So their plan is offers one free download at a time, that's mean you can't download 2 files at the same time in any given time, unless you are using two different IP addresses of course. And they also offers premium account which give you unlimited download speed & slot which means you can download as many files as you like at a time. Premium account comes with a price vary for each sites. Take rapidshare as example, they offers premium account at low as $3.99 per 24 hours, and it gets cheaper of you subscribe longer for a month or year. It's rather cheap and tempting to get your favourite files as quick as possible, even faster than using a torrent, torrent is free though.

There are both advantages and disadvantages using either torrent or file hosting site. It depends which works better for the users. Torrent has been involved in illegal download activities since it released and it gets lots of controversy and attention from the companies and internet provider. Your internet provider might limit your torrent download speed or block it totally as it's eating up a lot of the bandwidth & might slow down other users internet experience. Thus, peoples starting to look for alternative solution, that's file hosting sites. As you are downloading through the site server, it looks like normal downloading process and you aren't sharing anything. There's no way they can block it, but some internet provider gets clever enough to limit your bandwidth. Whatever you are doing, you can only use that much of bandwidth each month.

If you are th type of person who does not like to "seed", meaning "sharing". Using file hosting site is the best way to get free download. You'll be able to get what you want eventually if you are patient enough. Most file hosting sites even download as a free users, you can get a very decent download speed. But the bad thing is if there's no one uploading the file, you can't download it. And sometime files might be removed by the site because of inactivity or illegal content. It happens a lot, that's why you need to be fast or wait for the next upload. A lot of peoples are now using file hosting site such as rapidshare, badongo, mediafire, hotfile...etc to share their files. So it wasn't to hard to find one that you are looking for.

As for torrent, although it can be slow sometime because of less seeders. It's still the best for more stable download as you don't have to worry about disconnecting or file has been removed issues. The files will be there as long as there's seeder and you can continue where you left off anytime whereas file hosting sites don't normally support resume download. If you stop at 90% foe any reasons, then you'd have to download it all over again. It's a pain in the ass. But still, both way are free and you should be happy about it.

Run Java Games on PC

2009-10-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

So you have downloaded some mobile games on the internet and would like test it before sending it to your mobile. Is there any way to open these mobile games on the PC. Yes, there is. But you need software to run it. You download and you run it. It's a no brainer. Unfortunately, out of the 2 software I downloaded contained spyware that will install additional tools to your PC. Thus, I don't really recommend you to use it, but if you really really need it, you can download the software from some mobile site. One of the site I know of is mobileddl.com. Try to do a search for sjboy or kwyshell

The malware that comes with the software is not impossible to remove. If you are done using it, unintall the software. If the additional software that installed in your toolbars still existed. Download ad-aware or others spyware/adware clearners sofwtare from download.com. Do a complete scan and remove all malware it founds.

How to extract .RAR

2009-09-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised how many people's online asking the same question again & again on how to extract .rar file. It seems like a rather easy question for me and I always thought everyone should know how to do it. Maybe the software has already been sitting in my PC for quite a while, thus it turns into a normal process for me to install it whenever I reinstall my PC. There's always something new for you to learn and soon you'll turn into a geek like me. Just kidding.

Winrar is a very popular software for users to compress numerous files into one smaller size .rar file. Many peoples are using it to compress and upload their files to the internet for others to download. But some peoples don't know how to open the file as Windows doesn't comes with a software that can open .rar file, so you need a third-party free software called "Winrar" to open the file. You can download the free software at: www.rarlab.com/

What's the different between .zip & .rar? You can said that .rar is an improvement over the .zip format. Basically it's the same function, but rar does a better job in compressing file. And recently, there's another new format that became quite popular known as 7 zip. Yes, more or less they are all the same. 7 zip is another improvement over .rar. If you ever see a files that are in .7z format. You know what you should do. Do you? Download the free 7 zip software at:www.7-zip.org

We have already mentiond about various compressing format in our previous articles. To keep it short to open
.rar go to www.rarlab.com
.7z go to www.7-zip.org

If you have more question regarding software problems, you can leave us a meesage and let us know. We'll try to post a solution to your question asap. Thanks for reading.

How to open .iso files

2009-09-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

What's an .iso file? .iso is an image file of a CD or DVD without the physical CD/DVD of course. Many people's use it to backup their CD/DVD in case in spoil after some time. To create .iso file, you can use free software burner tools to create a duplicate image of your CD's. But how do you run the iso file? Easy, there's free software online that let you create virtual drive and run your iso image file. It's just like placing the actual CD's in your optical drive, instead you do everything on your PC by mounting the iso image into the virtual drive. The virtual you create will act just like the CD/DVD drive on your computer.

The two most popular virtual emulation software are "Daemon" & "Alcohol 120%". I preferred the former as it's easier to use. Daemon doesn't have any fancy interface or whole lots of options, after you installed the software, it'll display as a small icon on your taskbar. Then to use it, right click on the icon and create a virtual drive. You can create as many as 5 virtual drive and mount different iso image into each different drive. This will save you time un-mounting and mounting different iso file that's always in use. It's also something that your optical drive can't do, every time you want to change a cd's you have to take the cd out and place the second one in. Although such issues has been fixed considerably when DVD becomes the standard format of external storage. Daemon emulation software also comes with security bypass system, you can easily turn it on by selecting which security system you want to bypass. Why do you need this? A lot's of games today's have third party security software installed to prevent pirated copy's from running, some even install it in your PC without you knowing it and it can't be remove unless you reformat your hard drive. The biggest annoyance of these security software is that it could slow down your computer. Daemon let you bypass these software and install the game in your computer. But make sure you have the latest version of daemon.

The second emulation software is Alcohol 120%. I have used it before but that's quite some time back. From my faint experience, the whole software is too complicated to use. Daemon does a good job for me that's why I haven't thought of changing another software. Alcohol 120% has a free trial & paid version, maybe that's the reason why I don't like about Alcohol 120%. I'm a free software supporter, but I know the company are trying to make a living too. As long as the software is good, I'll definitely recommend it. Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with Alcohol 120%. I have been to a lot of forum and community, most feedback and recommendation are on the positive side, so I guess the software should be good. Alcohol 120% not only let you mount virtual image, but it also let you create backups of DVDs and CDs which daemon doesn't. Daemon software only let you mount an existing Iso or others virtual image file, it can't be used to create an image file. If you need a software that can let you create backup cds or dvds, then Alcohol 120% might be a better choice. But you might need to spend money on buying it, I'm sure there's some limitation on the trial version to an extent.

How to extract .001 .002 etc extension file

2009-09-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

Since file hosting sites are getting more popular, we have seen some new type of uploading style. Most file hosting site have file upload size limit, some smaller some larger. I personally would prefer smaller file size as it reduces the chance of broken file or sudden file lost due to lost of connection, especially when your at 90 over percent. Since uploader can't upload a file that's larger than the limit, they have to split the original file into smaller separate file. In the past, most people's are using Winrar to do the job, but it has less choice in size and harder to use. So a free software called hjsplit comes to the rescue. Although the software doesn't compress the file, it can easily split a large file size into various smaller size file & join it together again with a few clicks of button.

So next time when you see extension such as .001 - .(whatever number), you need to download hjsplit freeware at: www.freebyte.com/hjsplit/ and join the file back together before you can use it. If you can't see the extension of the file, read my previous post and learn how you can activate it. The free software doesn't require any installation, download the .exe double click the software and you are ready to use. The software is only about 300 Kb in size, so it can be downloaded within seconds depends on your internet connection.

It's not only useful when using to upload file online, I also found it useful when transferring large file from my netbook to my PC. If you have a large pendrive then transferring large file would be easier, but if you are like me only have 2 1 GB pendrive then you'd have to split the file using hjsplit, so you can transfer those smaller file to your pendrive then to your PC. Once you have transferred all files to your PC, use the free software again to join all the bits together. There's various reason why people's need such software, I never thought of it before I need it and it's really useful. I found myself using it quite a lot to transfer file from my netbook to my PC or PC to netbook. Even if you don't need it now, remember this freeware hjsplit, some day it might becomes handy. Especially when you download a lot from file hosting site, you might come across such extension in future.

It's time to move from Windows xp to Windows 7

2009-09-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

Before I start talking my experiences with the new Windows 7 RC version which will be released on 22nd October this year, I have never use Vista before. You might be wondering why I never want to try Vista but willing to test the RC released of Win 7? That's because I heard too much bad thing about Vista, on the other hand, Windows 7 has been getting positive review since the Beta released & my friend just happens to have the RC version on his pendrive, so out of conveniences I decided to install Windows 7 in my netbook along with Windows xp.

To tell the truth, my experience with Win 7 has been overwhelming, the first thing you would notice is the graphically impressive interface. I know it's weird but it gives you a classy and professional feel to it that makes using Win 7 a great pleasure. But still, the most important thing is the innovative features. I know some of the function such as Aero effects is in the vista, but it slows down even the most powerful computer as I heard, it's a badly optimized OS. Fortunately, Windows 7 is as fast as it can be with Aero effects even on a 1.66 Ghz, 1 GB of RAM netbook. Sometime it even feel faster than XP with all the very cool desktop effects, and the boot & shut down time is on par with Xp, maybe a little slower. Beside the old Aero effects, there's also some new and improved features in Windows 7. Let's talk about the improvement first, the gadgets which is one of the favorite features. In Vista there's a limited space on the right side that let you drop your favorite gadgets in it, but you can only use very limited of gadgets as there's very limited space. In Windows 7 you can drop it wherever you want on the desktop and design it on your own. There's a lot of useful gadgets already in Win 7 such as clock, calender, cpu meter..etc. Beside the one already in Win 7, users are allowed to develop their own gadgets and share it on Windows official site. Some cool gadgets I found including one button shut down, hibernate. I'm sure when Windows 7 is release, you'll be able to find more cool gadgets.

Now let's talk about what's new in Win7. There's quite a lot, I'm just going to briefly go through it such as jumplist & pin any program to taskbar which is also very cool & useful. Every time you point on the program for example your firefox browser, it'll show you a list of all browser. Point at it and it'll display the browser on the background, click on it and it'll stay. Pin any program to taskbar let you place your most use program on the taskbar for quick access.

I've been talking about how great Windows 7 is, but is it really flawless? Unfortunately no. I have some driver problems with my modem and the company hasn't update any new drivers since XP. So if I want to use Windows 7 and my internet connection, then I might have to buy a newer broadband modem. Although Windows 7 have a compatibility mode called xp mode which let all software that run on Windows xp also run under Windows 7. But to use the xp mode, you need some kind of intel virtualization support which my netbook doesn't support. It's a great addition for those who are still using old software, but the need of hardware support itself is a problem. Thank god I installed Windows 7 as an additional so I can dual boot both xp and 7.

Even though there's still some driver problem with my modem, I still seriously thinking of buying Windows 7 when it release later next month. It's a great OS, it looks great and run fast. I think it's time to move from a 10 years old os, you can really see the age of xp after you use windows 7. If you are buying a new PC or notebook, wait till the release of Windows 7, you won't regret it.

Free software to check your computer system information

2009-09-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

Recently my friend has this problem, he reinstalled windows xp because malware are slowing down his PC. After the installation every thing when smoothly, in fact the PC start and work faster like never before. But the problem start here, he doesn't have the necessary software CD for his sound card driver. You might be thinking that what's the big deal, just search the internet for the driver. Unfortunately he doesn't know the manufacture of the sound card either. Thus, first he needs to find out what sound card he is using before he can search for the right driver.

There's a few way you can check your sound information directly on the Windows.
1) Go to "start" select run, then key in dxdiag & press enter. Wait for a while for the program to load, it takes some time. You'll see some of your hardware information on the first page such as processor, motherboard, ram...etc. Never mind that, click the tab "sound" & you should see your computer sound card information. This method doesn't work for my friend, it says no sound card detected.
2) Second method, go to control panel & open "system". Choose the tab "hardware" on top, then click on "device manager". Now select option sound and see what you can find.

If the above two method doesn't work for you either. Then you might need the help of third party software. There's a lot of free diagnostic software on the internet, and following two is my favourite.
1) The first one is called fresh diagnose. The software will show very detail of your computer system information unlike dxdiag on the windows which shows briefly information. Download free version of fresh diagnose at: www.freshdevices.com/freshdiag.html

2) If for any reason the above doesn't help at all. Try out this second software which I found through user recommendation on some website. The software is Belarc Advisor, as for the official download site, you'll to do the work yourself. Just search for Belarc Advisor and you should see the company website on the top result.

Free ftp software

2009-09-14T07:03:00.000-07:00

It seems like internet is getting more popular when video streaming & social networking is made available. We got a reason to stay on the internet a little bit longer & stay away from the television. Eventually, people's get more tech savvy, then we learned about using blog & create our own website. Blog is free to use & you can share whatever information you want just like this blog. But if you want your own domain, you'll have to spend some money on it including a ftp software that will allowed you to upload files to the server.

So is there any free ftp software out there. The answer is Yes! Note: Beside using a separate ftp software, Internet Explorer has a ftp built-in function that will let you access to your ftp server. To find free ftp software, do a search on google. Here's what I found:" filezilla-project.org, www.coreftp.com, www.smartftp.com". These are the top three result on google, I never use them before, so I'm not sure if they are good or not. Since they are free, download and try it yourself. Beside the three I posted above, there should be more free ftp software around. You can try searching through the pages or go to download.com for more free software. The good thing about download.com is that you can easily determine a decent software by the review. But still the best free ftp software might not be on the site, so you might still need to do more research if you want the best. Otherwise, the three I mentioned should do the job just right.

Personally, I preferred cuteftp and still using it. If you are willing to pay, I recommend you to try out cuteftp. There's a free version of cuteftp on its official site, you can try it first before buying it. Though, I'm not sure if cuteftp is the best ftp software out there.

The best p2p software

2009-09-12T02:04:00.000-07:00

Torrent & p2p? Are they the same? Basically yes, both share files among computers. But there's some differences in functionality, each with its advantages & disadvantages. To download a torrent, first you need a software, you can download it free on the internet, bitcomet & azureus are some of the most popular out there. Second, you need a torrent tracker, without it the software is useless. How do you find these tracker? You can find it on website or forum that let user's to share their tracker. The only website I can remember right now is mininova.org. Search for the file name and download the tracker of that file. If you can't find it that's mean there's no one sharing the file you are looking for.

P2p is quite different from torrent when searching for a file. You don't have to search for website or forum to find tracker, such function has built in the p2p software itself. Depends on the p2p software you are using, it'll search on some of the most famous network such as edonkey & gnutella server. Those who are connected to the p2p network server will be sharing files among their computer's.

Now, the question you have been waiting for, which is the best p2p software? In my own experiences, limewire & shareaza are among the best. Limewire are only good for downloading songs/music. Personally, I preferred shareaza as you will be able to find some rare video as well beside songs. Shareaza is more versatile, you can find lots of music, video, software across gnutella & edonkey server. There's a lot of file in the network, but also a lot of junk file containing viruses. So be extra careful when you are downloading files in .rar compressed format. It's very important for you to scan every files you downloaded from torrent or p2p before viewing the actual content. This is the disadvantages of using p2p software, you wouldn't know if the file you are downloading are fake or not. And you can't find any comments on that file like torrent. Since you'll be downloading tracker from a website or forum, usually you can find some user's discussing the file assumed that it's popular. That information can be used to verify the authority of that file. If the file is not working or contained viruses, someone will post it there to warned others.

How to remove software from pc

2009-09-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

This is a guide for Windows beginner. Windows is an operating system, to run other third party software, first you need to go through the installation process. Now the important part, how do you remove these installed software from your PC? There is two way:

1) Go to "my computer" on the left hand side under "other places", click on "control panel". You should be able to find "add & remove programs", double click and open it. Now search through the list for the software you want to uninstall, then click on remove.

2) Go to the folder of the software where you have installed in. Check all the files within the folder and see if you can find an icon that's an uninstall word on it. If you find it, double click and follow the instruction to remove the software. Most popular software have this uninstall function built in.

Actually there's a third way but it's not recommended. Just delete the whole folder of the software, by doing this you'll leave the registered keys and other information on your pc, and eventually stored up useless information in your PC. But there's another way to fix this problem, download free registry cleaner and do a clean up.

Remember the two recommended way sometime just remove the major files of the software from your PC. It all depends on the software company. Some might let you delete everything associate with the software but some will leave some files & registry in your PC. To tell the truth we I hate it as it's not right for the company to do that. It's an invading of our privacy. So in the end you might still need to do the third way by removing every files and folder manually. But do this after you use the first two method. The download software such as registry cleaner and other files cleaning tools software to help you to remove all useless files from your PC.

How to get rid of spyware

2009-09-08T18:41:00.000-07:00

Spyware and adware are starting to be a serious issues, companies are placing spyware in your computer when you visit their website to track your internet movement or collect personal information. We called this privacy and they are invading it. Spyware is nothing new on the internet, but it's getting out of control when they are everywhere. Most spyware would just collects data such as your internet surfing habits..etc. But some other would install additional software in your browser and interfere user control. Some even change your computer setting, reulting in slow computer & internet speed, pop up advertisement..etc.

Some spyware can be cleaned easily by clearing your internet cookies and temporarily folder. But some others are not so easy, they'll try to hide behind your eyes. Fortunately, there's some pretty good spyware removal software that would help you to get rid of spyware. Here's three that I recommend you to try out
1) Ad-aware
2) Spyware Doctor
3) Spybot

These are some of the most popular spyware and adware cleaner out there. They both come in free and paid version. Try it yourself and see which works best for you and you might want to consider buying the full version.

Trojan horse removal software

2009-09-08T18:09:00.000-07:00

Virus is a common word that will harm you or your computer, of course we are talking about harmful computer viruses here. But is there any computer viruses out there that could potential harm you physically? Well.. if there's one, it'd be trojan horse. Trojan horse are considered as one of the virus too, but instead of messing up your computer, it drops a backdoor script or keylogger in your PC and steal your personal information such as password and credit card information. Nowadays, more and more people's are doing their purchasing online using credit card, we use it to buy items or pay our bills. Some people's may also have internet banking account or Payal to do their daily transaction. And trojan horse is mainly targeting at such groups of user, placing keylogger into your PC to track your internet & keyboard movement without you knowing it. They might even steal your email addresses since it's usually linked to many other sensitive information.

There are software out there to help you to remove trojan horse from your computer, but still the best solution is to prevent it. If you have antivirus software in your pc which more people do, update your virus definition database from the company website or update directly through the software auto update function. If you don't habe one, you seriously need to get one, try avg or avast it's free to use and it's pretty good.

Although antivirus software are good in detecting viruses, they might still let one or two slip through. To make sure your computer is clean from trojan horses, I recommend you to use trojan hunter. This software focuses on detecting trojan horse, removal & prevent it from running on the background. You can find a trial use at: www.misec.net

Beside a good antivirus & trojan removal software, you also need a good firewall. I already mentioned this in my previous post, but I'll say it again in case some of you missed the article. Zonealarm is currently the best firewall out there, you can get it here: www.zonealarm.com

Combining with these three software, you are pretty much safe. The rest is up to you, try not to download from unauthorized site or install software from unknown sources. Use your antivirus software or trojan removal software to scan the file before opening it. And make your software are up to date.

How to edit File extensions

2009-09-08T01:04:00.000-07:00

This might not be the biggest secret out there, but it might be new for some users. As you may already know, by default Windows XP doesn't show the extensions of a file. Some users don't know that and keep wondering how they could change the extensions when it's not even visible. In my last post, I talked about 7z extension, if you didn't turn on the extensions visibility, all you'd see is a winrar icon if you have it installed of course. It showed in Winrar because that's your default compress software and the file is compressed. But that doesn't mean that it's .rar file and you'd never know that if you can't see the extension of it. I'm not sure why Microsoft would want to hide the extensions by default, even though it says it was for security reason, but I think most users are clever enough to know what they are doing. Maybe Microsoft should disable the delete button so we couldn't accidentally delete any files? That's what happened with Windows Vista, Microsoft think they are only the clever one. Every action you do in Vista is pampered by the UAC, and keep asking you if you are sure what you want to do. That's why the most searches word for Vista are "how to disable UAC".

Anyway, I'm off topic again. So to enable the extensions, goto my computer, on the top menu select tools and folder option. A new windows will pop up, select view tab. On the second bracket, scroll down a little and you'll see "hide extensions for known file types". Untick the box and click apply. Now go back to your deskyop and you should be able to see the extensions. To change it, just click on the icon once, then you'll be able to change the file name or extension as you like.

How to extract .7z file

2009-09-07T03:47:00.000-07:00

It seems like .rar has dominate the market for a while until we start seeing quite a lot of .7z compressed file being uploaded to the net. Actually, .7z is just another file compress software just like .rar, so why do people start shifting to 7z? That's because .7z compress the file better than .rar, in another words, 7z software can compress file into much smaller size than winrar. Another advantage is 7 zip software support all kind of compress format including .zip, rar, 7z...etc. But Winrar doesn't support 7 zip format yet and it might never happen. 7-zip is another innovative free software that people love, it's easy to use and the features are much better. It's no surprise why people would want to change what they have been using for years. Well.. I was kind of forced to use but I'm glad I did. I have downloaded a 7z format but unfortunately winrar can't extract the file. So I start searching for some software that can open the file, it's not too difficult to find. As its format 7z, just type in 7z into google search and you'll see the site on top of the page. Here's the official site: www.7-zip.org

7 zip overall is a great freeware that do exactly what it says. Although the interface doesn't look as great as Winrar, the features is unbeatable. It's more practical than a pretty software that eats up your computer resources. Winrar is not bad either, and I'm still using it. But one thing I do notice that the new version is not compatible with the old version. That means that if the file is using newer version of winrar to extract, you may not be able to extract the file using an older version of the software.

MP3 Music Player software for your PC

2009-09-05T17:55:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of free mp3 music player software on the internet, and winamp is probably the most popular one out there. I have used it before, but that's quite some time ago. I don't listen to a lot of music on my PC, at least not playing constantly on the background. Thus, other video player such as VLC, KMplayer and Windows Media Player are doing a fine job. But the best music player among these three I'd have to vouch for Windows Media Player which I hate it totally as a video player (You can read my previous post to know why). If you are a heavy music user's, you should have hundreds if not thousands of song on your list. It'll gets boring very soon if you keep listening to the same songs over and over again. Windows Media Player (WMP) have this function to save your music list in different album. You can choose what to play in each days, maybe you like some heavy music in the morning, and prefer softer songs in the night. WMP do just great by separating the album. You can always delete or add new songs to the album anytime. WMP save your list so you don't have to select and add your favorite songs again next time. As for vlc & kmplayer, it's good to play one or two song randomly in a day as it doesn't save your playlist like WMP and Winamp. It's fine with me as I preferred quite most of time, but listem to one or two of my favorite songs from time to time.

Wmp is a good music player and it's free bundled with the Windows. But if you perfer individual software other than WMP, I'd recommend you to try winamp. It's not famous without a good reason. As I mentioned, I haven't been using Winamp quite a while, so I'm not sure how far it evolved todays. From my experience, the music player is light on resources and very easy to use. Basically, you just click on the add button and select all songs from your PC you want to add to the list, then press ok. There you go, it'll start playing all the songs you have addded one by one after you click on the play button. There's also this repeat function that will continue playing the list of songs over again and again, you can choose to switch it on or off. It's the same as in Windows Media Player.

Ok, I just visited Winamp official site and it has three different version, pro, bundle & full. There's just one free version back then as I remembered. So of course, you'd want to download the free version first, it's around 10 MB in size. You can download it at http://www.winamp.com/player

It seems like there's a lot more features now, not sure if it's a good thing. Winamp also available in 16 different language version. Try it and let me know how it compares to WMP. Is it better or more of less the same.

Clean up Adware, Spyware to speed up your PC even more

2009-09-03T23:49:00.000-07:00

No matter how hard you try, there's always a hole for adware & spyware to slip in your PC. Some time it's not your firewall fault, but you yourself let them in without knowing it. There's no guarantee that trusted site wouldn't place some sneaky code to track your internet movement. Or some free software might install some other extra software in your PC without your conscience. Did you experience slow down on your PC? Did you always gets some weird advertisement pop-up when surfing the internet? This could be the act of adware and spyware. And these malicious software are everywhere on the internet, website, software & email. They may not be as harmful as a virus, but they can be anonying casuing major slow down or errors in your system. There's no way you can block them totally, unless you cut ties with the internet. But some company developed some nice adware & spyware removal tools to help you clean up your PC fast and easy.

The one I'm using right now is Ad-aware from Lavasoft. I've been using it since 5 years ago and it's also the best I've used so far. I haven't been trying a lot of different adware removal software since then, and I know there's some other good malicious removal software on the market including spybot. But personally, I haven't try it yet. Adaware is doing a good job cleaning up all useless junk from my PC, and it's still one of the most popular adware and spyware removal software on the market. The best thing is, most of them are free for the normal version of course. If you love what you use, you can buy the more advanced paid version of the software.

In our last post, we talked about how registry can slow down your PC. It does slow down your computer if you install & uninstall a lot of software and never clean it for a long time, but it's not significant, you might not even notice the difference. The real culpit that can really slow down your computer are adware & spyware. Many of them could be running on the background and eating up your system resources. If you notice your computer is not running as fast as before, you may want to do some clean up.

Many antivirus these days does find & clean adware & spyware, but they are still not in the league of standalone malicious cleaner. I'd still recommend you to download the free version of adaware and test it out, there is no harm trying it. You can find all these software at download.com

Clean up Registry & speed up your PC

2009-09-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

Ok, some of you might already knew that every time we install a new software, whether it's Microsoft words, video player, antivirus or any other third-party software, it creates entry in the registry. But when you try to uninstall these software, the entry in registry doesn't remove along with the software. The registry list just keep building up every time you install a new software and eventually slow down your computer.

If you are an advanced user, you can do this manually by deleting the useless entry. To do that, click on start on your taskbar, select "run", type in "regedit" and click ok. Important: Do not randomly delete any entry in the registry, it might cause errors in your system or crash your Windows. But even the most advanced Windows user wouldn't want to do this themselves, it's a time consuming work and doesn't guarantee result. Therefore, software developer came out with all types of registry software that will clean, repair and fix your registry at the same time! It's an easier process with one mouse button click.

The problem now is which is the best that actually works? There are countless of such software either for free or paid. I normally won't use the paid version as there's a lot free version that actually works better. But if you try a trail version of a paid software and it does actually speed up and fix your registry problem, why not consider buying the software to support the developer. Still, most registry software I found cost around $29.99 which I found it quite expensive for the little speed improvement on the PC.

Here's the best free registry cleaner I found with the best users review, Auslogics Registry Cleaner. You can either type the name & search in Google or download directly through download.com, it's free and small in size, just a little over 2MB. Auslogics Registry Cleaner is light and fast, it'll clean up and speed up your PC in no time. It does what it supposed to and it's better than the defragger that comes with Windows XP & Vista. The software developer claims that after the cleaning, you will see a 2% increase in performance. It's not a lot and may not be noticeable, but hey every little bit helps and the software is free!

Best Download Accelerator Download

2009-09-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

All browser we are using have built in download function such as IE & firefox, but they are only good for small size download. If you are downloading file that's over 20MB in size, I highly recommend you to use a download accelerator software as it is much more faster and most importantly it support resume download. Of course, such features must be supported by the site too, or else it'll be useless.

I'm using firefox as my main browser, I don't use IE too much. I love firefox because of its speedy browsing speed and addons, unfortunately firefox built in download function is not as good. I often had this problems where the download just stop in the middle and totally not moving. It frustrated me especially when it's over 90% complete and end up downloading it again from the site. As I mentioned, if you are downloading files that are large in size and the site support resume download, use a download accelerator software to avoid such problems. Most software & major website should allowed the use of download accelerator, but most file hosting site are not except for mediafire.

There's two download accelerator I used before, netants & flashget. I haven't been using netants for so long, so I don't really have any comment on it, but it was good at the time. Currently, I'm using flashget for my download, the download speed is a lot faster that the firefox. I'm not sure why, but it just download faster on flashget. Maybe it's because it can separate the download work. It's like 5 download going at once at a single download. Flashget is a freeware, you can download it from its official site for free.

Flashget is an individual software. If you're using firefox and preffered to have it built in your browser, you can download the download accelerator addon on mozilla site. This will definitely save you trouble to open up the software everytime you want to download. By using firefox download plugin, it'll pop up with the choice of using the firefox download plugin. The plugin from what I heard is much better than the current firefox.

There's also another very cool firefox plugin that let you download files from site such as rapidhsare hands free! How do you fo it? Basically, you just copy all the rapidshare file URL into the software and let it run by itself. The software will automatically check every URL and make sure there's no broken link. This happened a lot when the file is too old or has been removed by the admin or uploader. After done checking, it'll start to download all files added in the list one by one. Now you don't have to go throguh rapidshare clicking this and that, and you don't even have to wait for the timer. The software will automatically wait for the rapidshare timer and download it, how cool is that?

So if you want the best download accelerator software, try flashget. If you want the best download tools for file hosting site, try the firefox plugin!

Free Pdf Reader software download

2009-08-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

Until very recently I started to read a lot of ebook in pdf format, and that's the reason why I started searching for a good pdf reader that are fast and easy to use. Unsurprisingly, the first result using the keyword "pdf reader" was adobe reader. I've downloaded and tried it, it's a good pdf software in general. The interface is sleak and looks really great, but it's not without a cost, the reader load slower compare to the other pdf software in the market.

And I heard about another pdf reader somewhere on the net, it's called foxit reader. So I head to its official website (if you look more carefully, foxit is just on the second result in first page on google) and try to download the software, to my surprise, the pdf reader was only 1 MB plus if you compare to adobe 20mb. You see the huge difference! It doesn't take long for me to download the free pdf reader and put it into test. Foxit reader is now my best choice for pdf documents and I never bother to going back to adobe. It's fast and easy to use, it load all documents I tested almost instantly. Adobe pdf reader isn't a bad software, it works great and looks great, but it's just too slow for my taste. I don't really care about the graphics as long as it's fast and do the job right. If Adobe was fast in first place, I think I'd have never try another pdf reader.

I talked about individual software up there. Actually there's a firefox addon which you can view pdf document directly on your browser and it's quite popular in demand. Unfortunately, the current one offered for firefox doesn't work as good as individual software. Although it's an addon for firefox browser, but it actually install the software in your computer as an individual software rather than an addon. And there's some complaint about the software crashing users system. Honestly, I haven't try it yet, though I'm using firefox as I normally doesn't install any addon or software that received bad reviews. This is just an extra information for those who are interested. Yes, there's such addon for firefox, you can do a search on mozilla firefox homepage for plugins.

Best Text Editing software

2009-08-27T16:34:00.000-07:00

For those who do a little text editing job, the bundled notepad in Windows should be suffice. If you need more functions such as text designing or posting images in your article, you may need more powerful software such as the microsoft words. But what if you are a programmer or you need to open dozen of text files for simultaneously editing? Notepad & Microsoft Words fails in such need. That's the reason I started searching for a free text editing software for my programming works. And I found the one I'm looking for, it's called NoteTab light.

NoteTab light has it strengths and weaknesses just like notepad and words does. They are use in different purposes for different types of user. If you are programmer, then you'd find that NoteTab is very useful. Otherwise, notepad can do light editing job just fine.

There is a very important feature in NoteTab that stand out from other editing software, that's its Multi-tab function. If you are using newer firefox or IE browser, you should find the tab function very useful. Basically, the tab function in NoteTab light works exactly the same way as in browser. You can open lots of tab (should be unlimited) in NoteTab for different files. It can open many files type such as txt, html, php, js..etc.

So why would you need the multi tab function. For example, you need to change a line of codes across all html pages. Of course, you can do it one by one using notepad, but what if you have hundreds of pages? That'd probably takes a lot of time to do. With NoteTab light, you can highlight all the html file you want to modify and choose open. Once every files have been opened in different tab, you can use the search and replace function to change the same line of codes to another in just seconds! And I guaranteed you that this can't be done either on notepad or words. I found it particularly useful when modifying codes and it saves me a lot of time while doing so. Every files were beautifully arrange on top, no more messy files on my task bar again. If you want to close all tabs, you don't have to close it one by one, just right click on the tab and choose "close all". Only the tab you are pointing on will not be closed. Or if you have uncompleted job you want to continue to next day, you can just close the whole software leaving the tab as it is. The tabs that are not closed will be shown when the next time you open the software. The auto save function is another useful feature that make sure you or someone don't accidentally close the software. No more worries about losing your work in electric outbreak or unexpected computer mulfunction.

NoteTab light just as its name indicated, light and easy to use. The size of the software is small and it doesn't takes a lot of your PC resources. And the software open almost immediately unlike Microsoft words that take some time to load. NoteTab light is a great little software tool for text editing and it's freeware. That's mean you can download the full version for free without any hidden charges!

The best File Recovery Software

2009-08-25T13:10:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of free software that you don't aware of, and it always came to the last minute when you are looking for software that would solve your problem. Today I'm going to recommend you the best lost file recovery software I've found, and I can tell you that it's not an easy find. Such software is very easy to find, but finding the right that really works for you could take days of downloading and testing. That's what happened to me when I accidentally deleted some important files and yes, I emptied the recycle bins. Is there a way to recover these files that has been removed from the hard disk? The answer is yes!

Now if you ever deleted some files that you want to recover, remember not to store in new files in your hard drive as that might overwrite the files partition you want to recover. Once it has been overwrite, there's no way you can recover those lost file!

I've tried quite a few different recovery software, can't remember the exact number but non of them work except for one. The hard disk recovery software that work for me is called pttd. Actually I'm not sure about the name, pttd is the group name? and the software name seems to be called ptd? Anyway, I did a test search on google with ptd but it doesn't returned with the site I'm looking for. So I tried again using pttd and I found it. You can find the software at "www.ptdd.com". It seemed like that the full version is not free, but there's a demo version you can download for free with less function. It was quite some time when I download the software, so I'm not too sure if it's free back then. The recovery software file size is just a little over 3mb, try the trial version and see if it work for you. If not then you have to do a search on google again for free file recovery software. There might be some newer and more powerful free recovery software out there. If you are lucky.

The best free File Hosting site

2009-08-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

Torrent might be of the past. You have got to admit that most older torrents doesn't have enough seed to provide decent downloading speed. This is where file hosting site started to get popular. All files are stored on the web hosting site, and most site provides decent & stable downloading speed. But if you have fast downloading speed over 100kbps and the torrent you are downloading is new with tons of seeder, then that's another case. Using torrent is still the speediest way to download when there's a lot of seeder, there's no speed limit. On the other hand, most file hosting site have some sort of limitation such as speed & one download per IP.

There's quite a lot of file hosting site on the internet, some famous one including rapidshare, mediafire, megaupload...etc. But the best file hosting site I've used so far is Mediafire, it has less limitation on download. Although there's a max speed for each download, it doesn't limit how much files you can download at once, and it also allows the use of download accelerator for resume download which most other file hosting site doesn't support.

Of course I'm talking about free service here, I've never subscribe to a paid member before, so I don't have any comment on the paid service. But from what I have heard, rapidshare & mediafire are on the top list. Unless you are a frequent downloader and you want to download it faster, I don't see any reason to pay for the services. Rapidshare have various plan for users, you can pay for one day unlimited or the whole month. A few bucks a day wasn't so bad at all if it's file that you really wanted.

Since Rapidshare is one of the most popular file hosting site, I'll talk a little about it. For me who use an internet provider that shared the same IP, I have a lot of trouble downloading files from rapidshare. Rapidshare only allows one download per IP for every few minutes in between. Since I'm on a shared IP, most of the time if not all I'd just get a download limit exceeded messages. Well, that's me anyway. Since most internet provider would give each user's an unique IP, it shouldn't be a problem. About the download speed limitation, it varies in countries. Some countries get faster download speed up to 100kbps such as US, Japan...etc. While others get only around 45kbps. It's not bad at all for a free services. If you are using torrent, I'm sure you can't get such constant speed.

It's all where the uploader's upload their files to. Most file hosting provide decent download speed, those I didn't mention including hotfile and many more. All you can do is hope that the file you want to download is being uploaded to the site that you preferred or maybe do a request from the uploader.

Free file hosting is something we never see in the past where hosting service was really expensive. Even now file hosting still cost a lot to maintain as I know, with all the crazy download bandwidth each day I'm not sure how the owner would survive from it. I guess somehow they found their way, good for them and us.

Free Email service

2009-08-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

I'm sure most of you guys have at least one email address with Hotmail & Yahoo. The competition get tough when Gmail entered the mail services market with innovative interface, speedy connection and ajax auto refresh when there's new email coming in. I'm not sure about others, but I personally have a lot of emails coming in every day, although I'm still using Yahoo! mail, I found it troublesome to click on the mail box to see if there's any new email coming in. And this is where I found Gmail auto refresh very useful and convenience. Basically, I'll leave a tap open for gmail, if there's a new email coming in, I'll see the number of email in my inbox changes. This save me time and trouble to check on it.

The only reason that I'm still using Yahoo and hotmail is because I've been using for so long, and it's hard to change every contact information and other subscription services I have. Although I don't like to have too many email addresses, I end up with 2 hotmail account, 1 Yahoo, 1 Gmail and 1 opera mail. I'd have to say that operamail is my least favourite and I dont use it very often. It has a lot more limitation such as inbox size compared to other email services. My top choice is of course gmail follow by hotmail then Yahoo. The only reason I hate using Yahoo is because I found out that sometime there's a huge delay in receiving email from others, and worst come to worst you might not even receive the email in your inbox. That's how bad Yahoo is, it could be SPAM protection that is causing the problem, nevertheless, it's a huge problem for user's. Yahoo Spam protection sucks anyway. On the other hand, I don't see much problem coming from hotmail and Gmail.

It's really hard to judge which is the best, Yahoo mail has a longer history and user based on the net afterall. And it's no surprised that Yahoo also have the most spam email sent in the history. Recent statistic shows that Gmail users are growing at over 40% per month, we'll see if google mail can keep up the good job on filtering spam mail.

If you want a recommendation, I'd say go for Gmail. It's good for heavy or business users because it help you to sort out your conversation under one title. This make it easy for you to refer back what you have conversed. Even if you are a light user, gmail have everything that you need. Gmail really stands out of the crowd and provide something really innovative. Clean & fast is the two words for Gmail. Sign up free today with practically unlimited inbox space!

Sony can never keep a secret. PS3 Slim rumours came true!

2009-08-21T05:26:00.000-07:00

I feel sorry for Sony, every secret they are trying to keep leaks few weeks earlier before they announce. Just recently Sony has announced a re-designed PS3, named PS3 Slim. It's a smaller version of the original PS3 with matt finish, that's mean that the surface will not attract finger print like the old one. Let's take a look at the new slim design

Although most comment I found was not a pleasing one, I thought the design wasn't so bad at all. I hate glossy finish, maybe that's the reason. Anyway the official says that the Slim is 33% smaller, and 36% lighter. But the good news is it's cheaper! The old 80GB PS3 and the new 120GB Slim is now available to pre-order at $299.99 USD. And you'll also get the new Dualshock 3 wireless controller in the package.

Now the bad news, it's not backward compatible. You really can't expect Sony to make it backward compatible for PS2 games since the consoles are still selling crazy even today. But you don't really have to wait because I'm sure sony will eventually release a firmware updates that would work with PS2 games, just not at the moment. As for me, well there isn't any PS3 games out there yet that I really want to play. Maybe when Final Fnatasy 13 is out, I might consider getting one.

The best Free Browser software

2009-08-21T05:08:00.000-07:00

Every popular browser on the net are free to use, either it's firefox, internet explorer(IE), opera or safari. Which one is the speediest out of them all? I haven't try safari yet, but I can say that Mozilla Firefox is the best I've used so far.

I kind of understand why IE have to most user based worldwide browser follow by firefox. IE is a Microsoft product and it comes bundle with the windows for every new PC you buy. If you want to use firefox, you have to download it free from its official website. It could be a troublesome process for some people, or they just never heard of it. Most peoples are hesitate to try new thing if the current one works well for them. Hey, I think I'd never use firefox if my friend never recommend it, once I started using it, I never go back to IE for more than 5 years. That's another reason why I haven't try safari yet as I'm now comfortable with the current browser I'm using. Even though I heard a lot of good thing about safari, I just couldn't live without all the cool plugins I can download from Mozilla site. And firefox have much better features and security. There are just too many hackers targetting IE makes it a dangerous browser to use.

Download Firefox now for faster and safer internet browsing experience. What are you waiting for?

Are you looking for an Alarm Clock Software for your PC?

2009-08-20T15:01:00.000-07:00

We already have cell phone that have an alarm function and a clock, why do we still need one for the PC? Well.. for me it's weird. I don't like to use an alarm clock and never had one before. My Sony Ericsson do the job just right and even with vibration feature, and I always put it beside my bed as my alarm clock. But sometimes in the morning especially when I don't have enough sleep, I'd unconsciously turn off my phone alarm and goes back to sleep without knowing it. It's getting worst and becomes a very bad habit.

Another thing that you might found it weird is that I don't normally turn off my PC, I'm just too lazy to switch it on again in the morning. So I left it on though the night. It has since becomes my alarm that wakes me up on important appointment. I just have to make good use of my 3.1 speakers playing my favourite songs to wake me up. As I normally turn the volume all the way up to make sure I get up in the morning, since I can't possibly put my PC beside me, I have to actually get up to my PC and turn it off. That normally wakes me up and prevent me from going back to bed.

Anyway, it's just my lazt ass habit. It's weird that windows xp doesn't come with such function, I have to search on the internet for a while to download a free alarm clock software. You are lucky today if you are also looking for such software for whatever reason you have. Go to bluefive.pair.com windows freeware section and you should be able to find a software called alarm. It's a freeware with very nice features. Basically, you can set the alarm time from hours to seconds. And you can also choose what songs to play at the time. After you are done, click activate. To make sure it works properly, test it first.

The site also provide lots of different freeware software for windows. I haven't use any of them yet, since I have already found what I need. You might be interested to browse through the available software, and you may also found some interesting software there. Enjoy!

Proxy, proxy. Why do we need a proxy service?

2009-08-20T07:49:00.000-07:00

I've found it interesting that a lot of internet users are searching for proxy, anonymous proxy and free proxy site. For most people, it might be a mystery. But for certain groups of people, it's necessary. So just what's a proxy? A proxy is a site service that let you bypass restriction set by the network admin, it can also be a software. And it's not surprise that most school & company block access to certain website such as facebook, myspace, twitter and friendster. Or certain keywords such as porn, sex & games. Of course, we can't just wait to check on our friends on social networking site or watch some educational info while we have the little free time at work or school. So, the best solution to solve this problem is to use a proxy site to bypass the limitation. Since every info send through a proxy server are encrypted, your network wouldn't be able to track what you are browsing on the internet. Just be careful not to be caught on a CCTV and you'll be fine.

A few years back, it shouldn't be too hard to find a free proxy sites on the net as it's quite profitable for the owner for some reason. But recently, I found it hard to find a decent site that provide a free service, either it's a paid service or the site server is just to slow load. There's still some pretty good one around, you just need to look harder. What I found the best are "hidemyass", although it might not be the best around. If you need a free proxy site that actually do the job, try it.

There's other reasons why people using proxy besides the one I mentioned above. It could be site restriction by your own country as we seen a lot of news that certain countries are blocking access to youtube & facebook. Using a proxy site is just a temporary solution, if it's the case that your country permanent banned a site you visit frequently, you might need to consider buying a proxy software instead of using the free one as it'll definitely be faster.

Maintaining a proxy is not as easy as it seems when you have a lot of users. Proxy site is a resources hog and it can slow down all user if it's use in a shared hosting, and you'd find that not a lot of web hosting company allowed a proxy site. But it might not be a bad idea if you just set up a proxy site for your own use. Web hosting services have become cheaper in recent year, you can easily find one in under $5 per month. As for the script, there's a lot of free proxy script you can use on the internet. Just search for free php proxy script and you should be able to find one. I'm more comfortable with a php proxy script, although I heard that asp or cgi might be a better choice.

Free Antivirus software Download

2009-08-18T09:26:00.000-07:00

Antivirus is one of the most essential software for computer nowadays. Most of the software doesn't come cheap and you'd have to renew your subscription every year at a fees just to download the latest virus definition. I've tried numerous anti-viruses software both paid and free, and I've to say I don't really see any difference between them. The paid version I used were Norton, one of the biggest antivirus software company on the net. Is it any good? Well.. it's just ok. I've decided to stop using it 2 years ago after messing with some free antivirus software. And the fact that Norton software is a resources hog that will slow down any super computers. But the real problem here is, Norton is a decent antivirus software, but it's not perfect. It doesn't detect every virus that are infected on your PC even with the newest definition, while others free software detected it. This doesn't mean that a free version is actually better, I tried many different antivirus software with various result. Some software detected a virus while others don't, and while others detected a virus and some don't. In short, I haven't found the best antivirus software yet that detect every viruses.

Before you invest in antivirus software, I highly recommend you to use a firewall. A firewall will protect you from virus, spyware and adware on other site and block them from accessing your computer. This will greatly reduce your chance of getting infected with unecessary adware. The best firewall I have uses so far are zonealarm. I think there's a free version of zonealarm available on the official site. If you like it, buy the full version for more advanced protection against malware. Firewalls are especially useful against blocking internet and suspicious program from running on the background. But still you need an antivirus software to make sure your PC's are clean.

You don't really have to pay for an antivirus software. There's some free antivirus software you can download on the interenet and it provides good enough virus protection, at least comparing to the pay version. The one I'm currently using are AVS, I heard that avast are not bad as well. These companies provide very frequent virus database update. You can either set it to automatically update or you can download the virus definition on the official site and update manually.

Although these softwares does a fine job, they are not perfect. If you are downloading files from unknown sources, p2p or torrent, make sure you scan all the files before opening it. Another dangerous sources are from email attached, even if it's sent by your friends, you should check the file and make sure it's clean before downloading it. Your friend might be forwarding attachment file that contain viruses without knowing it. Be a little bit more careful and your PC will be cleaned from viruses.

How to Download Youtube Videos?

2009-08-17T04:51:00.000-07:00

Youtube is a very popular videos sharing site with thousands of videos being upload every day. But you can only watch all the videos online by streaming through the internet, there's no download at this time and Youtube.com can never allowed this since many of the uploaded videos might infringe copyrights. Is there anyway you can download your favorite youtube videos to your PC's? Yes! There's countless of website provide such service for you to download youtube videos directly through their website, and if you want it, you can even choose to convert the video into popular format such as .avi & .mpg instead of keeping the original .flv. All you have to do is insert the youtube URL into the site and select all necessary options, details information can be found on the site.

The site link? Sorry, I'm too lazy to search for all available site, but you can try to search for "Download Youtube Videos" on google and you should be able to get accurate result on the top. Try to go to separate site and see which works better for you as the top site is usually hammerd with people and slow down the entire process. Search till the second page if you have to.

If the site doesn't provide converting service, is there a way to play flv file or convery using offline software? Yes, there is. To play flv format, you can use VLC player which I recommend before. For KMplayer I'm not too sure if it can play it as I don't have any flv file in my PC to test it out, but it shouldn't be a problem. If you prefer to convert the file instead so you can use it on your mobile phone, then you need a proper software that can do the job right. Try searching for "convert flv to avi" or similar combination. You should be able to find some free software that would do the job just fine. But if you want more features and function and willing to pay for a software, then buy it, it should worth the money if you are frequent youtube video downloader.

What's the best Torrent software

2009-08-13T05:42:00.001-07:00

In my blog, there's no boundary talking about pirated software or posting vulgar words. Although I tend to edit my word before I post to keep it more child friendly. A lot of people's are looking for p2p or torrent software to share files among each others. Most of the softwares are free, but what's the best? This is my recommendation and it might not be the best. Personally, I love to use bitcomet as it's adware and spyware free. And the installation is fast and easy without the need of installing additional application to make it works. The interface is simple and clean, you can easily set the number of concurrent download at once to keep only a few downloads at high speed. And there's the hash button which you use to check the file for errors after completion. If you every suddenly shut down your PC's in the middle of the download, it's recommend that you check the file first before removing it from the list. Although I'm not bother by the ads in bitcomet, some users seems to be irritated by it.

Another free torrent software which my brother like to use is Azureus. It's a bittorrent software so the main function are basically the same. But as for me, I don't really like it, because it's coded in java script. What so bad about it? Because my PC doesn't have the necessary java application and I've to download the java crap. Why can't it just work on its own? And this is not my only complains, the Azurues software loads extremely slow and clunky. If you are using a laptop or netbook, or even an outdated PC, I highly recommend you not to use Azureus. Even you have the top of the top hardware, Azureus is still a resources hog and it loads a lot slower than other bittorrent software. Alright, you already have the java application and you are not bother by the slow loading process. There's nothing worst than these right? Oh boy, you are wrong. Although this could be just my assumption, but the download speed comparing to other software on the same internet line, Azurues speed is actually running slower and sometime not even moving at all. Just to let you know it's not the seed issues. After all the trouble I've gone through, I decided to stick with bitcomet until someone recommend me something better.

Overall, if you are ok with the integrated ads in Bitcomet, it’s by far the better free bittorrent software out there.

How to open Docx files?

2009-08-12T09:47:00.000-07:00

When you are searching for ways to open the Docx documents, I know you are irritated by the fact you can't view the documents using old Microsoft office. I mean it's the same fuc**ing Doc file, why couldn't I even view the content? Don't ask me, ask Microsoft. Apparently, they are developing the new format to replace the old Doc file. They want you to move on to the new office applications. So, does that mean I have to buy the fuc**ing new Microsoft office? Well no, you don't really have to. There's always free way to a solution in the internet world. Mind you, I'm not asking you to download pirated version of office. I'm clean, just joking. Anyway, Microsoft are kind enough to provide a compatibility pack for old office users, you can download it for free at microsoft official website. By installing the new add-on, you'll be able the view and modify the content. But the problem is the size is quite large, if you are in a hurry and can't wait to view the file. There's an easier and faster way, download the Word Viewer application at microsoft website. Word viewer like its name, is for you to view doc or docx documents only, you can't alter the file in anyway.

Still not satisfied with the solution? Well.. why not convert the docx file into doc? Then you'll be able to modify and save the content using the old microsoft office. Head to "http://www.docx2doc.com/" on this site you can convert any docx ducuments into doc directly online. You don't have to download any software into your PC's, just follow the site instruction and convert your files. That's all the current solutions I know of, if you have better and easier way to view docx documents, send an email to me and let me know. But don't try to be funny telling me to use office 2007.

The best Video Player for .mkv (Matroska) video format

2009-08-12T04:42:00.000-07:00

So .mkv has been gaining popularity recently. Why? Because it's the best container for HD videos, the quality is unbeatable and it's small in size. But it has its downside too, compatibility issues. As you know, Windows 7 is going to be released on 22 Oct 2009. And I've got the chance to test out the RC version of Windows 7, it's a great operating system. Installation was smooth and it run flawlessly on my netbook without any driver issues. One thing that dissapoint me was it doesn't work very well with the .mkv format videos.

On the other hands, .avi file has the least compatibility problems and it's widely use and support by developer. But we have to acknowledge that avi container is getting old, and it's time for an upgrade or total discard. If mkv is such a great container, why most user's still preferred avi over mkv videos? Well.. apparently Windows Media Player doesn't play .mkv file and it's also the most widely use player on the market. Although I can't guarantee if mkv can be run on WMP, even it does, you'll have to go through the very troublesome online download process. Why can't it just work with all format just like others player? Peoples don't really go and search for the best player and assumed that Windows Media Player is the best on the market. And it frustrated user's who downloaded a mkv video and can't be played on it.

Here's the two players I recommend for mkv videos or a video players as a whole.
1.) KMplayer - This is my top recommendation for mkv format videos or DVD. It plays almost all kind of videos format except for RMVB of course. The interface are impressive with very much every function you could find on WMP. It's pretty much customizable in every way to suit your watching preference. The only thing I don't like about KMplayer was the player doesn't let other program take over the screen, it'll stick on the screen unless you minimize it to the tray. It might have the option to turn off that, but I never find such options yet. If you know, please let me know. Beside this minor quibbles, KMplayer is perfect player except it does hang and crash sometimes but not too often.

1.) Vlc player - Before I started using KMplayer, vlc is the only player I use to watch all my videos. Basically, it plays all types of videos/audios just like KMplayer except for rmvb. And it's slightly smaller in size and it doesn't use a lot of your computer's resources. But some problems with this player are when you are trying to skip sequences in HD videos or mkv format, sometimes it'll crash with errors. This happens occasionally, and I'm not sure what exactly the problems were. Another issues is when playing DVD movie, I remembered it doesn't have such problems in older version, you'll see lines on the movie screen. I'm not sure if it's purposely done, but I don't like it for sure. I want my movies to be crystal clear.

That's it, you have just learned two of the best free video software online. I'm not going to provide any links here. You guys need to learn how to use the all mighty Google search engine to find your own free softwares. Visit Google.com and type in either vlc or kmplayer and you should be able to find the site on first result. It's free to download for both, you can try it yourself and see which you prefer the most. Enjoy!

Welcome to the sources of Free Software Download!

2009-08-12T02:25:00.000-07:00

Hi, this is my first post, so I'm going to talk about what kind of content I'm going to post in my blog in future. You know it's kind of hard to get a decent blogspot name recently as most short name has already been taken by other user's. But what weird is that they don't even use the blog, just randomly type in some words and leave it there for ages.

Yes, about the content. I'm not going to focus on any specific topics, although my blog name indicated software related topics. Well, that's what I'll be posting most of the time, but if I found any interesting technology related or maybe off-topic news, I'll be posting here as well. Just to share all the cool freeware software that you never use beside those bundled with Microsoft Windows. People's don't quite often search for the others software beside those already in Windows, and I can guarantee you that those are not the best around. You'll be surprised how many useful software you can find online and what best is, it's free! Until my next post, cheers!