Every Sunday, I perform a set of jobs on all my computers. They help optimize the system, save hard disk space, increase security and privacy, etc.   Clean: Using CCleaner, I clean the PCs including all the browser caches and various other application caches. (Read my introduction to CCleaner here....

Every once in a while, there is some file that you know you’ve saved but yet can’t find it. Windows Search comes handy at such times but is very slow. Windows Desktop Search, a new utility that is now being shipped with the Windows OSs and being given as an update works using indexing. I think i...

I’ve realized that my last Tech Channel Roundup was nearly a month ago and I’m guilty of it. So, bear with me as I overload you with a number of interesting links that I found in some of the sister blogs. Milo discovered a product especially useful for enterprises of all sizes called Nightwatchm...

It has been nearly two months since I introduced Cygwin. We’ve seen how to install Cygwin, customize the terminal, a few text editors and a tabbed terminal emulator. Enough with the playfulness. One final configuration and let us move on to the geekier fun. Directory Structure Cygwin uses the POSI...

Microsoft offers a suite of utilities called Sysinternals for free for troubleshooting your PC. The suite is far superior to many of the alternate freewares that are available. Mark Russinovich, now a Fellow in Microsoft, originally developed them along with Bryce Cogswell when they were in the comp...

I started this month as the new damn PC guy and ended it by buying a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 in one of the Black Friday deals though I wish I had won a PC in a giveaway. I had been opinionated about using push buttons and organizing program files, worried about the rising types of blog fraud and spam ...

Netbeans and cygwin ruby don't have a happy relationship. To use the cygwin ruby interpreter it is necessary to launch Netbeans (6.1) with the arguments: -J-Druby.no.sync-stdio=true as otherwise Netbeans will pass a windows-style file name to the cygwin ruby that the latter cannot recognise (C:\Proj...

Lifehacker reader Michael writes in with a nifty tip that was lurking in our comments all along, but deserves to see the bright light of posting. If you're already using the Unix-like Cygwin, it's an easy hack to embed Cygwin's commands into your standard Windows comand prompt; if not, it might be w...

A Unix box ;-) I picked up one of those snazzy (ignoring reports of dodgy firmware bricking players) Creative Zen portable media players lately (more on that elsewhere) so that left the old 512MB iPod Shuffle without function… or so I thought. I’ve been playing around a bit lately with m...

I no longer am looking for a battery for a Dell Latitude. Alas, she died this evening — the CPU fan gave up the ghost. I tried some of the magical 3-in-1 oil but no love. Decided that I’m not spending any more money on this one… I’ll pull the ram and hard drive tomorrow and m...