Do It Yourself

Has it ever annoyed you to have to open lots of separate windows for Device Manager, Services, Event Viewer, and other system administration tools? Here’s how to pull them all together into your own custom admin panel.

Two Finger Salute

One of the things I loved about my Mac laptop was the multitouch features; the ability to use two fingers on the trackpad for many functions. Few people know that you can do this with any Windows laptop that uses a Synaptics touchpad. Here's how.

Securely There

Microsoft has pushed an update to Security Essentials 2, which is currently in beta testing. While there aren't a vast number of forward-facing changes, there is one important one: the re-introduction of context menu scanning. Once again, you can right-click any file on your system to quickly check it for infection with MSE.

When Security Essentials 2 is finally released, it will include heuristic abilities, which will allow it to detect malware that has not yet been added to its definition files. Security Essentials 2 will be adding both behavior checking and tighter Web browser integration to its already strong defense system. MSE2 will also continue to be free, despite adding those new features.

Intrepid types can download the Security Essentials 2 beta from Microsoft Connect -- you'll need a Live account to get in, of course.

RAMming Speed

If you're old enough, you probably remember what a RAM disk is. Back in the olden days, to squeeze every last bit of juice out of your computer (usually for the purpose of playing Doom), you could load a program into a RAM disk -- a virtual drive made out of spare RAM. As I'm sure you know, RAM is a lot faster than your hard drive

Fast forward to today, and most computers have a lot of spare RAM. Unless you're editing large multimedia files, you're probably using only a fraction of your RAM. Why don't we use a little bit of it to speed up our surfing of the Web?

Browsers save a lot of data to the hard drive. Every image, so that you don't have to download it every time you visit a page, is saved to the hard drive. That's when you experience the 'grind' of loading (or reloading) a tab that you haven't looked at recently -- the browser is loading data from the hard drive.

With a RAM disk, you can make the browser always load from memory. This speeds up the entire browsing experience by a significant margin. The browser starts in a flash, switching between tabs feels faster, and page load times can be reduced by 20% or more!

To get started, you need Dataram's excellent RAMDisk software. It's free, unless you want to create RAM disks over 4GB in size (which you really don't need to do).

You can read the rest right here.

Four- Play

Firefox 4, with the release of Beta 7, is as good as finished. From now until its release in early 2011, no new features will be added, no significant changes will be made -- Beta 7 is, for all intents and purposes, Firefox 4.

Unlike Firefox 3.5 (private browsing) and 3.6 (personas!!), version 4 has a significant number of new in-your-face features -- features that will take a little getting used to... like tabs-on-top! There are tons of neat little additions that improve your surfing experience, too. Many of these will exist in the background, under the hood, but it still helps to know exactly what your new browser is capable of; did you know that Firefox 4 is as fast as Chrome, for example?

This guide will fully prepare you for Firefox 4. It will teach you how to work with the big-hitters Panorama and Sync, and also introduce some other features you might not have heard about. If you're already using the Beta, this guide might teach you some new tricks. If you're holding off until the official launch in 2011, that's fine too -- bookmark this page and check back later!

No Key Needed

Whether you've forgotten your password or you have a more malicious intent, it's actually extremely easy to break into a Windows computer without knowing the password. Here's how to do it, and how to prevent others from doing the same to you.

Not for Kids

If you've been to any of my lectures or webinars the past few years, then you know I'm a fan of Twitter. Your kids are probably users, but maybe it's time for you to jump in too. Here's Twitter for Adults, a how-to for those of us who have, you know, jobs.