Install Microsoft Security Essentials.

Windows 7 comes equipped with some solid security tools, including a robust firewall and the spyware-blocking Windows Defender. On top of that, you will need a good antivirus program, one that works quietly in the background and won’t bog down your system.

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection against viruses and other kinds of malware, and it’s impact on your performance pc is negligible.

It could be a great alternative to paying an annual fee for virus protection, and whether you use XP, VIsta or 7 you should think about giving it a go and may even find it speeds up your pc.

Install Web Of Trust.

The seemingly innocent act of clicking a link – even one that’s at the top of a Google search-results page – can result in ‘drive-by downloads’ infecting your PC. Scary, right? But how do you know whether a link is safe to click?

Try Web of Trust, a browser add-on that will warn you of unsafe sites.

Specifically, the plug-in adds colour-coded icons to each link that your search engine produces: green for safe, yellow for risky and red for dangerous.

You can also right-click any link, such as one that appears in an online forum, and choose View WOT scorecard to perform a manual safety check.

WOT is free, and available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Although its rating icons add a little clutter to some web pages, we recommend it very highly for anyone concerned about security and looking for a quick and easy way to check for ‘dodgy’ pages.
 

If you remember the annoying User Account Control notifications which kept coming up in Vista, then you may be pleased to know that it is still there in Windows 7. Why pleased?

Because now you can actually change the settings of UAC so that it only notifies you when you want – i.e. when programs really try to make changes and not when you make changes yourself to Windows.

Although this feature was something that everyone bitched about with Vista, it is there to do a job and that’s to keep your machine safe from running dangerous software programs or making unwanted changes to your performance pc.

Here’s how to change the settings:

- Click ‘Start’ & type in ‘account’

- Select Change User Account Control settings

- Adjust the slider to your desired setting

If you really want to remove all the messages, then set it to ‘Never Notify’ and it will be as if it’s turned off.

One word or warning though, making changes to any security levels can be dangerous so be sure you know what you are doing beforehand, and get professional advice if you are not sure.

Better Safe Than Sorry!

With Windows 7 you can make a recovery CD or DVD with these simple steps:

• Insert a blank CD or DVD into your CD/DVD burner drive

• Click ‘Start’ & type in ‘Repair’

• Select the ‘Create a System Repair Disc’ option

• Follow the instructions given to you  on screen

• When it’s been completed, write a label on it (with time & date helps)

If you one day find you have a problem starting your pc, insert the repair disc and start your system. You will be presented with a recovery menu which offers you several recovery and diagnostic tools and will also allow you to select a System Restore point to go back to a point where your pc worked correctly.

As it’s only a 10 minute job, go do it now before you regret not doing it.

With every new version of Windows, we get given more and more features and functionality which make it more pleasing on the eye and supposedly easier to use.

• - Open the Control Panel, type visual into the Search area

• - Click Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows.

• - Choose Adjust for best performance, and then click Apply.

In a few seconds you will see a much plainer user interface and you will get much faster response times.

If you don’t like the look & feel of Windows now, you can choose the Custom option instead and change things gradually until you get the balance you want between performance and effects.
 

One easy & fast way to free up disk space is to remove unwanted programs, as mentioned in another post, which will speed up your pc. Another way to free up wasted disk space is to use the Disk Cleanup tool by following these steps:

• Open My Computer, right-click Local Disk, and then click Properties.

• On the General tab, click the Disk Cleanup button. Disk Cleanup will spend a few minutes examining your disk.

• The Disk Cleanup dialog box opens. As you can see below it shows you exactly how much space you can free up:

That’s it. Dead Easy and Fast and you should instantly see the difference.

Cheers

Windows 7 Vs Windows XP/Vista

Microsoft claims that Windows 7 is a lot faster than Vista or XP, but is it really so? There are so many factors to getting a faster performance pc, especially considering hardware and the programs you run, but there are some simple tweaks you can use to get a better performance.

Two quick examples:

Cheers
Paul

Microsoft Loses $290 Million Court Judgement.

Due to the way that Word was built using a special XML editing technology, the company that owns the legal rights to that technology won a court judgement that means Microsoft has to be extremely careful to make sure that other patents haven’t been infringed. 

What this means in the real world is that it’s highly probable that Word, and also possibly it’s mother product Office, will need to be revamped or rebuilt. To those individuals who use Microsoft Office, this could potentially mean having to pay a higher price for the software.

I  personally haven’t used Office (or Word, Excel etc) for some time now on my personal computers but instead I use OpenOffice which is Free and built by Sun Microsystems companies, so is very stable and reliable. It has a massive developer community behind it so is kept well up to date and can be used to open all those old Word or Excel documents that you have from before.

The latest version (3.2) is also just about to be released with the most recent version (3.0) having been downloaded over 100 Million times in a little over twelve months. Surely, that says something good about this product.

Anyway, give it a go if you haven’t already and you will be surprised at the performance pc users would tell you was not previously possible. You can get it here directly from OpenOffice.org.

Enjoy

Paul

Save Time And Have More Fun With Your Twittering!

There’s a great new application called TweetGlide which I have just tried out and found that it makes my tweeting a lot simpler and much more fun.  It’s free and you can customize it exactly the way you want it.

It also allows you to display an advert to all users so can be used as a great way to go viral and grow your traffic to your profile. You can also earn money with it, which is even better.

What’s more, there is an iPhone compatible version coming soon and I am really looking forward to being able to do this on my phone and my pc.

You can download it here and give it a go. 

Cheers

TweetGlide – A Quick Review

4th column of twitterglide is the direct messages you send or other have sent to you. Tweetglide has innumerable features including a paid membership with added benefits. Read more…