Application Install Guide

Use PrintScreen – At Last

Back in the days of 80-column monitors, dot-matrix printers, and DOS, the PrintScrn key on your keyboard was a way to send the entire contents of the screen to an attached parallel or serial printer. These days, PrintScrn takes a snapshot of your open windows, then sends the file into a hidden temporary buffer as an uncompressed image. Each screen shot for this story was taken by opening the necessary windows, pressing the PrintScrn key, then loading Microsoft Paint by clicking Start -> All P...

Disable Messager

Every time you boot windows, MSN Messenger starts running in the background. You’re not a fan of this IM client? Too bad. You don’t have a Passport account or don’t use the instant messenger integration built into Microsoft Outlook and Exchange? Too bad. You can save a bit of memory and get a little faster boot time by not loading this chat client every time Windows starts. Users of AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, or Yahoo!’s client are also likely candidates for this tweak. First, click...

Put Windows On A Diet

Windows XP is full of helpful applications, but some of them take too much control or have other downsides. MSN Explorer, the Outlook Express e-mail client, and even the Internet Explorer browser may all be mere baggage to you. All of these can be removed, saving you as much as 20MB of drive space in the process. To remove them, navigate to the Control Panel by first clicking Start. Then open Add or Remove Programs and click on Add/Remove Windows Components on the left-hand side of the window...

Improve Your Windows XP – Speed Access

Every time your laptop connects to a Wi-Fi hot spot, whether it’s in your home or down at the coffee shop, it logs the name of the access point that you connected to in the Windows Preferred Network settings. If you accidentally (or maybe even deliberately) connect to your neighbor’s access point, and then find yourself reconnecting again despite your efforts not to, you need to bump that listing down in your connection list and move your router to the top. To do this, click Start and sel...

BitDefender 8 Pro Plus

Security suites pop up at an alarming rate and though security scares are appearing even more rapidly, it’s still the case that what you really need for protection isn’t necessarily the same as what you’re advised to buy. For example, the version of the Windows Firewall supplied with Service Pack 2 may not be particularly great and certainly falls over in some key areas, but in most situations it’s good enough. Anti-virus programs make a huge deal of how fast they respond and how many ba...

Easy PC Transfer

Easy PC Transfer does not include third-party software as part of a system migration. Users have to manually install their programs to a new system before migrating their program settings from the old system, and it does not support direct drive-to-drive migrations within a single system as Migrate Easy does. However, those are the only quibbles we have with the latest reincarnation of StompSoft’s data migration utility. Easy PC Transfer installs effortlessly, and its intuitively designed i...

PCmover

Migrating data from one system to another is the digital equivalent of moving personal possessions from one home to another. Both situations require time, thoroughness, and a great deal of care to make sure nothing gets broken or left behind. For more than 20 years, Laplink products have functioned like a reliable friend with a truck to countless PC users needing to move their digital possessions into new digs. That experience shows in the company’s popular utility, PCmover. The utility off...